What Am I Working On?

What Am I Working On?

Been awhile so feels like it's time for a update. The rewrite is going very well. So far performance has been improved 300% (seams insane, but true!). The performance improvements can be felt throughout CB Activity. Interactions are faster, load times are faster, less server resources are used and more. Likes simplification is almost complete which has made using Likes instant instead of having a much longer HTTP request delay.

Currently my plan is in 3 weeks to hopefully have CB Activity 6.0.0 Beta 1 ready. This time we'll be starting with a Beta release to guarantee feedback and make further improvements where needed. Note the 3 weeks is just a guesstimate. It could take more or less time and will post another update in 3 weeks to see where things stand. This is a SIGNIFICANT rewrite. It prepares CB Activity for becoming a standalone Joomla extension and modernizes its entire codebase so it is substantial and needs to be done right.

Unfortunately I'm very far behind. Development was stopped for over a week to address bugs in other products. CB Redirect Bot for example needed a 100% rewrite to be J4 compatible as was causing fatal errors. CB Replacer Bot also needs to be rewritten and we've a few other serious migrations to handle for old Joomla repeatable fields into subforms.

With that said there has been some progress. The new Likes modal window is nearly 100% complete. It features filtering functionality, infinite scroll, and more. Below is a nice preview of what's to come.

Just another progress update. Being 100% transparent I am likely months behind at this point. Development has stopped multiple times to fix issues in CB and other plugins. However progress is still being made. Below is a progress update of the redesigned activity display.



This is still subject to change and is absolutely not done yet, but you'll notice the new design becoming a bit more familiar.

The new emoji selector is almost entirely complete. It comes with all 13.1 standardized unicode emoji. All are categorized for easy navigation. It includes local storage history of the most recent 5 emoji so you can quickly add your most favorite emoji to your posts. Below is a comparison of the old selector to the new.

OLD	NEW

The old emoji behavior with database stored emoji will be transformed into a new Sticker usage. The Sticker feature will allow you to create custom emoji, gifs, images, etc.. for users to quickly insert. So that great feature is not going away, but being improved further as well!

Ok, Likes display behavior has been drastically improved. Comment footer actions has been redone. Comment likes display has been redone. Comments can now detect if it's a reaction. A reaction is an emoji, sticker, or gif. When it detects it's a reaction it suppresses the background display and enlarges the text to 300%. This allows large emoji reactions. Check it out below!



The like buttons and links will also respond to the type of like you've performed. They also will change their color based off that. This means Like Types configuration has gotten a lot more robust to allow for configuring a types primary color which is used to adjust the text color.

You'll also notice the timestamp behavior for comments now uses a shorter display.

Also forgot to mention almost all the margin spacing between elements has been and is being removed. They are all being converted to flex or grid CSS styles. This allows the usage of the "gap" CSS rule to easily customize the spacing, direction, and order of elements. One example is comments direction in activity is reversed. The default order for comments to top down, but with 1 simple CSS rule it's reversed to fit activity discussion flow.