By Paul on Apr 19, 2019 at 2:04 AM

Sometimes personalization is a big selling point. Instead of a map of generic pins, wouldn't it be nice to have a map of company logos, or other such images that convey more information in a glance? The latest WSN release allows this with the Admin -> Settings -> Switches -> "Addresses" -> "Map" -> "Custom logo map pins" option. When that switch is enabled, a "Small Logo" field appears for listings which allows submitters to upload an image that'll be used as their map pin. The image is automatically resized. If you want bigger pin images, simply resize templates/images_default/marker.png in your favorite image editor. The custom images will always be overlayed on top of the standard pin image, this alllows them to leave a few pixels of color from the standard pin at the bottom to signify open status or listing type.

Also in this release, the ratings w/review comments system gained review editing facilities. I've also done some bootstrap 4 prep work, making the main menu and all btn-secondary buttons compatible with v4. A lot more bootstrap work is coming soon, including hopefully an integrated SCSS editor/compiler to make customizing easier.

By Paul on Apr 08, 2019 at 5:57 PM

For those of you with business listings, you may be using WSN's open hours option. That lets submitters record the hours their business is open. You probably already know that you can make use of that data to alert your visitors when a business is currently open, using the {LINKISOPEN} template variable. For example, <IF {LINKISOPEN}>This business is open right now!</IF>.

But what about maps? When someone is browsing your maps of listings, it'd be nice if they could tell whether a particular one is currently open. You could edit a notice into the map pin HTML, but that would only show up after they click the pin. So, I thought, why not use the pin's color? Businesses that are currently open can be green while the rest stay the standard red.

In today's 10.4.13 Beta 1 release, the colored pins options at Admin -> Settings -> Maps have changed to enable this. You now have a choice between disabling colored pins, enabling them for distinguishing listing types, or enabling them for distinguishing open from closed. Supports both google and OSM maps. If you have the open hours switch off, of course, you only see the colored listing types option.

Other recently added options include a tweak to include not-yet-effective listings in display, and a tweak to filter what shows on maps by any sql condition (without affecting non-maps).

By Paul on Mar 31, 2019 at 12:45 AM

Many of you use wordpress. You're probably already aware of the WSN plugins for wordpress which automatically install a WSN script and integrate members and the header/footer/style and adds a link to WSN in the wordpress menu and provides access to the WSN admin panel from the wordpress admin panel. The latest feature addition for the WSN plugins for wordpress is shortcodes.

Shortcodes are the wordpress way of inserting complex structures with simple markup. The WSN plugins now provide a way to insert any WSN toplist into wordpress. Just wrap the toplist in [wsnlinkstoplist]toplist code here[/wsnlinkstoplist] -- changing wsnlinks to the applicable script (wsngallery, wsnkb, etc). This is a great way to show some WSN data direct in wordpress, even within a blog post.

If you already have the plugin, you'll need to re-download it and replace the file to upgrade it (if you have a version 1.10 or later that's seemless -- 1.0x versions were not upgradable becaused they stored data within their file). Then make sure the WSN script is updated to 10.4.9, and go to Admin -> Themes -> Toplist Generator to make the toplist.

Limitations:
- The shortcodes make an ajax.php call for their content, so they're not great for SEO purposes.
- The shortcoded toplists can't do pagination or 'live' toplist updates. If anyone needs those I can add them as a paid project.

By Paul on Mar 17, 2019 at 10:03 PM

After adding the refreshless toplist pagination option, I got to thinking about other ways/places refreshless loading of content could be useful.

First up was the listings this month calendar widget. It's not in the standard templates, but it's in the blog theme in use here. Checking previous and future months was a pain because the whole page would have to reload and you'd have to scroll back down to where the calendar widget is, and also the URL would be cluttered with a bunch of parameters. Now with the refreshless option, switching months is smooth and nearly instantaneous. To use, just change your {FUNC_LISTINGSTHISMONTH} to {FUNC_LISTINGSTHISMONTH[ajax]}. Pondering putting some form of this into the admin panel templates, maybe on the admin search page.

Next, I thought about situations where you don't actually want to switch pages -- you just want more content to show up on the page while leaving the previous content where it was. Basically a "Load More" button as you'll often find on news sites. It's also useful for a blog like this one, because you don't really care to go to a particular page of blog listings, you just want to see more. I've added this to the toplist generator options, and you can retrofit it into an existing toplist with {TOPLIST1AJAXLOADMORE} (where 1 is replaced by your toplist number).

I've implemented both of these new options on this blog, so you can see them on the front page here.

Another change in today's 10.4.8 Beta 2 is I've added a X-Robots-Tag: noindex HTTP header to ajax.php to stop google webmaster tools from reporting crawl issues with it.

By Paul on Mar 08, 2019 at 12:26 AM

Paginated toplists get a job done: they allow your users to page through very long lists in their entirity. For a full page list which is the primary page content, this is fine.

When the list people are paging is just a little box in a corner of the page, particularly if the box is below the scroll line, it's irritating that the entire page reloads to show the next toplist page. What we'd like to do is have a refeshless pager that just updates the toplist content quickly without affecting the rest of the page. That's what I've been working on this week.

In this sort of compact situation, a list of 10 different page numbers is usually less desirable than a simple previous/next navigation. Thus the initial type of navigation I've set up is two simple buttons, "Previous X" and "Next X" where X is the number per page. These buttons hide appropriately on the first and last page. I can add support for other forms of pagination on request.

To impliment using WSN 10.4.7 Beta 2, simply replace {TOPLIST1PAGINATION} with {TOPLIST1AJAXPAGINATION} in your template -- changing the number 1 to the applicable toplist number. I tested it out with the top 5 links box and it works fine there, except that it doesn't respect the sort top rated / most visited toggles since I haven't ajaxified those yet -- which I will do for the next beta, at which point I'll make the ajax version of the top links box be the standard template version.

This won't work on a toplist in the wrapper template at the moment, though if you need that let me know and it won't be too hard to support. It's uncertain whether it works on integrated templates from other scripts, if not then again let me know you need it. It's possible some advanced toplist options may not be compatible, if so let me know so I can look into it.