A Mid-summer Treat is in Store for You (updated)

Tuesday, June 19, 2012 Tags: preview

Just as an ice cream cone seems extra special on a hot summer day, the next release of Exponent (v2.0.8) slated for the end of July, should be just as tasty.  Here's some things we're already working on:

  • Easier management of comments, tags, and categories:
    • You'll not only be able to manage all the comments on the site  from one screen, you can approve, dis-approve, or delete selected comments within a module (or from the site comments view).
    • You'll be able to add or remove tags from selected items in a module at one time.
    • You'll be better able to sort/arrange categories which will be grouped by module type.  You will also be able to assign a category/group to a selected list of items at one time.  And you'll be able to add or arrange categories from within the module itself.
  • There are two new views for the photo album to better handle categories or galleries: accordion and tabbed.
  • The system now handles category groups better by allowing you to display a single group by clicking on the category name in the Default views.
  • The News modules will have manual sorting and the Links module will have random sorting.

All of these new features are already implemented and working in the 'develop' or pre-release branch of code found on github.com.  The 'develop' branch should always be considered unstable and it is not recommended that it be used on a production site.

(Update: July 15th) We'll also add a 'quick upload' feature to the insert-image dialog in the wysiwyg editor making it much simpler to add a new image to an article.  The Email-Alerts (E-Alerts) feature will (finally) work within the blog, news, & filedownload modules allowing users to subscribe to content updates.  Plus, we plan to have an 'alpha' level implementation of the LESS css compiler which will allow much greater power in designing site styles.  LESS is to css stylesheets what Smarty is to HTML templates.