Not signed in (Sign In)
SkillShare - A place to discuss Web Standards and Web Design topics
Categories
Vanilla 1.1.9 is a product of Lussumo. More Information: Documentation, Community Support.
- Friends
-
-
CommentAuthorkari.patila
- CommentTimeAug 8th 2006
Got ideas? Since I basically have nothing better to do this week I thought that I might try toying with extensions a bit. The first idea that comes to mind would be a cssbeauty logo on my toolbar that lights up when my participated threads are updated. Or maybe it would be best to have different color codes for generally updated threads and the participated ones?
But, in any case, if you have a better idea please post it here. I'd be happy to give it a shot - even if someone else eventually ends up doing a better job with it. Any ideas for a Vanilla add-on are welcome as well. -
-
you could make the forum extension work for all vanilla forums. If it require server-side code maybe it can be added as a vanilla addon.
-
- CommentAuthorWardLarson
- CommentTimeAug 8th 2006
dude I like the idea of it changing colors when threads you start are posted in. -
-
CommentAuthorkari.patila
- CommentTimeAug 9th 2006
This extension stuff isn't nearly as difficult as I had imagined.. After a brief familiarization period I have a neat cssbeauty logo on my toolbar, where the heart changes color if the main rss-feed has updated since the previous check.
And, by the way, I do realize that it updates every time it's requested (lastbuilddates), but that's not important at the moment. At least the concept works. Still to do are the login processes and caching. So far it only works while the browser is kept open.
At any point point please feel free to take the idea and run with it - as much as I'd like to have an extension like this, I don't have to be the one coding (all of) it. For me this is just an attempt to try something new.
Also, I think that some kind of a community project might be fun, since the discussions have been mostly about answering questions instead of discussing techniques or ideas (not that there's anything wrong with that). -
-
Post some images, when there are some.
-
-
CommentAuthorkari.patila
- CommentTimeAug 9th 2006 edited
There's not much to post, really, but here goes: http://cs.joensuu.fi/~kpatila/extension.html
Note that the icons are oversized and certainly not final. I actually have no ambition whatsoever towards designing them myself. But you get the idea, right?
Since this morning, the extension gets the last 5 headlines from the rss-feed and saves them into a string, which it compares to periodically requested headlines (five of them, of course). If they are the same, there should be no changes (unless they are somehow in the precisely same order) and the heart stays green. Otherwise it changes color.
I'll start working on the Vanilla-part tomorrow. That way it'll be easy to incorporate the "participated discussions" feature into it. Currently the heart goes blue when that feed is updated.
There's still a lot to do, but it's looking good so far.
Addendum: the Vanilla add-on is meant to replace the beforementioned use of rss, since Vanilla already has functions for checking threads for updated content. -
-
That looks great!
Just out of curiosity how does the extension know to look for a certain user's posts?
Neat extension. -
Nice! I was imagining something more like the gmail notification extension which puts a small icon in the bottom right, but this works as well!
-
-
CommentAuthorkari.patila
- CommentTimeAug 10th 2006
"how does the extension know to look for a certain user's posts?"
-That would be the Vanilla add-on. The extension uses the add-on to pass login information, and then fetch the necessary data from the database. At this point the extension is periodically checking the add-on, which outputs the headlines and timestamps of recently updated discussions. If the user has signed in (either at skillshare or via the extension) it also collects user-specific data the same way the Participated Threads 1.1 - extension does.
The gmail notification extension has the benefit of using the gmail api (or at least that's what I think), but Vanilla didn't seem to have any (documented) features that would allow an external application to gather information from it. Please correct me at this point, or as soon as possible, if I'm wrong.
I did put some thought into making the icon appean on the statusbar, but since it also acts as a bookmark for skillshare, it felt more practical to place it next to the main navigation.
There's still a lot to do, and I'll test this with my own copy of Vanilla during the weekend.
Also, feel free to post suggestions or sketches for the icons. -
-
- CommentAuthorWardLarson
- CommentTimeAug 10th 2006
i think it'd be cool if you could make it compatible with all vanilla forums... so someone could simply add the url to the forum and their username & pass and then have it work on that forum as well. it would have a broader userbase.
for the icons you could use the vanilla logo.
just a thought. -
Seems, nice. Though, I think it would look better down on the status bar.
-
-
CommentAuthorkari.patila
- CommentTimeAug 10th 2006
"i think it'd be cool if you could make it compatible with all vanilla forums..."
-That's the long-term plan, but at this point I'd just like to have this working. I'll add some options and features afterwards. -
1 to 12 of 12