By 
Paul on May 27, 2017 at 10:24 AM
First, the issue of not having all possible pins on the category or search map at once is at last solved. By setting Admin -> Settings -> General -> Map Pins Loading Strategy to "all", WSN will progressively load all applicable pins that are within the current viewport -- and when the viewport changes by drag/zoom, it loads anything needed for the new viewport. It's generally a quick process but there's a loading indicator bar to make it clear when it completes.
Second, I set about making it possible to dynamically filter the map by listing type by checking or unchecking a checkbox for each type. To use this, simply insert {FUNC_ADDFILTERPINSHTML} where you want the checkboxes displayed.
Third, in conjunction with the above I thought it'd be nice to visually distinguish pins of each listing type in different colors. This is now possible by setting the coloredpins tweak. Up to 7 colors are automatically assigned, and a colored pin is displayed by the checkbox to act as a visual key.
By Paul on Apr 19, 2017 at 10:39 PM (Edited Apr 19, 2017 at 10:46 PM)
Here's how it works. Open tweaks.php in a text editor. Then add lines like this before the ?>:
$changesettings['stopspam'] = 'bait';
$changeswitches['alertify'] = 0;
Note that switches must always be 0 (turned off) or 1 (turned on). You can add as many settings or switches as you like.
In order to avoid accidentally saving the changed state in the admin, these changes are applied only on front-end pages -- not in the admin panel.
By Paul on Mar 26, 2017 at 6:50 PM
You may still wish to replace the shared keys with your own keys in order to have control over the challenge level (more human-friendly or more secure against machines).
I've also added a line to the privacy policy page when reCAPTCHA is enabled which explains that it uses cookies and shares data with google, fulfilling EU privacy disclosure law.
By Paul on Nov 15, 2016 at 11:17 AM
Now you have another option: google's reCAPTCHA. reCAPTCHA has several advantages. First, it can be "solved" with just a click in most cases thus saving the submitter time and effort. Second, when it suspects the user of being a bot, it presents them with problems that are impossible for current AI systems -- such as choosing which of a series of pictures contain a certain thing. Third, the complexity is configurable so you can decide whether to make things easier or more secure.
The drawback of reCAPTCHA is that you have to sign up for keys for each domain name to use it. When you select it from the spam prevention menu at Admin -> Settings -> General, two boxes will immediately appear prompting you for the site key and secret key and there'll be a link above the boxes telling you where to register to get the keys.
reCAPTCHA is available in WSN versions 10.0.32 Beta 3 and later.
By Paul on Sep 24, 2016 at 11:02 AM
For a while, we've had options in the auto setup to choose a category structure of counties by state or cities by county by state. That works well for a national directory, but in many cases people just want a directory for a particular state. Removing the undesired states was no simple matter, and then since having a single superflous top level category is undesirable you'd want to make all the subcategories into top level categories. With WSN 10.0.22 Beta 3 and the latest version of autosetup.php, all the required queries have been automated. All you do is select "Counties of single state" or "Cities by county of single state" under "Pre-Load Data" during setup, and then select your desired state from the dropdown that appears. As an additional convenience, either of these selections will also automatically trim your countries list at Admin -> Settings -> Localization to just "United States" and states list to just your selected state, so that submitters don't have a chance to mess up the address.
A further improvement I have in mind for the future is to create a "cities as autocategories" switch which will remove the category selection process from submitting listings, and instead automatically choose a category based on the city/state provided as the listings address. This of course would require that all listings have an address. It would also need to automatically create new subcategories for city names that don't yet have categories, and would have to wait until after validation to do so in order to prevent spammy category names.
By Paul on Sep 17, 2016 at 6:58 AM
By Paul on Sep 13, 2016 at 8:15 AM (Edited Sep 13, 2016 at 8:19 AM)
I've just released 10.0.19. Besides a bunch of minor fixes, an update to the bxslider component and the auctions system and cache mentioned in recent previous blogs, the rest of the changes relate to the saved listings system.
In the past, there've been two parallel saved listings systems -- one in the database for members and one in browser localstorage for guests. 10.0.19 unifies that by importing the guest localstorage data to the database, and sending a cookie to the browser to act as a unique identifier for that guest's database entries. This means it's now possible to show how many guests have saved a particular listing, as well as how many members. This unification process also made it easier for me to bring a guest's saved listings with them when they become a member, which wasn't happening before but is now (automatically).
A major under the hood structural change to saved listings is that they've been moved to their own separate table now instead of being tracked in the listing savedby field. The only way this will affect most of you is that you can now create toplists of saved listings in the toplist generator by selecing the savedlinks table. If by some chance you created a toplist with a custom SQL filter based on the savedby field, it will no longer work until you convert it -- fortunately I think it's unlikely that anyone has done so since the format of the field wasn't documented. The underlying reason for the change was to enable manual drag and drop ordering of saved listings, which isn't enabled by default but is available with the new manualsortsaved tweak. If not using manualsortsaved, the old sorting selector still works.
Another change is that saved listings collections can now be shared publically between your members. When the new "public saved listings" switch is turned on, each member's profile page shows a link to view that member's saved listings. If comments are switched on, members can also discuss each other's saved listing collect...
By Paul on Sep 09, 2016 at 12:22 AM (Edited Sep 09, 2016 at 12:25 AM)
I can only hope there won't be any apache configurations which barf on these rules, I've conditionalized everything that I know is conditional. If you have a problem with it on your apache server, do let me know. Those of you not on Apache will not be able to take advantage of this, unfortunately -- with the possible exception of litespeed and such slimmed apache look-alikes, but haven't tested them.
There is a risk that the etag definitions may not work on all sites -- some of the internet has reported it only working from httpd.conf and not from .htaccess. If that's your situation, you may end up finding that you and your visitors keep seeing old versions of files after you've changed them. In that case, you will need to turn off the caching/compression option.
Next up will be CSS minification. I'll need to integrate a CSS minifier script and switch all references in the source from the current stylesheets to new .min.js versions, perhaps in a templates/styles/production/ subdirectory. This will have the disadvantage of making it impossible to immediately see changes if editing the regular .css file via FTP (rather than through the admin panel), so I may make it optional.
By Paul on Aug 30, 2016 at 11:10 AM (Edited Aug 30, 2016 at 11:37 AM)
First, I've added quantity tracking. When enabled, the listing submitter and set a quantity of the product they have available. Whenever a purchase is processed through WSN's system (paypal/2co/etc IPNs) it automatically deducts one from the available quantity. It will even work for payments sent to listing submitters if the purchase is through paypal, since WSN's generated paypal button for that sets the IPN to call back to WSN. The default (but configurable) action is for the listing to automatically hide itself when the quantity hits 0. This will be useful for any site that sells less than an infinite number of each item -- even if you only sell 1 of each, enabling quantities will allow the listing to autohide after being purchased.
I've also added an auctions system. When enabled, the listing submitter can select to make their listing an auction which will last a number of days they specify (configurable default is 7 days). The price field then acts as the minimum starting bid. Any logged in member can then place a bid, which must be at least 10 cents more than the current leading bid. The configurable default is to autohide the listing after the auction completes, and of course it emails the winner to ask them to make payment and emails the seller to tell them who won, and gives both of them the other's email address to facilitate communication.
These are of course fresh experimental features at the moment, do let me know if you find any probelms or have any ideas to enhance these systems.
By Paul on Aug 23, 2016 at 10:34 AM (Edited Aug 23, 2016 at 10:36 AM)
For the 10.0.18 release, I've finished the long project of merging the default and bootstrap templates. The bootstrap theme from 10.0.18 onward will simply be a custom stylesheet for the default theme. This means bootstrap is no longer at risk of getting out of date, either on my end or due to customized templates during your upgrades. If you have an older version of the bootstrap theme you may want to reinstall it in 10.0.18, though you'll have to be careful to reapply your customizations after.
In other recent developments, I've begun automatically updating 9.0 and 9.1 versions to 9.2. Those two series haven't had a release since last year, and it would be complex for me to update them since they're not compatible with PHP 7 which is what I'm running on my development server now. So I figure the best thing for everybody is to just move everyone up to 9.2. Fortunately this doesn't require any admin interaction and all the customized templates can be safely preserved without much risk. Based on my testing, I don't foresee any problems arising, though this is the first time I've tried automated series updates. Of course this only happens when the site is set to automatically upgrade.
Unfortunately it's not so simple to automatically update 7.1 and 8.0 series sites, because there are major changes to the style and fields systems between those versions which would present too much risk of messing up somebody's site while they're not looking. If you are on any pre-9.2 series you do need to upgrade though. I'm planning to write a script to collect a list of known outdated installations and email the owners of those sites to ask them to upgrade, probably sometime within the next month.
