Documentation Mailing Lists FAQ Roadmap - Questionaire Responses for AA CAMP 2004

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1. Main problems and annoyances you encounter when using ActionApps
Collected user requests on AA TODO list.

There is list of feature requests I collected during last years of development and AA support. It should be actual.

Webdesign
- Add "Display conditions" button to Searchbar in Item Manager which will display conds[] and sort[] array which could be used on the page as slice.php3 parameter
(will be visible only for Administrators)
- Search form wizard (allow to create searchform with all the conds,...) - How it should look?
- Do not allow to use the same alias name in the same slice
- Create new Admin (or better AA) page with several Maintaince utilities (like "Rename constants group", …) and mainly easy API to add new utilities
- Allow specify Multiple values as default setting for the field
- Automatically set the „Insert“ (and possible “Default”) function on the Field Setting page when you change Input type (and the change of Insert function is required (like for Ids or Boolean).
- field independent shortcuts/aliases – usage would be just like usage standard aliases with f_t function – say _#HEADER__ which will be normally expanded. You will be able to use any AA alias and {} construct in such shortcuts and maybe you should be able to use it across several slices. We could be also able to refer to specific parts of view definition – something like _#244_top_ which will be expanded to “Top HTML code” of view 244. Similar shortcuts we could have for slice fields.
- aliases administration – allow unlimited number of aliases, unlimited length of alias definition (maybe we can remove alias definition from field setting and move it to separate page)
- allow to copy Field setting from another slice or even better from another AA installation (maybe from Template repository?) - this could be implemented in “Slice Admin -> Fields” – Add new field on the bottom on the page
- Allow to set all parameters of all (or selected) fields on one page. It will dramatically speedup database setup process. We can display Advanced Field setting table (by tabledit), where each field will be on one row with all its values (just like cron setting, ...)
- Return to field setting when you finish setting of constants.
- Notes – allow to add “Administrato's notes” to all admin pages – different for slice/view/... Then you will be able to add “webdesigner comments” for view 245 (displayed if you are editing view 245) ... It could be implemented as small icon on top AA navigation bar - “Add note” - so it will be common for all AA Admin pages.
- expand (unalias) the “filtering conditions” parameter for “Related Item Window” input type in order you can use conditions like conds[0][headline........]={Honza Malik} or such.
- Design mode – when slice administrator switches ON the design mode, then each field in inputform will show small link to setting on the field (Slice Admin -> Fields) or even better it will allow directly editing of inputform (delete/change helptext, change field name, ...)
- Input type Date – possibility to hide “Day” selectbox
- possibility to fill dates before year 1970
- allow users to left expiry date unfilled
- use great DHTML calendar coponent (http://www.dynarch.com/projects/calendar/) for date
- allow users to add item to related slice directly form inputform (we will use it if we will have slice “Authors” and we are filling an article written be new author.
- extend conds[] to use also: conds[1][headline.......1,fulltext.......1,abstract.......1] (and/or conds[1][*]) - to search in more than one field
- allow to fill, validate work with floating points numbers in the form
- slice/view parameter wizard - enable to construct slice parameters from the wizard
- generate anonymous form as view (like inputform view) with {inputvar:headline........} variables...
- fulltext search integration (MnoGoSearch?)
- extend conds[] syntax to allow search in related slices
- iCalendar file support - input/export

User Interface
- posibility to add link to related slices to the left navigation column of Item Manager for each slice. (Michal)
- Better interface for Alerts (more intuitive setting of filters/readers/templates)
- improve AA graphical design – use CSS styles better
- find and implement some crossbrowser DHTML library which will help us to create better User Interface
- improve parameter wizard – use different input types (selectboxes/checkboxes/...) for different parameter types (not only current textfield
- possibility to redefine the name of several buttons in AA admin interface for a slice – namely “Add item” should be “Add reader” in reader slice, ...
- Add “Logout” button in the AA admin interface
- Searchbar – change operator "> (12/24/2002)" for date field to ">" with prefilled mm/dd/yyyy in the value field
- Searchbar – allow to search also values of “relaed fields” (items in related slice). People are writing headlines of related items for related field (instead of the long_id) – without success, of course. They should be able to fill the headline or we should allow users to select the items – just like we do for categories
- Searchbar – if you select “begins with” (=RLIKE) operator, then if you write more than one word in the search field, then nothing is found (which is right – standard AND is used as default, so it searches for “begins with xy AND begins with zy”, which is logical nonsense). The solution could be – add qoutes around the word by default, or add checkbox “exact match”.
- create textareas for design setting bigger or resizeable. Maybe we can also use HTMLArea for the designs.
- possibility to sort items in Item Manager by clicking on the column name
- Maybe we can add "Allow display holding bin items on web" setting in slice setting and then allow conditions like:
conds[0][status_code.....]=2
- Add slice properties (custom slice fields), where developers and slice administrators can easily add new slice settings.
Such settings then could be edited by administrators and optionaly by editors. Example of used properties:
* allow to edit author (normally it is not possible to edit author, but sometimes in the slice setup it is good to allow it)
* set different time for slice (different than server's)
* slice intro text(s) (editable by editors)...
How to implement: Slice properties will be filled into content table just like ither items, but instead of item_id we will use slice_id
- alias function for extracting file extensions and file sizes.
- fill optional "Extension" (and “File Size”) field on file upload (PDF/ZIP/RTF...)
- possibility to set sorting of items in slice.php3 by AA Admin interface (currently we have this possibility only for views)
- possibility to create views with pagescroller
- better handling of static pages (changeable by AA Admin interface) and also possibility to controll site structure (tree) - menu,...
- add Polls module
- add Surveys module
- more shortcuts - ALT+x
- pass accessibility tests (US Section 508, Blind Friendly Web, ...)
- HTMLArea - add good MS Word cleaner and add possibility to disable some toobar icons
- customizable user interface - colors, ... - maybe also by using templates.
- improve site module user interface (maybe also use it for static maintaining static pages)

Item Management
- wiki text - allow users to use not only "Plain text" and "HTML", but also "Wikitext" as used in wikis

Views
- iview parameter should také aloso "No item message" and „Listing length“ (listlen) parameters from the view
- allow to add more sort conditions to the view
- possibility to change view id (vid) to be not only number, but to be also text. Then you can assign “ecn_top_stories” id to the view, which will be used with vid=ecn_top_stories. There are two advantages – it is easier to read such urls and we solve the problem with view ids, when we create copy of slice (new slice from template).
- allow view (and slice.php3) to display first x items in different format

Discussions
- rewrite discussions to be standard view, comments will be stored in new slice. This allow:
* use pagescrollers
* use custom discussion fields
* use all common view's features (search, sort, cache, modify design, …)
* do not display discussion for „this“ item option
- independent discussions on javascript
- e-mail notification on new discussion comment

Alerts
- possibility to send (or change) forgotten password for Reader (Alerts)
- possibility to unsubscribe person (email) from all notifications at time (when the e-mail is not valid, for example)
- When creating an email template, if URLs are enclosed in angle-brackets (i.e. <www.ifiwatchnet.org>) they don't appear at all in the finished email. (P. King – 1.3.2004)
- bug: it is imposible to switch between different Alerts modules (you have to go another type of slice and then switch to second alert
- add default 'Alerts Set' view to sql_update.php3 script (in order user will see something more clear than 0 items found
- copy “conds[]” fields when we create new alert view filter form another view used as template (now the conds[] are not copied)
- Auth module for secure access to specified directory for specified AA Readers implement also for SQL permissions (now works only for LDAP)

Bulk E-mails
- allow user to store sent emails as template for future use (reusable)

Email Notification
- use e-mail templates in (Slice Admin -> Email Notification) which allow to specify custom e-mail headers, HTML e-mails, ...
- when user fills and send item from anonymous form to the AA, tehn we should be able to send an “Thanks” e-mail to the user (if user's e-mail address is specified in the form.

Export/Import
- Allow to store setting of CSV import (mapping...) for future use
- Allow import of OpenOffice.org xml files into database. OOo saves the files in XML file and it could be imported into AA and define mapping (which part of the document should go to which AA field). Some OpenSource CMSs currently implementing this feature
- item UPDATE from CSV - ”I am going to import and update items with Import CSV feature (which is really nice feature!). The problem I have found is that if you choose "update item" (if the item_ids are the same), the item is not updated but rewriten. It means that all fields of that item are deleted from database and only those from csv file are imported.It would be great to have also "True update" option so only fields from the csv file are updated and other fields of that item are left intact.”
- for CSV import: we should be able to define one field, which we use as condition. If we are adding new item with the same content as is in this field (for any item in the database), then we should be asked for INSERT/UPDATE/SKIP options (usable for names in in addressbook import...)
- ignore empty lines in CSV import

Inter node export
- possibility to set “Enable export to all nodes”
- allow to update changed items on remote server
- possibility to have EXACT copy of the slice on remote server (including slice setting, ...)
- support of ATOM feeds (import as well as export
- fix RSS import export

Documentation
- improve and convert to HTML
- create links from AA interface to the right places of Documentation (change links like http://apc-aa.sourceforge.net/faq/#cron)
- add description of 'notshow' variable to anonymous form listing (as comment) – to be clear what it is for
- search and replace in slice/view/item

Development/Core features/Structures/APIs
- Improve debug informations
* structured output (=better design)
* cookie based: The idea is, that administrators of the slice will be able to clink on „Debug“. In popup they will set, which debug informations they want to be displayed (database queries, image uploads debug, e-mail sending debug, public output debug) and possibly the level of verbosity (how much informations they want to get). Then this user will get all the debug messages (s)he want and (s)he will get it without any other url parameter (like debug=1&nocache=1...). User will be able to switch the debug OFF (unset the cookie)
* possibility to switch ON "debug output comments", which will print on public site HTML comments like:
<!-- view 234 - begin, parametrs are: cmd[234]=c-1-action -->
- Speedup parsing of format strings (parse only evaluated branches of {switch() } construct)
- remove externally_fed field from item table and create it normaly as dynamic field (with dynamic creation of the field definition (field table))
- bug: IsField() function returns true not only for real fields, but for all text with length of 16. It should be fixed, because there could be problem to use 16-characters long texts with f_x and other aliases
- allow conditions to search also related items (the values in items of second slice, which is related to this one)
- rewrite slice to use view form – (remove format fields for fulltext and index from slice table and use view table instead. Fulltext and Index will be then special case of view. It allows adding conds[] and sort[] conditions to slice Index view, as well as any other view's setting). Maybe we can also add list of used views directly in left side menu on “Slice Admin” - as shortcut.
- convert all imports (off-line filling / CSV import / e-mail import / XML import /...) to the same API – for each format we will create filter, which will fills “item_content” structure. Then transformation functions will be done on this COMMON structure (like date->timestamp conversion, url validation, ...) - so we then can use the same transform functions for all data imports.
- slice_id........ is packed in content4id structure (which is not good for grouping and anchors)
- create common “CreatePassword()” and “AuthenticatePassword()” functions which would be common for all parts of AA and will use the same alorithm in as many parts as possible (maybe configurable in config.php3)
- switch to subversion?
- change script extensions to php
- update the scripts for use with php5
- switch to utf-8
- remove slice_id and other important setting from session variables (to avoid problems with two different browser windows with the same session id)
- optimize tables and its indexes
- create 'mainain' script – repair tables/optimalization of tables/remove inconsistency in database/ check problems in database/...
- History – allow users to go back in history of changes. Not only for items, but also for all settings (setting of views, ...). The interface should be also able to show difference between specified versions of the texts/setting
- use some common form-handling library for all AA admin pages (something like phplib's ooforms, Jakub's tabledit, ...)
- implementing JSR 170: Content Repository for JavaTM technology API (http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=170, http://typo3.org/documentation/mailing-lists/dev-list-archive/thread/60148/?tx_maillisttofaq_pi1%5Bmode%5D=1)
- SEO friendly urls
- improve cache - different cache time for different information types - fulltexts could be stored longer than index views...

Other
- Named conditions – new admin page (or searchbar button?), where you will be able to define set of conditions and name it. Then we will add new view parameter, which will use the name of stored query – defined conditions then will be used
- Allow to copy permissions from specified slice (namely when create new slice we should have the possibility to copy also permissions from the old slice)
- Add “Start in slice” property to User profiles (in order each user can jump to specified slice after login)
- Allow group profiles (setting profiles for group of users)
- Possibility to use another language for each user (set in user profiles). This option is related to switching to UTF8 page encoding and probably Alternate field names will be also required.
- Slice/view/field Repository – allow users to copy views/slices and even fields from any AA around the word. Administrator will need to have some password to remote AA for this task. This allow users to share slice/view templates, copy slices to another AA install. We will be also able to create “AA DESIGN REPOSITORY” on actionapps.org server from which we can download “calendar” template, “press release” template, and many others. Each AA should be also able to export their designs to the repository, so the exchange will be two-way.

older feature requess you can find on http://actionapps.org/aa/doc/ROADMAP.html

2. Features suggested for future development versions of ActionApps
Collected user requests on AA TODO list.

3. Comments About Usablility

4. General future development suggestions
History of changes, Template repository, updating of core functionality (adaptation for PHP5), creating interchange API.

Submited by:
Honza Malik

Jun 3 2025

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