Some ideas for enhancements of the Van2Chat Plugin

oliverraduner

First: is this plugin developed according to the Vanilla standards in the meantime? F.eg. not using it's own database stuff?

Then I have some proposals for enhancements here:

1. after posting a new message, show a loading-indicator until the post is added to the shoutbox
2. the textfield for posting should be locked/disabled until the message is posted
   (probably also consider kind of a "spam"-protection like for regulating the amount of messages one can make between in xx seconds?)
3. the textfield for new messages should be a little wider
   (matching the sidepanel width)
4. usernames should be linked to the userprofile
5. there is no warning when the text in the textfield is too long
   (the textfield could get a red background, or you could add a text-counter à la twitter to indicate this)
6. URLs are not being recognized/translated into clickable links
7. It would be nice to have alternating row colors for the messages
8. the history sucks... why is this on a totally empty page? And it does not even show more messages than the shoutbox itself...?!
9. Is it not possible to specify the total amount of messages to show in the shoutbox?
10. The removal link looks "ugly" ([rem]) - you could use a nice & even smaller image for that. f.eg. this or this

caerostris

Hey, thanks for all that tipps, thats simply great!

In fact, i already thought about adding point 4 and 10 of your list...
The seconds "this" of point 10... Is that your oicture/do you know under ehich license it is released?

I will use a loading indicator from ajaxload.info , thats what you mean, isnt it?


Your right in every point you mentioned, except number 8): if it doesnt show more then the normal shoutbox, there are dimply no more posts saved in the database ;-)

The last point (your first point):
The database functions and so on
I do not use vanillas database functions except C("Database.Host") etc. to get the login credentials, for one simple reason:
Vanillas database functions are instable and bad documented, if you can write me a working fix for this, it would be great, but i really tried to use vanillas db funcctions for a longt time, sometimes it even throwed "Bonk!'s" (Internal server errors) when i tried to ouput the DB querys... ;-)


But i will add every point you mentioned to the todo list!

Thanks ;-)

caerostris

Ah, i forgot one thing, im sorry for
-the crappy (and misleading) name
-the crappy [rem]
-the crappy history

Let me explain the backgrounds:
-the name:
At first, i started developing it for private use only, and considered to release it later...
When i wrote the plugin, i didnt care about the name - know i hate it ;-) but currently i cant change it...

-[rem] and history:
Hmm..
If i think about it, it looks like i didnt mind if it looks good or not - i just was happy to got it working ;-)

I'll add your feature "requests" to the bugtracker, if youre interested,
Take a look at the bug reporting page (link in the plugin description), there you can see what i already implemented, and what i didnt implement yet...

But i wont add the requests today, in germany its 0:46AM ;-)