There's a lot going on at the moment which is not visible to everybody. I would like to summarize some of the developments in this article.
Calendars! Calendars! Calendars!
A long time we all lived with PostCalendar - a complex and powerful modules that included Smarty before it was included as templating engine into the core. But the complexity was also the reason why the original maintainers gave up their work and nobody really picked it up again. Robert Gasch attempted to dissolve the code jungle and turned to other projects. Other modules like Zerocal, cal-zone or the pgCalendar addon for Pagesetter never really took off in the shadow of the huge PostCalendar. For a long time nothing much happened until recently several new calendar modules started to grow:
1. Daniele Conca's crpCalendar started off as a simple list of events but it is slowly turning into a full fletched Calendar with day-, week- and month-views. Moreover it supports hCalendar microformats and Content via plugin so you can integrate calendar events into your Content articles.
Download: http://noc.postnuke.com/projects/crpcalendar/
2. TimeIt is attempt to clone PostCalendar with .8 technology. In the meantime version 1.1 RC1 is released which not only offers all the features postCalendar has but also event registration and user events.
Download: http://www.assembla.com/spaces/files/cxTPX-9PKr3lxaabIlDkbG
3. Eventliner is a new Calendar which also imports PostCalendar data and offers day-, week- and month-views.
Download: http://noc.postnuke.com/projects/eventliner/
Good News for Communities
Florian Schliessl released a new, cool community module called ContacList which handles lists of friends. Your user will be able to ask other others for friendship and see their friends birthdays. The module can also be used in other modules to make user profiles ASO only visible for friends. TimeIt already supports ContactList so your users can add their events or register and make this information visible to their friends.
Download: http://noc.postnuke.com/projects/contactlist/
Totally Web 2.0
Mark West released a little plugin that allows you to include these little buttons for all kinds of link services like del.icio.us, mr. wong ASO. into your modules.
Download: http://noc.postnuke.com/projects/pnwebservices/
Pagesetter Successor
Marco Kundert is still working on his Pagesetter clone. The module will have all the features that Pagesetter has but replace all the stuff that Jørn first implemented in Pagesetter which now has been included into the core by the core features. Guppy will be repleaced by pnForm, the workflows will be replaces by the core workflows ASO. Moreover he aims at making Pagemaster easier to use for beginners. Gabriel Freinbichler is already running a test version on one of his sites and he seems to be quite satisfied with it.
Shops
There are at least 3 forks of pnCommerce out there, maintained by Rüdiger Hahn, Jim Hatfield and others the problem now is that they all are very busy with their system and that they need to integrate all forks again to have a common code base again. There were several attempts to reunite the code but AFAIK the project lacks somebody who is really willing and able to put some time into it - who works self-motivated and needs the shop for his own sites.
Robert Gasch is working on a commercial shop. I had the priviliedge to take a look at it and it seems to offer a lot of very advanced features. If you need a shop and you are willing to invest some money into it, you should contact Robert.
Media
Axel Guckelsberger seems to have 50 hour days. His latest project is MediaAttach - finally a real solution for a central media repository. It still has some legacy from it's predecessor pnUpper but it already offers a lot of great features for the handling of media and it is included in Scribite and Content.
Download: http://noc.postnuke.com/projects/mediaattach/
Certainly there is a lot more going on - so if you are working on a project, please leave a comment.
Posted by
kaffeeringe.de
on Monday, April 21, 2008
Comments (8) · 746 Reads
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8 Comments so far
(Latest comments
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1. marcolinux wrote on Apr 21, 2008 at 11:39 AM
great news, but out there we are waiting for THE news...one month after PostNuke bugfix weekend, it seems that there are no news on .80 release/develpment?!
please spent a word on it!
bye,
marco
2. JørnWildt wrote on Apr 21, 2008 at 11:43 AM
I am working hard on the last issues - especially the category permission problems (see http://noc.postnuke.com/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=16027&group_id=5&atid=101).
A lot of new category stuff was unfortunately added at a very late stage and that has cost us dearly.
3. mdee24 wrote on Apr 21, 2008 at 12:11 PM
Great news!
I heard something about some kind of TAGS module too, are there some news about it?
-Martin
4. kaffeeringe.de wrote on Apr 21, 2008 at 12:31 PM
Simon has implemented Alex Kings PHPTagEngine for a customer but he says he has to clean it up before public release.
5. espaan wrote on Apr 21, 2008 at 02:11 PM
There is the BlankTheme project (David, Mateo and me) based upon the YAML framework for easy creation of flexible themes.2 column, 3 column or a flexible grid where you define your own layout are possible. There are serious plans to include the YAML builder in there for interactive theme layouting.
BlankTheme includes an extended menutree with a lot of menu templates and style sheets (based upon great menus out there, purecss, suckertree, dynamic drive, etc). BlankTheme supports a top navigation block (configurable from the admin side), where you easily put a horizontal multi level menu with menutree. Or multi level flyout menus on the left side (example: http://www.erikspaan.nl/pn8rc3/ ).
Mateo and I have taken on the News ValueAddon module. A content plugin for News articles (based upon the extended stories block) is already in there. Things like feature story(ies) in a block or Content are on the list.
I'm also working on a SmugMug module where you can display your albums and photos from smugmug inside PN. It is based upon phpSmug, which is on its turn based upon phpFlickr, so a port to Flickr is also on my wishlist and shouldn't be that hard.
Blocks and Content plugins will certainly be in there. Caching of the SmugMug API calls is already implemented in phpSmug (and phpFlickr) so external call delay can be kept to a minimum.
6. JørnWildt wrote on Apr 21, 2008 at 03:21 PM
espaan: please note that I have SmugMug plugins on the list for Content. The actual idea is to have one "Add photos from external webservice" plugin - and then have kind'of sub-plugins for that one for the different photo websites out there.
7. espaan wrote on Apr 21, 2008 at 04:34 PM
Great. Is there already something that I can take a look at so that I can hook onto that?The flickr plugin in Content 1.1.0 has limited functionality AFAIK.
I would like to go for:
- include 1 or more album(s) with Thumbs and URL to the module displaying them or directly to the webservice.
- include 1 or more photo(s) with their Thumbs (expanding to full size with lightbox/lightview) or full size directly.
- include a specific nr of recent albums / recent photos.
A good structure that is easy expandable later on would be nice. So get the basic include a photo up and running and add features later on. Beware that both phpSmug and phpFlickr have caching available that should also be administrable.
The same functions could be used for a scribite plugin or maybe a hook to include photos/albums from photoservice X in News or whatever.
8. JørnWildt wrote on Apr 21, 2008 at 10:30 PM
No, not yet.