Code Authors

Posted: Thu Apr 24, 2008 10:09 pm

As some of you might know, I have a dev site I'm constantly taking apart and re-building at www.johnhaywood.com
At the moment I'm experimenting with the news article links on the home page.
Why?
Well because I can!
I'm just tired of the crappy 'Readmore' links and don't really see the need to have two links with different anchor text (ReadMore and Comments) going to the same place right next to each other.
You might also note that the link is built to take into account user preferences for how the user wants the comment displaying - personally I do not know anyone that even bothers with that so I may strip it out completely as it seems such a waste of resources doing the ton of extra sql queries for it.
It would also help cleaning up the link!!
I think a link ending in

Code:

sid=3

is much more preferably to

Code:

sid=3&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0

I have replaced the text links with some home made icons and used some nifty code to overlay the number of reads and number of comments into the image itself and make some better icons for the article 'score'.

All I have left to do is get rid of the last piece of remaining text which isn't actually in the news module index file (it's stuffed into themeindex or themearticle of all places <sigh>) and put some social bookmarking icons in.

Posted: Sun Apr 27, 2008 9:15 am

I have moved my code which I have been testing onto this site as you can see.
One last thing that has been bugging me is the 'rate this article' function. It is not accessible from the home page articles so you have to click either Readmore (if the article has extended text) or Comments (if it has no extended text).

If someone writes a brief succinct article that has no extended text, why should a user have to click 'comments' to open the article page just to rate the article? I know it is only one additional click but in this instance, it seems better to me to be able to rate the article directly from the front page.
If/when time allows I'll have to see if I can pass the relevant $op into articles.php from a front page to allow 'rating' of the article from the homepage.
If not I'll just write a new function into News/index.php to cater for this scenario.

Site Admin Joined: Jan 06, 2006 Posts: 99

You know, something I didn't even think to mention before is that the end-user will lose their comment threading choice? I wonder if we need to be thinking of changing that too to be cookie based rather than using this crappy GET string approach *nuke is using today. In fact, although I have not looked at it in years, something tells me it already is storing the threading preference in a cookie... but don't quote me on that. lol.

Posted: Sun Apr 27, 2008 12:13 pm

There's an easy way to find out seeing as the code is disabled in my News module Wink

I suppose as a 'user' it is nice to have the choice of presentation but it sure as heck mucks up the Readmore or Comments url by using the current link building method. Even with re-writing enabled, it is still, how can I put it, not optimal?

Obviously the changes I'm making here are because I want/need them for this site and not specifically for RN BUT, at the very least, now I have delved a little into that whole mess of code, I'm wondering if at the very least there shouldn't be an is_user around that whole block of code.

There is no point doing the sql work, the whole ifelse loops, sanitisation and initialisation for an anonymous user because they will only get the 'default' display of data anyway.

I guess it might be permissible to muck the url up with the

Code:

&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0

for a user but at the very least, now I think about it, that should not be visible to anonymous.

Posted: Sun Apr 27, 2008 12:20 pm

D'ya think it might be worth me copying this rant to Mantis lol?

Site Admin Joined: Jan 06, 2006 Posts: 99

Up to you sir, if you feel strongly enough about the issue to think we should address it in RN. I had no prior disposition either way. Was just interested in the train of thought going on here and with what you have been up to. Smile

Posted: Sun Apr 27, 2008 3:06 pm

It doesn't appear to be handled by cookies which is a shame, however I have posted in the RN restricted forum Wink

Posted: Sun May 04, 2008 2:43 pm

Just in case anyone wants them, my images are available on request.

Posted: Wed May 14, 2008 3:08 pm

As per a post on Ravens site. for those that want to 'play' but don't want to use images.
I think replacing the _READMORE language constant with $title would be a nice touch.
It certainly seems like it would be a better anchor link txt to use the news item title rather than 'readmore' but depending on the theme, the length of the title might throw the design out.