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.
Not too long ago, I added a twitter field for members to specify their twitter account. Given that WSN has had the facility to display twitter feeds for a long time (scripts.webmastersite.net/...tes/twitter-feeds-634.html) I decided today to make use of it by putting a twitter feed onto the view profile page. Surprisingly, using the dynamic {MEMBERTWITTER} in the feed construct opener worked fine. I did discover that feeds were always displaying 5 items regardless of how many were requested, fixed that.
On the submit and edit listing pages, WSN has javascript that automatically adds http:// to the start of the URL if someone forgets to type a scheme. Submit/edit also has backend logic that attempts to fix URL inputs. Despite this, I came across a client site with all sorts of junk data in that field. Some of it may be very old data from before WSN automatically prepended the scheme. Some of it probably comes from old imported data. To address these scenarios, I've made the 10.4.4 Beta 3 and later upgrades seek out and fix botched listing urls.
10.4.2 brings some improvements to WSN's link checkers, especially the dead link checker. It now records and displays the time a listing was last found to be down, along with the number of times it has been dead. Should make it easier for you to see whether a link is definitely beyond hope or just experiencing some temporary downtime. There's a new 're-check' option so you can re-check selected links (re-check works for dead, reciprocal and content checks alike). Also fixed some errors that were displaying when checking a site that has a bad SSL certificate.
I decided to start the 10.4 series today. Continuing the recent development strategy, 10.4.0 is identical to 10.3.36 and they will begin to diverge with 10.4.1. This means we can finally stablize 10.3 so that no new bugs are introduced to it from now on. If you've been running 10.3 with automatic updates turned off, this would be a good time to turn the updates on as they're safer now. If you've been running 10.2 or earier, this is the time to upgrade.
Time to revisit the color-coded map pins option. First, I thought it'd be a good idea to make google maps use the same marker image as Open Street Map. That way you can customize it (marker.png in your theme images), and more importantly it removes the dependance on google's long-depreciated charts API which was being used to generate the google maps pin images dynamically before -- that API could go dark any day. The tricky part was to maintain support for the colored map pins option without having to create 10 new images for different colored pins which would be a pain for you to customize.
Today's release has two major sets of new features. First, there's a suite of page speed tools on a new page speed settings page. Most of these tools were discussed in the last blog entry. I've been able to boost one of my WSN installations a 97/100 speed ranking on the google mobile site speed test with these page speed tools, with no significant adverse effects. Of course, they make it a pain to edit things so they ship off by default and should only be enabled when your site goes live and you're no longer changing it regularly. There's also a new file browser tool.
WSN has some page speed tools -- html minification, javascript minification, css minification -- but these tools are limited. While they combine many files into one, they don't combine every possible css/js file into one. While they handle most of the styles/scripts on most pages, they don't automatically handle every obscure page. And if you've added custom scripts/styles to your website that you found around the internet or wrote yourself, WSN doesn't make any attempt to combine or compress those.
A month or so ago, I made a change to how the children of categories with special rewrite URLs set work. Previously, the children didn't take into account their parent's special URL -- since then, the children have automatically used their parent's special URL in calculating their ancestry path part of the URL. For example, if a category named 'One, Two' has the special URL https://site.com/onetwo/ then a child URL is now https://site.com/onetwo/child/ whereas previously it would've becoming a numeric category URL due to the special character (comma) in the parent category name.
10.3.31 contains a few more speed improvements, less drastic. It also fixes three little bugs: When using the horizontal admin menu with a non-bootstrap front end theme, the menus weren't working because it wasn't including the bootstrap javascript. Important fix since it left people unable to navigate their admin after they install a new theme or change menu type in certain ways. In the guided start, the settings page suddenly shrunk to a smaller size halfway down. Fixed the missing closing tag that was causing that.