3.4.0 wish list

[shawn_a]

Among the myriad of core fixes I have planned there are a ton of features.
But I am thinking too many features. Soooo I think it would be wise to whittle it down to chunks and roadmap so we can hit a reliable release schedule.

There are already major features in various states of completion, but there are also a few important large ones that need to make it in.

Some gauge on the users would be useful here.

As you can see there are 2 pages of features and another page of bugs.
Some are large some are tiny little things I would like to get done.

https://github.com/GetSimpleCMS/GetSimpleCMS/issues?labels=&milestone=2&page=1&state=open

Realistically i do not think I want to implement some of the major re factoring all at once. So some of that will get pushed back and some feature replace it.

So maybe if i can get input on desired features, then we can narrow it down to a vote or something if necessary.

Some major features of note ongoing questioning or prioritization are.

Menu Manager upgrades and multi menus
snippets
file manager improvements
thumbnail editor improvements
page drafts
publish date mechanisms
New front end theme
New pages fields / SEO

Please add anything you think is missing from the github list that need prioritizing or any must have features or bug fixes.

And notes on the major ones you want or think are better for our growth.

Be sure to check the "in progress" and "closed" issues that are already being worked on.

[shawn_a]

Of course any future stuff you think should be prioritized, like page categories etc, or any plugin hooks that will facilitate plugin development of these missing features.

[Everyone]

• Menu manager upgrades & Multimenus - this is one of the most useful features. Currently has to be implemented by plugins with varying effects. Would be really nice to have natively.
  
  
  
• Publish date mechanisms - very useful for those publish&forget seasonal pages. Seen too much "Merry Xmas" pages in june.
  
  
  
• New front end theme - as long as there's a need for it - Personally I like current Innovation theme much : )
  
  
• Snippets - what differs them from Components?
  
  
• Page drafts - If this is what I think it is, isn't there something like that already (private/public pages)?
  
  
• New pages fields / SEO - what these would be?
  

[hameau]

Quite a list, Shawn – no wonder you want to prioritise!

Is there a case for some of the (popular/important) features to remain as plugins – perhaps because they are not main-stream features, or they are only useful in some applications of GS? The effect of this would be to keep the core GS installation light and simple, but with 'official' plugins (or groups of plugins) available to meet certain use cases. (Blogs come to mind for me – I don't want to be cluttering up the admin interface for no reason.)

The ability to install these 'official plugin packs' from within the admin interface would keep it as simple as possible, without bloating the main application, but make it easy to customise for users.

[yojoe]

Option to recover whole (pages, images,themes etc) or partial (only pages) website content from zipped backup files from admin panel. This would also make it very handy during migration to another hosting provider.

Unfortunately I'm still afraid of .xml file corruption, and couple times with older GS version changing page's URL lead to a disaster, where some pages just disappeared.

[datiswous]

1 Menu Manager upgrades and multi menus
2 snippets

1 I think the menu manager improvements are a basic need which needs priority

2 Improving components might trigger creativity.

https://github.com/GetSimpleCMS/GetSimpleCMS/issues/507
I think it's best not to have separate components and snippets. Add optional functionality to components, to make them flexible. For the rest the interface should be better, so it's easier to create many different components and organize them.

[hameau]

I think it's best not to have separate components and snippets. Add optional functionality to components, to make them flexible. For the rest the interface should be better, so it's easier to create many different components and organize them.

One good reason for keeping components and snippets separate, is to allow components (usually a low-level part of the content) to be hidden from a less privileged user, while still allowing the less privileged user to edit snippets (a high-level part of the content).

At least, that's the way I see it.

[datiswous]

Ok, good point.

Personally I think a better aproach would be to hide features inside the components section depended on user role. So you can make different sorts of components, but some users can only make snippets kind of components, while the admin has all the features available.

[PrplHaz4]

As for major stuff - I would love to have the ability to upgrade my installation from the admin screen I'm only managing ~10 sites right now, but it is a considerable effort to get all of them updated (and tested) for new releases.

I think menu management is a priority as well, since there seems to be a lot of confusion/help topics associated with menus (and could help create more robust/complete themes).

GS does not have multi-user features enabled OOTB, so permissions should prob not be a consideration when evaluating a core feature. In that regard, if we combine and enhance snippets/components (which i agree, are confusing as independent entities), the multi-user extension could apply permissions at the individual snippet/component level.

I would also like to see a BS3-based default theme, as there are numerous sites dedicated to bootstrap templating - making it a pretty flexible base with very little work needed to get going. I would prob consider this lower priority compared to the others though.

I'd also say page drafts and file manager improvements are great features as well.

[shawn_a]

I would love to add permissions to core for everything but there is a lot of refactoring that first has to happen so everything can be wrapped in something that even allows for it, this is probably not going to be until a couple releases.
But I have some ideas to squeeze some features for it in, at least for tabs and sidebars perhaps, of course this would still be in the plugin realm of controls.

[xxdex]

1. menu manager
+ multi level menu navigation
+ create a page (redirection to other page / external page)
+ create page visible.. but not active (example: menu who have a childreen's)

2. upload files from default content area (ckeditor) integrate with pgrfilemanager or something like that
3. date and/or time of publish page (from when ... to when) it will be active and visible in menu
4. change back end.. when it's to much of plugin active in horizontal tab .. then page is too long in horizontal.
5. in back end user profile add a couple of editor options: full, simple, custom (in custom tab specify what will be visible)
6. create a avatar field for user / user's group

[Timbow]

Everything which is done by editing the config file should be done by check boxes and drop-downs in the back end. Editing a text file is not a good way to do anything.

[shawn_a]

What do you mean by "everything"
Not everything is relevant to a config setting, perhaps identify which ones ?
There are plans for moving some things from gsconfig to settings, I am slowly adding support for global configs that are not hardcoded to definitions ( php definitions cannot be changed after gsconfig is read FYI )

"Create a redirect page" should be a plugin
"visible but not active" this is the wrong way to do menus, and should be solved by menu system.

upload from ckeditor , yes definitely ( there were some bugs i had to clean up to do this first )

Feature already exists for publish dates, not sure what priority it should be

Toolbar selector or builder should be a plugin ( support added and easily doable in 3.3.x )

We have no concept of user groups, that would have to be engineered first.

Change back end ? Not sure i understand complaint, have you tried GSSTYLEWIDE setting?

[datiswous]

I think editing a config file inside GS would already be an improvement.

Maybe someone can finish the GS_configurator

[xxdex]

shawn_a

create a redirect page:
would have been easier to just give the box "open the page with the content" "redirect to" it should show the field to select an address and a selection of "new" window "is the same" window "frame", etc. and of third field "inactive link" is just my suggestion


my idea for users
the creation of a single system to create users, and giving them the rights of access restriction. Now there is a multiuser system . but each new user must obtain separate access rights.

You could create an access group in which to save the access rights. and then to add user- assignment to an existing group

[Timbow]

Re the config file

There might be a case for some items to be in a config file but almost all of what is there could be considered useful for the web designers and developers that are setting up sites, although not for end users/site owners. Would that suggest an 'Advanced Options' page in the back end for all those settings? Some of them I alter for every site (toolbars, default thumb size) many could be much handier ( no version check, error suppression)

[shawn_a]

Now you see why these are still in a file?
You just went from 1 to 2 features, both depending on a global refactor feature.
So now we need an advanced config also , see how quickly this becomes not "simple" ?

If you are doing this stuff on every install then use a custom gsconfig file with every install, that is the simplest solution, hell you can even write your own implementation using gsconfig to fetch stuff from an ini file if you wanted or server env variables in htaccess.

So do you want this feature or what I am working on now, making everything I can 10 times faster ?

The middle ground is "Which of these things are NECESSARY", ior precisly which gsconfig options need to be in settings, do they need to remain in gsconfig and settings ? Do somethings need to be overridable, do we need to keep this backward compatible? Some ?

[xxdex]

and what is easy ?
user support cms ( not being a programmer or developer ) has to know that in the meta keywords must enter some commands to redirect .. or deactivation . It is easier to make a check box where the user ( a simple man who probably need to learn manual cms) will be able to click and change something , rather than to teach him new commands . I know from experience that learning a user to join the gallery to the sometimes problematic content (% gallery % ) ...

when i creating a profile for the user who operates the website I turn off access to the modules page setup , backup, or templates ... for my safety . Because a user who is not familiar to the programming .. selecting the wrong thing can spoil a lot of things

I am opposed to exploring all options for each user ...
Let this be available for admin .. not for the publisher .
Admin / installer of GetSimple easily cope with the adjustment of the standard options for the user.


in extended in page get-simple.info:
You should do some of pagination.. now it's much of plugin.. and height of page is very big...

[shawn_a]

hmmm

[morvy]

Menu Manager upgrades and multi menus - who has problem with i18n menu ?? it's fast to install, easy to configure (only drawback that I need to set single lang variable in gsconfig) -but yes, at least medium priority on this
snippets - would be fine to have "general positions" and move components/snippets in any position I want, more components in same position with order - like joomla? - medium priority
file manager improvements - definitely must have, dropzone for uploading but we need to be able to upload files while editing article
thumbnail editor improvements - low priority
page drafts - what's wrong with public/private pages now?
publish date mechanisms - would be fine, medium priority
New front end theme - very low priority, Innovation theme is fine
New pages fields / SEO - page fields are low priority, seo optimization is higher priority. what about making some optimization to pagespeed/yslow ?

manual update from admin would be fine too, as now I have rsync job to copy from template site to all small site that I'm runing on GS

[datiswous]

The middle ground is "Which of these things are NECESSARY", ior precisly which gsconfig options need to be in settings, do they need to remain in gsconfig and settings ? Do somethings need to be overridable, do we need to keep this backward compatible? Some ?

These are the options in GSconfig users might change from time to time and (at least some) are most needed in Settings. I think they should stay in gsconfig as well. Most other setting are set once and/or in specific situations.

# Turn on debug mode
# WYSIWYG editor height
# WYSIWYG toolbars (advanced, basic or [custom config])
# WYSIWYG editor language (default en)
# WYSIWYG Editor Options
# Autosave within edit.php. Value is the autosave interval in seconds
# Disable Sitemap generation and menu items

Just adding some of these would already be nice, doesn't have to be implemented all at once.

GS log files should be directly readable from Support section.

[xxdex]

upload directly:

http://get-simple.info/forums/showthread.php?tid=5203&pid=42927#pid42927

pgrfilemanager is not so bad.. it' can be used as default..
can create folders... rename files, create thumbs... Unfortunately, there is no possibility of scaling, cropping images

[shawn_a]

datiswous- Do you mean the error log?
This is not a feature on purpose, error logs are easily used for injections and other stuff and typically not rendered anywhere for this reason.
There is now a plugin for this I noticed also, so this might not be an issue.

Also fyi, The log manager supports viewing any standard gs log file in the log directory out of the box, so plugins can use their own logs for stuff also, very easily.

[shawn_a]

Oh and as to explain some of the stuff questioned.

innovation has to go because it is dated, but also because addthis uses tracking cookies and its own js script and it is slow. So i agree not a priority, addthis needs to at least be replaced with something open source and not hosted elsewhere.

Page drafts are useful, because private does not simplify editing a page that is already live, and you cannot save a page over another page with out moving things about, so this becomes a person editing a live page on a live site in real time. Probably not wise. I have some ideas to redo the engineering of drafts to make them much simpler as whats in the issue on github, some of the reason its been delayed so much is it was too complicated.

[xxdex]

This is just an example of changes that I would see in new versions in get simple ..

small size:




FULL SIZE IMAGES:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/49983884/in/newgs/www.jpg
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/49983884/in/newgs/www-1.jpg




in start page use a something like that...
i'm see a multimenu's and multilanguage like into a start page

edit navigation structure will give a all pages with a possible change position's
a "#" will be attach to change name. or edit a page's what are in menu (edit, remove. change position etc)

subpage with menu..
Page visibility LIKE:
Normal - visible
Private - Not visible in menu
external link -> this will hidden a "Custom URL (Slug)", ""Tags $ keywords", "Meta description"
and in this place it will be visible option: "add a url here" checking a http write (validation), and the seccond option with target "blank" "parrent" ....
not clicked menu option will enable a button in menu.. but this menu will be not clicable

add this page to the menu:
checbox to add's a page to menu... or menu's
config icon at the right of the menu add's page:
it's can have (like I18N Special Pages extras) active when checkbox will be checked
options -
page parrent
menu text
insert after

special style (example to change font collor in menu) like "red" "yellow" or similar

publish date of page start / end
from example:
http://xdsoft.net/jqplugins/datetimepicker/

Allow to comments - possibility comment's a page's
Visible only for registered user's group - create a special user group and enable register in front-end - user can edit and change a data like password, avatar, maybe comments after login.. etc...
enable a page break pagination.. simple way to break a long page's into couple of subpage's

at bottom
add quick buttons with a simple add a gallery and other (like page break code)
push a gallery icon should open a light box and there will be a simple way to selected what gallery i want to input into ckeditor content .... clicked a gallery will be paste code in ckeditor where is active cursor (% gallery name.... %)

click a page break code will give a paste code (% pagebreak %) into ckeditor where is active cursor..

it's just my ideas (taken out of my head ..)