For the past decade plus, WSN has made use of google pagerank to give you and your visitors a quick indication of how popular the domain name a link comes from is. Unfortunately, google is no longer making pagerank accessible to the public in any way. Changes in WSN are thus necessary. As a replacement for pagerank, I've decided to use alexa's site ranking. Alexa provides an esimtate of where a site lies on a list of the most popular websites, where 1 is the most popular and unpopular sites number in the millions.
Looking to update to PHP 7 to take advantage of improved speed and memory management? WSN 9.2.44 Beta 4 introduces preliminary compatibility with PHP 7. Be advised that PHP 7-specific bugs are likely to be popping up for a while, so it's probably best to keep stable production sites on PHP 5 for now.
A new theme, 'downloads', is now available for all of the WSN scripts. To install it, go to Admin Panel -> Themes -> Add Themes and find it in the list. It was initially made for WSN Software Directory but is adapted for the others. Best used with the 'left side category menu' switch turned on. Demos: WSN Links, WSN Gallery, WSN KB, WSN Forum, WSN Classifieds, WSN Software Directory, WSN Directory
Sometimes, especially in WSN Gallery, you may want to overlay text on top of an image. Today while working on a custom theme I applied this simple CSS to overlay the image titles over the top of the image thumbnails (in category and search results) and the tool links over the bottom of the thumbnails: .gallerylink .linkbitinfo .linktitle, .gallerylink .linktools { text-shadow: -1px -1px 0 #FFFFFF, 1px -1px 0 #FFFFFF, -1px 1px 0 #FFFFFF, 1px 1px 0 #FFFFFF; } .gallerylink .linkbitinfo { position: relative; top: 25px; } .gallerylink .linktools { position: relative; top: -45px;
The newest feature this week in the 9.2.41 beta releases is draggable resorting of attachments. When ordering your file uploads on submitting or editing a listing, you no longer need to set sort order numbers manually -- just drag a file's row to above or below other rows and the sort order numbers will automatically update accordingly. There's a small new column with an icon to help indicate draggability. This uses jquery UI's sortable under the hood. If you've customized your file uploader template, you'll need to update it to get this feature.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.