Nearly December Update

[Arantor]

It's nearly December and that means nearly Christmas and a host of our celebrations and shopping and partying, so before everyone gets too festive and excited - and is still dealing with atrocious November weather - I thought I'd cheer everyone up just a little.

Despite there being some interesting personal challenges going on behind the scenes, it's been a pretty busy time for us lately, and also to those who have reviewed what we're doing on Github and suggested things. We're not ogres (well, I maybe am) and if you got a suggestion, especially if they're ready to go with code, we'd love to see them.

But that's not what you're here for. You're here to see what awesomeness we have up our sleeves. It's all on Github, you can always check it out but while we're still in this heady melange of excitement phase, things may still be broken or buggy. Whoever controls the spice, controls the universe. That's kind of ironic then given my surname

Anyway.

* The first version of likes made it into the core for definite. It's still a WIP, as there are questions about it that we haven't solved yet - what permissions it should have being the biggest - and AJAX liking isn't handled yet but it will be.

* In the admin panel when you save things, there should be a nice message at the top telling you that things got saved now.

* Themes now have to state what version of SMF they're from. No more will you be able to accidentally upload a theme from previous versions that won't properly.

* The 'your forum is in maintenance mode' warning is now much more prominent so you'll know if you are or not.

* Random oddities in the theme got fixed, including a random multi-year-old bug in the admin panel as well as consistency and thematic improvements in some of the information panels.

* Guests were somehow able to be given permissions that didn't really work for guests.

* Admin/moderation logs no longer enforce the 'you can't delete anything in the last 24 hours' restriction. However, they do now have a warning whereby if you empty the log, it will leave a message saying that the log was emptied.

* Various of the admin help bits and bobs got better wording.

* On top of the admin area dropdown menus having icons, the profile and moderation areas now do the same.

* Reattributing posts to users also fixes reported posts.

* Sticky topics are no longer something you can enable or disable; they're always enabled (because I have yet to see a forum that didn't use them)

* The mail queue had a couple of minor bugs where 'private' emails could be leaked under very very specific circumstances, and would not always continue properly, which has now been fixed.

* The whole 'allow viewable email addresses' thing went goodbye; emails are naturally hidden as they should be.

* The package manager no longer has the 'latest packages from simplemachines.org' section, it didn't really actually help anyone, and was often a bit wrong in what it told you.

* When pressing the 'mark everything as read' button, you're now prompted before it does anything.

* A user viewing their own profile is no longer permission controlled, there's really no good reason for it to be - they're always able to see their own profile.

* Swanky new dropdown menu for profile and PMs. See attached pictures for more. Because we added these swanky menus, the profile and PMs menus are no longer in the main menu - they don't really need to be, either. So the menu is now more compact and more focused on the site (with the 'me stuff' out of the way at the top of the page)

* PM labelling got a major, major overhaul. There were a number of very serious holes in the original implementation of the way labels worked, namely all kinds of hidden limits, all kinds of weird performance issues and it got rewritten.

* When looking at the list of boards in the admin panel, there's now an icon next to redirect boards to let you know they're redirect boards.

* It's now possible for users to say why they're editing a post.

* Revamped icons for the front page board index. Additionally, by default guests now see the 'new posts' icon instead of the 'no new posts' icon. Might just encourage a few people to register if they think there's something exciting going on.

* The 'Loading...' banner at the top of the page when something is loading no longer has the 'close' icon on it. It didn't really work, certainly didn't do what people were expecting and there isn't a particularly good way *to* do that, so it went.

* Packages will now report (and sort by) the time when they were installed.

* The menu panes used to have this interesting and quirky misalignment of corners; you'd have one very noticeable rounded corner, one square corner and two slightly rounded corners. They're now all consistent.

* Improved handling for ImageMagick for some image handling.

* Child boards are now renamed sub-boards.

* It's now possible to limit where a user can move topics to. Now it's possible to let them move anywhere as they currently can, or you can limit moderators to moving topics only to where they could start topics themselves. (Of course, admins are not limited)

* Spell check should now support enchant (as pspell is being phased out by PHP)

* eAccelerator and Turck MMcache are no longer supported, they don't do what we need any more.

* Categories can now have descriptions attached. See attached. (This also shows off the new board icons by Gary while we're at it)


And this is just 3 weeks. We have plenty more to do yet. It's gonna be spectacular.

As ever, those who are trying it out, please do report issues on Github rather than here.

[Chainy]

Wow, that's a big list! Looks like you're making great progress. Thank you for the detailed and very interesting report on how things are going, Arantor.

[vbgamer45]

Awesome work. These updates are great.

[iMiKK]

Awesome work, Arantor.
Thank you for updates.

[mashby]

Now I know where all of the rum went. Rum well spent. 2014 will be a great year for SMF. Thanks for the updates!

[live627]

Rum? I thought you were into beer.

[Arantor]

I'll happily drink beer, but I enjoy rum more

[CountryLady]

Awesome 

Thanks for letting us in on all these yummy details.
even more for getting these tweaks, changes & improvements accomplished.


...Waiter, please bring Mr Arantor another of whatever rum beverage he would like.

[lurkalot]

As ever, those who are trying it out, please do report issues on Github rather than here.

Just reported a problem. Though not sure if I posted in the right place, never used git before. 

[margarett]

Another fine update, thank you Developers

I'll happily drink beer, but I enjoy rum more

I would post the link and the image again, but I think you already know it by now

[Burke ♞ Knight]

Great job Dev team!

[Shambles]

Meh, not bad for 3 weeks work.

Did you really need to sleep, though? Think of all that lost productivity

[kat]

mmmm.... bits and bobs...

[Arantor]

Just reported a problem. Though not sure if I posted in the right place, never used git before. 

You did it just great and now the installer should be fixed

[Kindred]

Pyrat rum is my favorite!


Excellent job, Arantor and others!

[Chalky]

Absolutely brilliant!!  Nice one, dev team 

[Don Jajo]

OMG! :O

Can't wait!

Nice one Dev team!

[Irisado]

Great work by everyone involved.

Thanks for the updates.  Everything is looking really good.

[Colin]

Cheers.

[Antes]

Arantor
Rocked
And
Nocked
To
Our
Realm

and yes i ate the K