By Paul on Jan 21, 2016 at 8:25 PM

Big release tonight, 9.2.40. It includes 5 fixes:
- Fixed unparsed {BUMPSTODAY} in autobumping field description. This affects you if you have the bumps system on, normally used for classifieds websites that order by submission time.
- Fixed lightbox on validate attachments page. Just cosmetic and only the admins see it, but it makes the process of validating attachments a bit easier and prettier.
- Fixed display of attachments from other members on previewing editing listing. Previously, if you were an administator editing a regular member's listing, the preview frame would not show the images they uploaded. Now all images are shown in the preview.
- Fixed theme packager option to include custom fields. Previously, selecting to include custom fields was causing an error -- now you can use all the options as intended, though in most cases you won't want to.
- Fixed autodeletion of old abandoned file attachments. This was an odd old bug

One change that's halfway between a fix and a feature:
- Ads no longer show in the admin panel. This change arose from the realization that some people are putting ad slots in the redirect template. The redirect template is used after submissions, but it's also used various places in the admin panel like the importers, and javascript junk from those ads can break the automatic redirects that you need for the importers. So I decided that ads shouldn't be visible in the admin panel, which means you can safely place ad slots in the redirect template now.

And three new features:
- Added wsn_makeconfirmdialogajax and wsn_makeconfirmdialog for easier confirmation dialogs. These are just developer tools making it a lot easier to leverage jqueryui, but if you're an advanced user it'll be quite handy -- see last week's blog about making confirmation dialogs for deleting files for an exampel of how to use it.
- Added play/pause for slideshows. Covered this in the last blog.
- Added Dutch language pack. Got Dutch-speaking visitors? Copy /la...

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By Paul on Jan 18, 2016 at 9:06 PM

One of the limitations to WSN's lightbox slideshow feature has been that it only worked manually. Now, as of 9.2.40 Beta 3, I've added a play/pause button. Look to the left of the slide title. Click play and it'll start flipping through the images automatically, then press the pause button (which appears in the location of the play button when play has been pressed) to stop.

Want to change how long it pauses between images? Go to Admin -> Settings -> Files -> Slideshow Pause.

Want to make slideshows autoplay until someone presses pause? Use the new Admin -> Settings -> Files -> Slideshow Autoplay? option.

By Paul on Jan 12, 2016 at 9:55 PM

Sometimes, users act before they think. Those big inviting delete buttons on their file attachments when editing a listing may get clicked without good reason, and then the file is lost. The solution? A confirmation yes/no dialog.

The 9.2.40 Beta 1 release adds a new javascript handler function to help with this, named wsn_makeconfirmdialogajax. It takes two parameters: the first is the name of another javascript function which will be called when the user says 'yes' to the dialog, and the second is the value of a parameter to pass to that function.

You can use this function to make a confirmation dialog for any javascript event. If you'd like to make a confirmation dialog for a simple url redirect event, use the wsn_makeconfirmdialog function instead -- the only parameter you need to pass to that is the destination URL.

For confirming file attachment deletion, we'll just need to go to Admin -> Themes -> Manage Templates -> File Uploader. In that template, replace wsn_deleteattachment({%=file.attachid%}) with wsn_makeconfirmdialogajax('wsn_deleteattachment', '{%=file.attachid%}') and replace wsn_deleteattachment({ATTACHID}) with wsn_makeconfirmdialogajax('wsn_deleteattachment', '{ATTACHID}')

That's all, you're done!

Please note that as of now this solution is only good for English-only websites because the dialog prompt can't be translated without a very awkward workaround. If you need a multilingual solution, please contact WSN support.

By Paul on Jan 07, 2016 at 4:55 PM (Edited Jan 07, 2016 at 5:32 PM)

Here's a little more detail on some of the changes in the 9.2.39 release (besides the hybrid field references discussed in the last blog):

A new listing template variable {LINKLASTUPDATE} was added to all the scripts. It acts like a combination of {LINKDATE} and {LINKLASTEDITDATE}. If the listing has been edited it returns {LINKLASTEDITDATE}, otherwise it returns {LINKDATE} -- so it always gives you the most recent change date and is never blank.

WSN Software Directory has a new option "Require Purchase to Download Software?" at Admin -> Revenue -> Sales Settings. This provides a simple way to run a site where you sell access to software downloads. Purchases via the shopping cart system are assumed to be purchases of the software download rights. The "download" button is hidden normally, and appears only to those members who've purchased that listing. A member can thus easily download all the software they own, and nothing else.

Another change for WSN Software Directory is the padstaticdescription tweak. This tweak is for those of you who want to use PAD files but also want to edit in custom descriptions to replace the PAD file's software description. When this tweak is set, every time the PAD file updates the listing it'll leave the description and summary fields alone (if they're blank, like on a new submission, it'll fill them though).

The final software directory change is to the new listings page, which now includes updated listings (only in WSN SD, not the other scripts). This way fresh versions of software are highlighted instead of only new software. If you prefer only new software you can edit the New Listings template and remove the OR lastedit > {SINCE} from the toplist.

By Paul on Jan 04, 2016 at 8:01 AM

The listing details page may be the most important page on your site, so you probably spend a lot of time customizing it.

The grid-based display of field info on the listing details page in the last few series of WSN makes things simple for you. You can manage everything via the field manager, set the order automatically, and not have to mess with the template at all. But sometimes you want more control to make a unique and beautiful layout. So far, the way to do that has been to do things the old pre-field-manager way by putting the template variables directly in the details template. But then your field manager becomes nearly useless and you have to re-write/copy the field display HTML each time you use it. There must be a better way.

In WSN 9.2.39 I'm adding a new, hybrid approach. Instead of rebuilding all your display HTML for each field to take it out of the table, you can now call the field label and the field output HTML separately anywhere in a template. Just use {LINKFIELDLABEL[fieldname]} and {LINKFIELDOUTPUT[fieldname]}. For example, for the tags field:

<div><b>{LINKFIELDLABEL[tags]}</b></div>
<div>{LINKFIELDOUTPUT[tags]}</div>

This way the field manager remains a useful way to manage the output HTML and the label text, although of course the display orders set in the field manager can't affect your free-floating field references.

These LINKFIELDLABEL/LINKFIELDOUTPUT template variables will return content on the details page even when you have the field manager set to not display the field on the details page, so you can uncheck that display box to take it out of the tabular section if you want to have some of the page remain in the tablular format while moving certain fields out of it.

By Paul on Dec 26, 2015 at 4:06 AM

Today's releases of all 4 supported WSN series include a security update for a potential SQL injection in the RSS feed. The vulnerability may allow access to information the attacker shouldn't be able to see. As far as I can see it doesn't allow data alterations or user privledge escalation or anything like that, but updating is strongly advised.

As you may know, the 8.0 series has been scheduled to be discountinued at the end of the year. I've decided to extend that so 8.0 continues to get security fixes until at least Febuary 15th 2016. I'll provide access to 9.0 to everyone by January 15th to ensure that even those who don't pay upgrade fees have a chance to update their sites before security updates on their old version cease. I'll send an email to those accounts when I update their access.

By Paul on Dec 20, 2015 at 9:21 PM (Edited Dec 20, 2015 at 9:22 PM)

A couple of notable changes in today's 9.2.28 Beta 2 release.

I've added more microdata markup for the reviews w/comments page so that google recognizes each individual review someone writes of a listing on your site. This improves the chances of google showing the review in their results with a link to your site.

At Admin -> Members -> Settings there's now an option to select a password reset method. When password encoding is set to none, the original password is emailed to the member, but that's bad practice. When passwords are safely encoded it's impossible to email the original password to the forgetful member. The normal method has been to autogenerate a new password to send to the person. But this could be bad if someone maliciously resets your password. You could enable security questions to help prevent that, but now there's another way. Select the "send link" password reset method and instead of emailing you a new password it'll email you a link you can click to go to a page which will allow you to set a new password.

By Paul on Dec 10, 2015 at 1:44 PM

One of today's changes for the upcoming WSN 9.2.37 is a set of new template variables that provide easier ways to reference files attached to an image in a specific order (the sort order set on upload/edit). There's now {LINKTHUMBIMAGEX[number]}, {LINKTHUMBURLX[number]}, and the associated boolean {LINKHASFILEX[number]}. You can pair these with the preexisting {LINKCAPTION[number]} and {LINKHASCAPTION[number]}. If you want to show the third image on a listing, and include the caption only if it's present, here's all you have to do now:
<IF {LINKHASFILEX[3]}>
{LINKTHUMBIMAGEX[3]}
<IF {LINKHASCAPTION[3]}><br>Caption: {LINKCAPTION[3]}</IF>
</IF>

To change the thumbnail size away from the default, add width and height parameters... 500 width by 400 height for example:
<IF {LINKHASFILEX[3]}>
{LINKTHUMBIMAGEX[3 <,> 500 <,> 400]}
<IF {LINKHASCAPTION[3]}><br>Caption: {LINKCAPTION[3]}</IF>
</IF>

This can be very useful if you want to position large thumbnails in different places on the details page, with information around them.

By Paul on Nov 21, 2015 at 1:52 AM

WSN has had an "add from web search" option for a while which can be very useful for filling up a directory with websites appropriate to a category. For a business directory, however, it would make things a lot easier if WSN could determine the address and phone number of the business which each search result references.

With the cooperation and forethought of the website owner, the geo.position and icbm meta tags can help. These meta tags allow a web page to specify its' latitude and longitude. As of today's 9.2.31 Beta 2 release, WSN now detects this and also does a reverse geocode to get the address.

Unfortunately, very few websites are currently using geodata in their meta tags. To get a few more addresses, I've used some regular expression page parsing to look for a couple of common USA address formats in pages. Also added USA phone number detection. Detection remains very spotty due to the infinite variety of ways that web pages represent addresses, but it's a start.

By Paul on Nov 17, 2015 at 11:26 PM

Thanks to clipboard.js, I've just added cross-platform copy-to-clipboard functionality to WSN's template editor. This replaces an archaic javascript which had only been able to select the contents without copying in most browsers. Are there any other places where cut/copy to clipboard functionality would be useful?

Another change today was a formatting change to the RSS Feed template to achieve full Atom feed support by default. WSN's rssfeed.php now outputs a feed which is valid both as RSS 2.0 and Atom.

9.2.30 also brings some fixes. These includes a fix to processing template conditionals in non-mime email headers and footers (notably the default email footer with the unsubscribe link now only shows to members, as it should). Also fixed watermarking for images and added an easier AJAXy remove watermark option.