Musicalmidget’s Blog

A couple of weeks ago I posted a first look at the new shoutbox plugin for MyBB 1.4. This week, I’m providing a glimpse at another updated plugin for MyBB 1.4. This time, it’s Board Messages.

Notice the new name? It’s only a slight difference, one letter in fact, yet that one letter is an indication of one of the major new features to this plugin. For the many years this plugin has existed, it has allowed administrators to add a single message to the top of the board index, editable from the Board Message settings group in the admin cp. Those times are now over however, as you can now add as many board messages as you desire from a new page in the admin cp. Each message can be enabled or disabled at will (as indicated by the icon next to each message) and can also be placed either on the board index only, or globally across all forum pages.

If you look closely at the messages in the screenshot above, you may also notice the other new feature of the plugin. It’s now entirely possible to customise the look of each message according to which theme a user is using, by specifying a custom CSS class to use for each message. If no custom class is specified, the default class .board_message is assumed. You can manage the CSS for your message classes directly from the MyBB theme manager, so each class can be tailored to the style of each theme on the board.

The Board Message plugin has always been small and indeed that remains the case, so these are the only new features to highlight. I hope users enjoy them and find the plugin easier than ever to manage. If you have access to the MyBB 1.4 beta, watch out for a beta version of the plugin coming soon.

It’s hard to believe it’s been eight months since I last posted. You can blame university for that. A very busy and at times quite stressful year, but it’s all over now. University is finished and I’m back home permanently, not counting the short break I’m leaving for tomorrow. With university out of the way I should be able to maintain more of a presence online than I have been in recent months, despite the inevitable job hunting that will be taking place soon. One of the things I should now be able to do however, is give all my plugins some long awaited attention. The first plugin to recieve such attention is the new and improved shoutbox plugin.

Shoutbox 2.2 boasts a number of new features and improvements, including some very common requests. Firstly, the plugin is written exclusively for MyBB 1.4 and will be released upon the public debut of 1.4. Because of this, the plugin makes use of the new plugin features which are available in MyBB 1.4, such as integrated update checking against the MyBB Mods database, and the ability to activate and deactivate the plugin without loosing all existing shout data.

With the new version comes a number of new settings for controlling the shoutbox. As before, the following options are available:

• Number of shouts per page
• Number of seconds before the page automatically refreshes (0 disables)
• Number of consecutive shouts allowed before flood control takes effect (*more on this to follow)
• Maximum shout length
• Allow HTML
• Allow MyCode
• Allow Smilies
• Allow [img] Code
• Width of shoutbox popup window
• Height of shoutbox popup window

In addition to the above, a number of new options are also available.

Minimum Shout Length: Fairly obvious, the minimum length of a shout.

Display Mode: Many times since the shoutbox plugin was first released, people have requested they be able to display the shoutbox on their forum index, rather than in a standalone window. Some have managed this through template editing and the use of iFrames, but no ideal solution was ever available. That is, until now. This new setting allows you to choose whether to show the shoutbox in a window or on the index page. Or, if you just can’t decide, you can have the best of both worlds and display the shoutbox in both ways. The shoutbox is fully integrated into the board index if you choose to display it there, with no template editing required and no use of iFrames. (*Screenshots to follow)

Shouts Per Page on Index: If you’re showing the shoutbox on the index page, you’re not likely to want it to show 25 shouts per page. But, if you’re also showing the shoutbox in a window (because you’re spoilt for choice), you’ll likely be equally as unhappy about only showing five shouts in the popup window. For this reason, the existing “Shouts Per Page” setting continues to control the number of shouts displayed per page in the popup window, but the new “Shouts Per Page on Index” setting allows you to specify a different number of shouts per page for the shoutbox on the index. What’s more, this particular setting is only visible when the “Display Mode” is set to “Index Only” or “Both”, to save confusion.

Shout Sorting Order: Another commonly requested feature is the option to reverse the shout sorting order. By default, shouts are shown in ascending order, with the newest shouts shown at the bottom of the page. This new setting allows you to change that so as new shouts are shown at the top of the page. Since this will inevitably mean that new shouts are then shown on the last shoutbox page rather than the first, the plugin knows which order has been selected and sends you to the correct default page accordingly.

Show Friendly Redirect Pages: Some users expressed a desire to disable friendly redirect pages for the shoutbox, since the page is generally quite small in windowed mode. This new option allows you to do just that.

So those are all the new shoutbox settings, but that’s not all there is that’s new…

The new shoutbox plugin is more customisable in terms of usergroup control. You can now specify exactly which usergroups are able to view the shoutbox, as well as control which groups can shout, edit and/or delete their own shouts, moderate the shoutbox and bypass the shout flood control. Note that some options such as editing, deleting and moderating are not available at all for the guests group.

Surely, that’s it…isn’t it? Nope, there’s still something more to show you…

Since you can now activate and deactivate the plugin without loosing your existing data, your shoutbox is likely to become very full over time. For this reason, a new pruning tool has also been added to the admin panel. Upon installation of the shoutbox, a new “Shoutbox Pruning” menu option will appear in the “Tools and Maintenance” section. Like the log pruning tools, this tool will similarly prune the shouts table, deleting shouts which are older than the number of days specified. I’ll probably also include a tool for the new MyBB Task System which will, when enabled, automatically prune shouts at regular intervals, but I haven’t yet written one. Whether or not it should be released with the main plugin or as a seperate option also still needs to be decided.

So, you know about the new admin options for the shoutbox, but how does it look on the front-end? It probably comes as no great surprise that aesthetically, the shoutbox looks pretty much the same on the front-end, but it has been tweaked slightly. The following screenshots demonstrate the shoutbox displaying on both the index page and in a popup window.

You may notice in the screenshots above that the refresh link has gone. Rather, it has combined with the shout button. In part, this is to make space for the link that takes its place, allowing users to enable or disable the automatic page refreshing, regardless of the default setting. This is done through a cookie stored on the users machine. If the disable cookie is flagged as enabled in the shoutbox, the page will not automaticaly refresh for that user. The disable auto refresh link changes, allowing the user to enable auto refresh again in the same way. Note however that if you disable auto refresh globally (by setting the limit to 0), users will not have the option to enable or disable the refresh.

That’s pretty much it for the new shoutbox plugin. It’s the most significant update the plugin has ever recieved and I really hope people enjoy it. I’ll probably release a beta version to the beta testers of MyBB 1.4 before my trip away for a few days. Updates will be coming for the Board Message and Downloads Section plugins soon, since they are regarded as my other priority plugins. Unfortunately, I simply haven’t had the time to get much done for these other plugins yet. Stay tuned however, I’ll post updates (for some other plugins also) in the coming weeks as I start to work through them.

This evening I paid another visit to the Apple shop in Meadowhall. There were three items on the shopping list. Firstly, my brother wanted a MacBook for his schoolwork and was ready to buy it. Also, I wanted to get my hands on some new software for my own iMac. I wanted iWork ‘08 since I was impressed by the trial and OS X 10.5 Leopard.

My brothers new MacBook was a breeze to setup and he’s now getting himself used to it. Once the OS X installation wizard finished I was a little surprised to see Tiger load up when we were told Leopard was in the box. It turned out the Leopard DVD was hidden under some papers. Whilst the new MacBook was updating to Leopard, I opened up my own copy of the update and began to update my own machine. We left the systems to it and went to watch an episode or two of Stargate Atlantis. We returned a little later to see two new installations of Leopard ready to launch.

I’m not going to say too much about Leopard yet until I’ve had a chance to play with it for a while, but my first impressions are quite positive. In the meantime, I thought I’d attach a few screen captures of Leopard running on my own iMac. If you’ve seen any of the publicity images for Leopard then you’ll probably not be seeing anything new here.

Firstly, the brand new desktop complete with 3D reflective dock.

Along with the new desktop comes a brand new Finder. I’m especially fond of how generic file icons have been replaced with thumbnails of each file. This makes it very easy to find exactly the file you’re looking for.

In addition to the existing Icon, List and Column views in the Finder, Leopard introduces Cover Flow view, similar to Cover Flow in iTunes. Again, this is a great way to quickly find exactly the file you’re looking for in a folder.

Quick Look is a new feature which allows you to quickly preview a file directly from the finder without the need to open it up in an application. Just click the spacebar or select the “Quick Look” option to preview the file. It’s also possible to quickly sample documents, presentations, music and video files directly from within Cover Flow.

The new dock isn’t just about looking great, it has a new feature called Stacks, which are essentially folders on the dock which open out to provide more shortcuts. For instance, I have an applications stack on the dock which quickly displays shortcuts to everything in my Applications folder when clicked. Similarly, the new downloads stack displays the files I’ve recently downloaded so as I can access them easily without needing to clutter the desktop. Stacks are displayed either as a fan or a grid depending on the number of files in the stack, or any custom option you may have already set.

I’m thrilled to finally be able to use the new Spaces feature in Leopard. Spaces aren’t a new concept, they’ve been around for a while in other operating systems including numerous Linux distributions, but I’m not really a Linux user. Spaces are essentially just additional desktops that you can easily flick between to keep your applications separate. For example, you could assign a space for general internet related applications such as a browser and email application, whilst loading a document in another. Whilst writing the document in space two, you can quickly switch to space one to look something up on the internet. It’s also easy to drag windows from one space to another and drag spaces around to change their order. I’m already finding the Spaces feature handy for keeping my different running applications grouped and clutter free.

Finally, front row has also changed slightly in Leopard. In fact, it looks rather similar to Apple TV.

I haven’t yet setup Time Machine, but I’m hoping to do so soon once I get a suitable external hard drive. There are no shortage of images of Time Machine dotted around the internet however and the online demonstration is definitely worth a look if you’re not sure what Time Machine is.

So there’s a peek at Leopard. I’m sure there’ll be some more Leopard related postings from me over the coming weeks too.