News
The Auranos Web Application is in beta. This means that it is a fully functional web site which is undergoing improvements. The latest changes are documented here and features to be added in short and medium term are related below the most recent changes. Older changes can be seen in the sections below these.
Latest Changes
Smileys!
Added code to transform some grammatical mark combinations into smileys. Now you can type :) and it shows up as 🙁. So far only a small limited set of smileys is supported happy, sad, open mouth, heart and broken heart. The full functionality will be "coming later".
Social Login Reintegration
Social Logins have been re-integrated. Currently only facebook is supported and due to the issues of running external scripts this is a feature I'm spending far more time on than I should be since I'm not keen on having much to do with facebook but its an eponymous thing that seems supported in alot of the most important sites so as a minimum the full web application has to support it somehow. I've put in a switch for it so even though it's not a regular module like chat or social share, it can be switched off at any time.
Room Selection
Improved the chatroom so that now there are a variety of chatrooms for users to choose from, each with their own set of read and write permissions. Meaning you can have rooms which can be seen by a level of membership but only writable by members of a different level. It allows for a room that can be seen by the public but only written to by members, rooms which can only be seen and written to by members and rooms which are only available to paid members or members who are part of the website team.
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More to be added ... (See the next section).
Coming Soon
Profile Editing
This almost essential feature will initially allow users to change their username and password and any variables that add on modules may allow them to set (e.g. default chat colour) but this will be the interface for providing additional details like email address, billing address for pre-filling paywall credit card forms and the button which starts the process of buying or renewing a subscription once these features are implemented.
Admin Screen
Members with a high enough privelege level have access to a page which allows them to do website administration tasks according to their privelege level. The facebook reintegration was hampered somewhat by the need to delete newly created test users across several tables so a simple joint table where you click a button over a single user to perform whatever tasks need to be done for a specific user seems to be in order to save having to go across several tables to access the same user recorded in different places.
Coming Later
Chat Ban
Members with a high enough privelege can block chat users from a particular chat room or from all of them.
Chat Block / Highlight
Members can hide or highlight comments from specific members they choose to hide or highlight.
Smileys revisited
Smileys now work but only a very limited subset of smileys. Later there will be a full set together with a listing of them in the help page.
Coming at some indeterminate point in the future
Immediate Messages
Unsure whether to implement this as a feature specific to the chat rooms or as a general site feature. Perhaps do both or just do the chat version temporarily.
Immediate messages display immediately whenever a user types to a specific user as opposed to the room itself. It is akin to the facebook chat interface when the chat tabs have been turned on. Obviously there has to be some means to manage the IM's so that a user doesnt get flooded in a way that makes their use of the site impossible in certain cirumstances.
Text Editor
At the moment pages are being created using the operating systems text editor which needs to be uploaded to the site by ftp/cpanel together with any content like images which need to be uploaded to the uploads directory and have unique file names there which are referenced by the page which is written offline. A proper text editor fully functioning will allow the user to drag images onto a page they are editing and do all the work for them so its wysiwyg to the point the user can just get creative and not worry about any of the technosophistiplexity involved in having their creations appear when they click the post button.Comments
Allow users create and view comments pated below articles which are published.Paypal Payments
A means for users to upgrade permissions to view or take part in premium content by paying a small subscription fee for the week.Twitter and Instagram OAuth Login Integration
At the current time OAuth-client is integrated in the form of login using facebook. Its taken two days to fulfil this and thats not including the time spent doing the original integration and noticing the inherent flaw of allowing the possibility of XSS attacks from the OAuth server. I dont want to spend too much time on external authentication as directly logging in with the site is preferred but since it might attract more interaction I'm hoping to include this feature for OAuths which are generic rather than professional or specialised. I'm not sure if what I've dont already will make Oauths for other vendors easier or whether their Oauth processes will mean I have to rewrite the Oauth generally meaning I have to rewrite the login ... again ... which is something I had so "completed" many moons ago. (Ive still to finish off the fb integration in the form of the actual sandboxing of the iframe I allow it to run on and Ive no idea how Im going to tell the host window that I'm done. This is way too much time catering for corporate whoredom!!!
- ...and all other great ideas as they arise!