Nekkid Ninjas

Follow up:

List view in Khepri

List view on NinjaBoard 0.5.3

Although these screenshots show apparent visually differences, the real differences are under the hood.

Version 1.0 is much speedier, responsive and lightweight. Most of those enhancements are an direct result from using the Nooku Framework(referred to as Koowa for the rest of the post).

I'll outline a few of those technical enhancements in detail below, if you're just here for the preview screenshots, click here to skip to the other screenshots.

Tech Details

Parameters

We're no longer storing your parameters in an INI format in multiple fields. Example below is how the list parameters usually looks like when stored in the database:

We're now storing them in one single field, as an JSON encoded object.

This allow us to do numerous things, like namespacing, multi level nesting, and more. So we could name parameters as "hours" instead of prefixed as "latest_post_hours". Encoding to JSON are also much faster than INI. And allow line breaks, something INI formatted parameters don't, as that's how the parameters are separated from each other.

The real fun is of course when you add AJAX into the mix. As we can do a lot of javascript magic with the parameter values without parsing them with PHP first.

Time Zones, Time Formats and Terms, vanished?

You'll notice that the terms screen is now gone, and in its place you got a handy article selector that lets you pick an content item from com_content as your "Terms of Agreement" text. Since the stand-alone terms NinjaBoard 0.5.3 got didn't do anything beyond what's possible by just fetching a standard article, we couldn't find a reason to keep it.

During the development on 1.0, we made many great improvements to Time Formats and Time Zones. But that didn't stop us from removing it entirely. We feel there's no benefits that outweigh the problems and confusions from having a different time zone offset on your board from Joomlas.

Time Formatting is also something we felt was out of its place in the main board settings, as this is usually handled by the template.

NinjaBoard 0.5.3 allow you to set Time Format and Time Zones individually on a per user basis too. But we've removed that too. For one it's a tedious task for the user to set a time zone setting in two places. Secondly that only gives more room for error for the users. The Time Format setting is useless too, as it's not really used anywhere. As templates most likely format the time to a specific style.

We're instead integrating with Joomla completely on those features.

We're also no longer doing breadcrumbs internally in the component. On 0.5.3 the breadcrumbs appear in the board header, and doesn't integrate with Joomla at all. Now we do, so you can use mod_breadcrumbs to your heart's content. That's the reason why the breadcrumbs settings are removed from the settings parameters.

As we progress on the frontend until launch, we'll most likely drop more parameters and make more functionality work automatically if possible. Or moved to a more sensible location. View settings that affect the template should be done in the template edit screen. "View Footer Settings" don't make sense if the chosen template don't have a footer at all.

Other settings, like Guest Posting, should be done in the Forum and Topic settigns for example.

That's it for the tech talk for this post, we'll round it off nicely with some additional screenshots

More Screenshots

Edit screen in AdminPraise Lite

Edit screen in Khepri

Edit screen on NinjaBoard 0.5.3

That's it for Day 10, thank you for reading!