[pLog-svn] Suggestions for PLOG team

[Oscar Renalias]

I like feedback :), but let's see...

On 6/1/05, nick nizhenyuan <ni.hero at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi, guys
> 
> I am really glad to see that my email-box is filled with the mails
> from you, and one of my pleasure is to open my mail box and find that
> more and more new changes are undergoing.
> 
> You are so great because of the spirit of sharing.
> 
> I use plog since last year, but actually I haven't contribute one
> sigle word to the code because I am not familiar with PHP , I think
> what I can do is to share my experiences and idears all about plog to
> the team, and wish that can bu useful.
> 
> Introduce my site first, www.vVlogger.com, built with plog 1.0  and
> got 1500 users now since set up 2 months ago. I will write my idears
> and suggestions got from these two months and hope that will be
> userful for Plog to ge more popular.
> 
> Suggestions :
> 
> 1, Plog should be more easier to use. This is the most important issue
> currently worried me. A lot of users says it's too complicated to use.
> To us, who are familiar with computer and Plog, It's easy to use. But
> to others, it's not:)
> 
> It's not so difficult to solve it. First ,just rearranging the admin
> menu will work.
> You can look at BSP from China http://www.yculblog.com/my.php?= "
> (username: ameng pass:123456). There are two columns, left one for
> menu and the right one for admin page. secondly, making some pluggins
> site configurabal, I mean that administrator can open some pluggins
> such as recentcomment/mostread  instead inform the user to do it.

We committed ourselves to the current user interface and we're not
going to change it. It took us a lot to implement what we currently
have and it'd be foolish to throw it all away and start from scratch.
What we can do is improve upon it.

First we should identify the particular areas that should be improved,
instead of just saying "users find it difficult". What do they find
difficult? Posting? Managing resources? Custom fields? How do they
think it could be improved? Can you ask your users and get back to us
with some clear points that we can analyze and work on?

Or if you already have any ideas, keep in mind that most of the stuff
is pure CSS that can be easily modified. If you feel so inclined, a
proof-of-concept design showing some of the ideas brought to the table
by your users would also help a lot :)

> 2, Performance should be improved. Especially when entering the admin
> page, the new post page is a bit slow.

We're working hard on it and we hope that plog 1.1 will shine in the
performance area!

> 3, Global BLOG Category and Global Article Category.
> 
> I saw that it has been put into bugs system, but nobody adopt it until now.
> 
> The above three issues are urgent to a Bsp like vVlogger now. But I am
> not sure wether it is also important to a standalone blogger.

Yeah some people have requested these features but see below...

> Idears:
> 
> Buddlist:
> The persons who blog has a great willingness to communicate with
> others on the web, so a buddlist will make plog users associated
> together.

Argh, not again. 

I am really not that interested in this feature and if you want it to
be somehow integrated with for example the dashboard (how about a
section in the dashboard called "my friends' activity"?), it cannot be
implemented as a plugin. It cannot be implemented as a plugin if it
should also integrate with the summary either (like in the user
profile page in the summary)

Or in other words, it means quite a bit of work.

Don't get me wrong, but I don't really feel like working on a feature
like this. In the countless hours I've spent implementing support for
atom, moblogging and very soon, mobile access with customized
templates for small devices, I could have implemented this feature
three times :) But I probably had 100 times more fun working on stuff
that I like! I am quite fond of concepts such as mobility and I am
aiming to close the gap between mobile devices and blogs. If this
differs from the common goals of blogging communities, so be it.

The point is, the ball is on your court now. You (you==users) have the
tools (the API) and all the help you might need (the devs, wiki,
forums) so it's only a matter of making a little effort. Once ready,
send us the patch and we'll incorporate it in our code.

Heck, we're not even paid for our efforts. I wouldn't mind being
sponsored in order to implement a certain feature, and  I am sure that
some of  our team members wouldn't mind either :)

> AutoSearch:
> This idear got from google adsense, A blogger can set up some keywords
> to demostrate what he is interested. And PLOG will search the
> correspondding article and displayed the titles got to blogger's
> homepage.

Could you elaborate a bit more on this? I don't quite get how this
feature would work.

> uni-id:
> This idear got from Drupal, the users can use uni-id to log in all
> sites built with drupal all around the world, that openness is so
> great :)

Drupal's implementation has one *very* big security issue: a modified
installation of drupal will allow the site owner to collect anybody's
username and password in clear form:

1) user A at mysite.com visits site yoursite.com
2) user A at mysite.com authenticates in site yoursite.com, which will
contact mysite.com to make sure that user A is really who he says he
is (drupal will just make an xmlrpc request as far as I remember from
yoursite.com to mysite.com)
3) the owner of yoursite.com modified drupal so that it logs all the
content type in the authentication form, so whatever user A at mysite.com
typed in the form has been stored.
4) the owner of yoursite.com now has A's password and can access A's
account in mysite.com

I think this is a big security issue and we shouldn't proceed with
this approach.

> Above is some of my thoughts.
> 
> At last, I have to say :
> 
> Thanks for your great work!

Thank you for using plog :)

Hope you didn't misunderstand my comments but it all boils down to
having fun with what you're doing. I would have quit working on plog a
long ago if I didn't think that I can still learn and enjoy working on
it.

Oscar