A quick round up of the changes in 10.4.29: Fixed some sports in WSN Forum where it was saying 'links' instead of 'topics'. Fixed an error message on adding an event when using the alertify switch. The error appeared in the alertify modal because there was a call to updateattachments() which wasn't applicable for events since events don't have attachments. Someone encountered a problem where an email notification was missing a line break, despite the line break being in the corresponding language item.
Since 10.4.27, WSN has three configuration modes. You start off in standard mode. If there are certain settings you want to change every time you take your site offline for development or debugging, you can use development mode for that. If there are certain settings you want to change when you're ready to put the site into its' mature long term ideal state, you can use production mode for that. The effects of development or production mode are defined by you, at Admin -> Settings -> Development Mode and Admin -> Settings -> Production Mode.
At long last, the new Flattern theme is available for all WSN scripts except Classifieds and Software Directory (will get to them later). There've been a lot of WSN changes involved in supporting this theme. As a bootstrap 4 theme, most of the work centered on bootstrap 4 support. It was a long slog due to the many differences between the versions, but at this point WSN can pretty seemlessly switch between bootstrap 3 and 4. There's a toggle for it on the theme settings page and also a way to specify inside the stylesheet. The templates have classes for both versions specified.
Sometimes you may want something that behaves more like a single page app instead of a website. For that, today I've introduced a new tweak 'ajaxsite'. What this does is it transforms all internal links into javascript calls. The javascript immediately replaces the whole middle section of the page with a loading indicator graphic, then it loads the requested URL with &usewrapper=no tacked on to suppress the wrapper, and places that inside the area.
One of the legacy annoyances with WSN's bootstrap themes has been the presence of jQuery UI elements. I built certain things in jQuery UI before I made the decision to support bootstrap, and it had the advantage of working with legacy themes as well as with bootstrap themes. But with bootstrap themes, it meant you had to deal with elements that didn't obey your theme, and you had to pick a jqueryui theme that came as close as possible to your color scheme. And even if the colors match, the style of jquery ui is incongruous with bootstrap.
Today's latest 10.4.16 Beta 5 release addresses one of the biggest annoyances in my development workflow: locating templates that contain a certain thing. Maybe you want to find where a certain CSS class was used, where a template variable is used, or just where certain text you see comes from on an english-only site. Now you can. At Admin -> Themes -> Manage Templates, use the 'Filter to templates containing' box. All templates not containing the text you enter will be hidden when you click Filter (refreshless, so if you're in the middle of editing a template you won't lose anything).
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.
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, This business is open right now!. 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.
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.
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.