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.

You won’t have seen much of me over these last couple of days. I’ve not vanished off the face of the earth, at least not yet anyway. I’ve instead been beavering away at some of the many new features planned for MyBB Mods, particularly the submissions page. I posted a while ago that I’d started planning and putting together the new system, but the last couple of days I’ve been working almost constantly on turning the plans into a reality. There are so many things to do though, I’m nowhere near finished yet.

I’m very excited about some of the planned features and would love to show you them all, but I’m going to resist for the moment. I will give a related update on the submissions script though. Did I say submissions script rather than submissions page? I did. Thanks to the new features for the site, it simply isn’t feasible to keep all the submission options on one page. Rather, the new and improved script will be split into four steps, two of which are optional.

Step one is where the basic information about the submission is entered. A screenshot of step one is attached to this post. It’s largely the same as the last screenshot I posted, although there are a few differences. Can you spot them? Note that the image is cropped this time. That’s because some of the new features I’ve been working on were also displayed on the page, and tempting though it may be, I’m not ready to reveal them quite yet. I was up until 5AM in the morning working on this, largely because I was fighting as usual with the simplest of javascript code (another hint at something on the page maybe?).

Step two is where the actual submission file is uploaded. Why not allow that in step one you may ask? Well, during step one, a GUID (globally unique identifier) is generated for the submission. This GUID can be added to a the info function of a plugin before it is uploaded in step 2. By adding the GUID, users of the plugin will be able to check for plugin updates with only one click in the new Admin CP that you’ll see in MyBB 1.4. For more information on the feature, see Tikitiki’s related blog entry. The GUID is shown to the user during step two if they’re submitting a plugin, as are suggested instructions for adding the GUID to the plugin file. Below the GUID is the file upload field, which is obviously shown for all submissions. A screenshot of step two is also attached. Note that the “What is this?” and “Show me an example…” links load the associated content below in a javascript controlled drop-down (that wasn’t the javascript causing me problems, so what was? ). Also just a quick note that the existing submissions system has been generating GUIDs for new submissions since the end of March, although they haven’t yet been shown to users for implementation, since only a select few have access to the version checking feature at the moment. However, once MyBB 1.4 is released, users who already have submissions in the MyBB Mods database will be able to see their GUID (or generate one if their submission was made before the end of March 2007) from the site control panel.

Steps three and four are both related to some of the new features I’ve been working on. They’re also both entirely optional, so users who don’t want to make use of them don’t have to go through a submission process that is longer and more complicated than it needs to be. Instead, if a user decided not to make use of one of the features, they can simply skip the step and be done with it. I don’t have any screenshots of these new features for you just yet, but keep an eye on this space.

Although the submissions script still may change before it goes live, the current step four would provide some easy to find additional information about a submission, if the author decided to use it. Not any old information though, something specific. The current step three is also very exciting and could potentially benefit all MyBB users.

Am I being a little vague? All will be revealed soon.

I haven’t even scratched the surface on some of the other things I’ve been working on or have planned. But, after working until 5AM yesterday and from 11AM to now (about 3:30AM) today, I hope the hard work pays off and users can start enjoying the updated site soon.