tabulas.com

• Disable "colors" section of CP until i can standardize template variables
• Only show "friends of" for profile's owner
• Update analytics HTML (and make it consistent with the two templates)
• User verification: clicking link auto-logins (but only allows this to happen once) and redirects you to the profile page.
  
• When suspending users, send an email to them.
• Remove ICQ as a field in profile (who uses this, still?!)
  
• When viewing the directory, show "all users" when you have less than five friends (friends filter makes it look like there's no activity on Tabulas!)
  
• Add in script to start tracking statistics of activity
• Initial pass at "official" default Tabulas themes submittal process
• Fix issue with usericons where if you upload a new icon as a default icon, it didn't propagate properly
• Only pass comments to TypePad's filter when user is not logged in
• Add support for themes.tabulas.net, which will store static files for Tabulas templates

toomuchtabulas

A couple of weeks ago, I resolved to make all Tabulas default templates 1024x768 friendly (instead of being limited to the strangling 800x600 resolutions). The first set of templates that were updated were my favorites - the "Standard" templates. I've also updated the "Artemis" templates to take full advantage of 1024 resolutions. While doing that, I also cleaned up some things that were bothering me about that template -  namely, I've added the "About Me" section, made entry titles clickable, and added the metadata for entries. I'll be continuing to update all the default templates to be 1024x friendly.

The point of this exercise is two-fold: to start supporting the new image size, "medium-large" for entries. The old thumbnails are just too tiny, and with most people having broadband access, it makes no sense to use the small image sizes. Secondly, going through the templating execises is giving me an idea of how to add support for "shared" templates, so it's easier for the Tabulas community to add and share custom templates.

In anticipation of the new front-end gallery UI, I've removed the "# of images per row" option from the back-end (Yay for code clean-up!).

I also cleaned up the user directories today; there is more information about the user (entries / images / friend counts); I've also made the user directory a default view for the "Community" tab. The user directory will become more of a focal point - I want to consolidate the "friends" view into the user directory view at some point.

The control panel also got a refresh as I updated the top-nav elements - I remade those images and tightened up the space of the tabs.

What am I thinking for the future? A couple of things:

• Template sharing - allow Tabulas users to more easily share templates
• New gallery front-end - More Flickr-like in its display of albums/images
• Consolidation of friends + user directory view
• Communities - I still haven't hashed out how these will work or look, but it's the next "big" thing I want to tackle for Tabulas. 

P.S. - Thanks to Ree for the awesome usericon!

A lot of stuff went in today... epic hacking day!

• Been getting hit with a lot of spam lately - added a new table "recentcomments", which stores a snapshot of recent comments - this'll help block spammers who are using the same IP addresses who've bypassed the TypePad spam filter and are hitting multiple sites. An initial few will get through, but the filter should catch them after that. I'll have to see how it works in practice. 
  • Added a new administrative CP function - ban spam IP address. Instead of hardcoding the spam IPs into the code, it's now stored in database. Every night, it's written to a PHP file so the array can be read quicker.
    
  • When a spammer's IP is detected, the hit log archives are also cleaned up.
    
• Category deletions are a bit cleaner now in the way they move entries. 
• Usericon deletions are cleaner - they will explicitly unassign iconid values on deletion.
  
• Default usericions are now stored as a part of the user table as well as in the usericon table - this optimizes a bunch of queries.
  
• Usernames can now be 32 characters long (fixes issues where the un-maxlengthed "change username" screen caused usernames to seem "lost", when they were simply truncated.
  
• Updated the UI of the "Content pages" in the control panel to include the privacy level
• Comments from guests which do not contain URLs are not linked.
  
• Default gravatar image has been replaced with a blank image (looks less obnoxious).
  
• Updated control panel's secondary nav to no longer use images, but text. (For future localization, as well as cutting out ~25K of CSS and ~40K of images)
• Moved the "Gallery" tab under "Extras". (Part of a future plan to bring more attention to the friends network, rather than the content)
• Added interests - searchable keywords to help bring users together.
  
• Added user directory - find users by gender, location, interests, and activity. The "friends" view will be collapsed into this view in the near future (default view of directory is already your friends' activities).
  
• Adding more places in code which updates the user's "last updated" status.
  
• Added "Delete Entry" into both under "Entry Tools" when viewing a single entry, as well as when you're editing a single entry.
  

From your friends page, you can now choose which of your friends can see your friends-only entries. Kind of an experimental feature, really.

The UI for the friends is a bit wonky (remember to scroll down to save your changes) - I'll clean that up shortly.

A few small updates:

• Added a new page to all Tabulas accounts: "Popular entries" These are the 15 most commented-on journal entries for any given user. It's accessible from /journal/popular/
• Added support for UEB - with the FF plugin, you'll get an icon on any post you're reading that you can edit
• Added prev/next support for any page with entry pagination, as well as the monthly archive views (useful with the link widget for quickly navigating entries)