What Am I Working On?

Been awhile! Things are still moving along. The vast majority of the core code rewrite is now complete.

Nearly all of CB GroupJive activity and notification handling is now in the core. Once that's done CB Gallery will be moved to core as well as privacy control integration with CB Privacy moved to core.

Once that's complete an official Alpha 1 will be release. Alpha 1 will contain no migration code and will block upgrades of existing installs. Beta 1 will have migration code, but should not be used for production. If that goes well we can move into RC 1 or into a stable release. Still got a lot of coding ahead of me, but things are looking good.

In addition to this custom activity has never been easier. There's a new "custom" folder in the "activity" template folder that will easily let you add custom activity display for any activity you want. You can also override the core activity from there as well. The same applies for notifications.

Also performance has yet again been improved even further with more optimal prefetching queries. The number of queries has been reduced by roughly 30%. The prefetching queries have all been further optimized using more accurate indexes further improving their performance as well. The database has been padded to over 10 MILLION activity entries and is running smoothly.

Another quick update. A custom WYSIWYG editor is being put together for CB Activity finally. Currently when making a post it's just a textarea input. This will now become a contenteditable div that shows you an exact or close to exact preview of what your post will look like. Example as follows.

From:
 
To:
 

The new live preview for mentions almost complete. A lot of improvements made to the JavaScript to make this possible. Below is how it currently looks. Still subject to some further design improvements. The inserted mentions do have unique CSS so they can be restyled as needed as well.

Autocomplete
 

Selected
 

As you can see you've a full autocomplete built in. This will search site wide for any user for mentioning. This can be customized to mention: all users, connections only, or moderators only (useful for helpdesk like usecases!).

This should be feature complete sometime next week and then the live preview of hashtags can be implemented.

Just another update. I've had to pause a week here and there to work on other plugins, but CB Activity is still progressing. Relational tables for mentions, tags, hashtags, and liked activity are now implemented. These tables are hyper optimized to contain simple pointers. What this means is it's possible to filter a stream down to all posts you were mentioned in, all posts you were tagged in, all posts with a specific hashtag, and all posts you've explicitly liked. This is all done blazing fast against a table with MILLIONS of rows so rest assured it will scale.

In addition to this the mentioned behavior shown above is finalized. Hashtags also now has an autocomplete just like mentions. The contenteditable behavior of the activity post has also been finalized. Other sites and solutions use bulky WYSIWYG editors loading tons and tons of JS, but CB Activity is using a scratch made solution that's light and blazing fast!

The filtering behavior for activity streams has also been finalized. You can setup as many filters as you need, set access for them, and restrict them to stream owner. Filters can filter by asset, by stream id, and by user ids. They can be named whatever you like and you control the default filter (the All filter) for streams.

Still a lot more to do, but our ticket tracker below is looking more and more done!

forge.joomlapolis.com/projects/cb-activity/issues

Stream filters now support excluding. This will let you exclude specific assets, streams, and users from outputting in that filter.

 

I've been hard at work rewriting the Links feature to be more familiar to users. They won't need to use +/- buttons anymore. Simply add a link to the post and it'll detect it. Below is the current progress for link previews.

 

You'll be able to close out the preview if you don't want it in your post and can toggle the image on/off as desired. YouTube and Vimeo support is built in. Automatic detection of image, video, audio, and files (e.g. PDF) is also built in. Standard URLs (e.g. just linking to a non-media URL) is also supported. A generic oEmbed parser is implemented so we can quickly and easily add new URL parsing behavior for any site that supports oEmbed. Several more core domains are also planned (e.g. Twitch) to handle their embeds.