What am I working on?

Details: Written by: krileon; Parent Category: Blog; Category: Kyle; Published: 09 April 2019; Last Updated: 09 April 2019; Hits: 2268

Time for another current progress update on what I'm working on. This time it's a new major release for CB Activity. Lots of great new features with a heavy focus on performance improvements! Check out the details below.

The next release of CB Activity is 5.0.0. With it comes Themes. Themes allow adding a customized CSS and/or Image based background to a users post allowing further expression. See it in action below!

A few defaults will be included, but you'll be able to add as many Themes as you like for your users. You can make them CSS only, image only, or combine image and CSS. Next is a nice usability improvement for emotes. It has always been frustrating for users being expected to know the emote shortcodes, but that will no longer be the case. Now a new emote button can be found at the bottom right of the active text input when making a post. This will let your users quickly and easily insert an emote. Take a look below.

Now we're going to dive into changes more on the code side of things. First things first is sometimes CB Activity can be slow. This is mostly due to poorly optimized queries. I'm going through and padding every CB Activity database table that stores user behavior (e.g. activity, comments, likes, follows) with at minimum 1 MILLION database rows. I'm then optimizing all the queries to be lightning fast when accessing such a massive dataset. What this means is your site will be able to safely grow while still being nice and fast. These optimizations have already been made in part and released as build releases, but even more optimization is coming!

Some other great features planned at things like finally rewriting the template files to be simple to understand HTML like what you may have seen in a few other plugins. A lot of the PHP will be moved out of the template files making it even easier to override and customize CB Activity. The biggest benefit of this is you'll be able to use a different template PER STREAM. The possibilities could be endless!

There are also plans to implement support for Reactions. These are basically animated GIFs that can be inserted into a post. They'll behave similar to Emotes and will have a button next to the new Emotes button shown above. The plan is to use 3rd party giphy service for this since it would be too heavy to maintain such a large library of GIFs and because it'll use a 3rd party service it will be disabled by default.

There's a lot more little fixes and minor adjustments coming to better improve the usability and performance of CB Activity. You can find out what all is coming and current progress on our forge below.

https://forge.joomlapolis.com/projects/cb-activity/issues?query_id=147

Posts in discussion: What am I working on?

krileon replied the topic:

#313117

5 years 4 months ago

This is a progress update topic. These features are not released yet. They'll be available in CB Activity 5.0.0. The template rewrite is taking longer than expected, but is almost complete so CB Activity 5.0.0 should be ready for next week unless there's any further unexpected issues.

BlountyNG replied the topic:

#313101

5 years 4 months ago

How to turn on the use of gif reactions?

krileon replied the topic:

#312850

5 years 5 months ago

The new Action autocomplete feature is now implemented. You can now specify suggestions for users on a per-action basis to autocomplete the action message and emote icon. Check it out below!

This is entirely handled by an easy to use Repeat usage shown at the bottom of the Action edit page. Substitutions and language strings are both supported in the suggestions.

Feeling, Celebrating, Eating, and Drinking all come preloaded with some great suggestions.

krileon replied the topic:

#312804

5 years 5 months ago

I'm back again with another awesome update! Reactions are officially completed. They're fully supported in Activity and Comment posts and powered by Giphy. They're heavily cached client and server side for great performance and to help avoid hitting giphy API rate limits. The default gif selection is from their Trending feed with option to search for something more specific. It also comes with infinite scrolling to load in more gifs (just keep scrolling the dropdown!). Check it out below.

Selection:

Note Giphy attribution is not shown in the above, but is being added. It will show at the bottom of the dropdown selection and always visible while the dropdown is open. This is a requirement to use Giphy in a production environment.

Display:

You can insert as many as you want. Don't worry CB Activity comes prepared from page spam by rolling up a post if it's too long. The insert code for reactions is (giphy:GIPHY_ID) to allow for inline insertion manually if so desired (the dropdown selection will handle inserting at cursor for you).

Up next is some more great improvements. I'm planning to add an auto complete to Actions. This way you can select Action > Celebrating > Birthday instead of having to type it all out. This will be powered by our repeat usage (+/-) allowing you to add as many auto complete suggestions as you like. Following that will be improvements to the Emote feature to allow for multiple replacements. Currently for example if you want the smile emote to replace :smile: :happy: :glad: you can't without having the same emote 3 times. This will be improved to allow providing sub-replacements so 1 emote can replace several different inserts (even text smiley faces if you want). Last but not least will be the template file rewrite to allow for per-stream templates.

krileon replied the topic:

#312543

5 years 5 months ago

Just another update. Everything is still progressing well and you can still follow progression on our forge below.

forge.joomlapolis.com/projects/cb-activity/issues?query_id=147

The new Themes feature has been completely implemented. Themes allow users to give more emphasis to their posts. They're completely customizable with a background image, CSS classes, or both. Several default themes are included.

The Likes and Follows modal has been redesigned to be a little more stylized and include the canvas boxes for users.

Notifications containers will now link to their content (just click anywhere in the container that isn't already a link), have sharper edges, and now have a hover color.

A few new things that aren't seen, but certainly a huge help is MORE performance improvements. All user input database tables have been performance tested and optimized with 1 million rows. That's a lot of data!

Additionally there's a few more features to go. Specifically autocomplete for Actions (e.g. Celebrating > Birthday/Anniversary/Promotion/etc..) to help reduce how much users need to type when selecting one of the available actions and Reactions. Reactions are just animated GIFs. This feature will be powered by Giphy so it will require you to have a developer key (instructions will be provided). Then finally the last major feature will be a complete rewrite of the template files. They will no longer be PHP class and functions, but mostly HTML making them easier to override. More importantly the template rewrite will allow for a per-stream template instead of same template applied only to every stream giving MUCH greater customization.