Hello everybody!

We've come a long way since our first public release in the summer of 2009, through the landmark release of iWiccle 1.20 (which could really have been called Wiccle Web Builder as we originally saw it with a couple of more modules thrown in), and are finally at a point where we've hammered out the greater part of what a technology start-up company with limited resources needs to hammer out to get on their feet and into serious business.

In the course of tomorrow (after a good night's rest), I will bite deep into the final stretch of the WWB 1.0 release episode, which should be done and dealt with without much headaches as our framework and platform are solid and stable, and 98% of the issues that have held it back have been hammered out in the course of the 1.20/1.21 release, user reports, in-house testing, and the first batch of our showcase sites (that have also helped us stabilize our finances and keep us in full time --- and I mean literally full time --- action with all things Wiccle).

As you will have seen by now, most of the issues that have surfaced in the last months have involved on average ten to twenty minutes of time and one or two silly lines of code. Our framework is at a point where most module development is really not much more than a dozen more silly lines of code; I could type in a page or two of instructions for creating a "Wikipedia" module, an "Answers" module, a "Portfolio" module and so by just cloning one of our existing modules giving it a bit of a twist; and anyone with elementary PHP understanding and a pair of eyes could do it themselves if they wanted.

Just to give a heads up on what grade of goods are on the pipeline post WWB 1.0, the "Extreme Enveloping" technology and the associated module builder that's a natural extension of the module enveloping we do provides ((5x5)x25)x25) = 15625 possible basic hybrid modules by combining different layers of existing modules in different combinations, and when you go to module cloning and spin it a bit more and have a bit of creative imagination, you get essentially an infinity of potential apps that are waiting just behind the corner.

And with that on the table, while we are quite clear in-house on the final twists we intend to put into the WWB release 1.0, I'd like to hear the users here do a bit of free brainstorming on the stuff you'd like to see go into the first global release of our flagship monster CMS (that is currently powering a good number of local business sites across different markets, and the heart of which has been debugged in and out).

Please post in simple bullet point lists of features you think would be cool, and post as many as you can; chances are some of them are right on the pathway and just need to be picked up as we rally on, and your highlighting them would make them a part of the 1.0 release easily enough. (I have hundreds of notes myself on features that could go in anytime with half an hour to an hour's code tops, jotted down over the last couple of months and set aside for that one last massive crunch that makes it all come together. The core is now where it ought to be.)

The final countdown is in progress from tomorrow morning!

A couple of things I'd like to see added:

• An admin option to 'Reset Counters' (per module if possible) which resets 'views' counts to zero. In building a new site and with all the testing going on, the 'views' counts are quite inaccurate (because of the testing) when the site goes live.
• This one (I suspect) is far more complex and probably belongs in the Feature Requests category, but here goes:  In Page Builder, somewhere among the box building components, it would be nice to have an optional pop-up box in which admin could place a message - advertising something, marketing something or requesting something (or whatever the case may be). When optionally used, the box header would display an icon of some sort which, when hovered over, would display the message (very much like the pop-up header when the menus are hovered over). Here's my simplistic graphics to help me explain:

The icon would display when the message option was selected:

The pop-up message would display when the icon was hovered-over:

(some sort of opacity choice would be a bonus)

Another little 'picky' request:

• In the archives for each module, it would be nice to have an admin option to display or not display emply months. In the course of building a site and again, with all the testing and deleting of posts, archives are created from the time of installation. So, if someone took 6 months to build their site (before they went live), their archives would list (potentially) 6 empty months.

Picky I know, but it's a neatness thing:

PS: I notice that bullet points are automatically replaced by the nifty Wiccle symbol. How is that done?

Updated: A few hours later and I remember wishing that this was an option when building my site:

• On my home page I have Latest Posts, Latest News, Latest Members etc - all centralized on the home page so that my members could see the 'latest' of everything without having to trawl through the entire site looking. It would be nice to be able to create a 'Latest Comments'  box (with sorting if possible). Not sure if this is possible though because Comments seem to be treated differently to posts, news, members etc.

Hi John; thank you for the above, those are all dead simple to do, and almost all of it is already in my own todo notes. Consider them all accepted feature requests.

1. Admin post recount is coming in as it is; it will reset all counters to match the current data in database. It's easy enough to add in a "zero them all" switch, if you think the above doesn't already cover it.

2. I have a set of optional "unit add-ons" coming in as a separate field to the builder, exactly to get diverse icons with functionality there; "print this unit" (gives a separate printable view), drag button, open/collapse button, to top / to other anchor button, etc. This is a great addition to those, and the code for mouseover tooltips is already there in our eStore module and just needs to be copied on.

3. Sure thing, been meaning to add that in for a small forever as the empty months bug me too. This feature has been untouched since release 1.00... so it's about time.

4. Again, this is something that has been bugging me as well, and is one of the things that will go in without a question when I'm in that direction. I just need to integrate comment handling better with the get_elements() abstract dynamic module content handler; which means I need to basically delete some redundant bits of code and add in the appropriate builder extensions, which will reroute comment handling and make it behave as the rest of it. (As it is, comments have been "glued" to their posts, which needn't be the case. This is a good example of something totally unnecessary that needs go out.)

• You get the bullet by changing the CSS for li HTML tag (w3schools reference); for reference, see our wiccle.css stylesheet (search for "li_bullet.png"). If you need more info on this, please start a separate thread.

So let's hear some more suggestions and requests! I will keep haunting this thread until we have 30+ requests on the table... 4 down, 26 to go before an acceptable feedback baseline is reached. I want to make it crystal clear that we can react to customer requests with very short response times wherever required, and we keep our ears and eyes open to every bug and feature request.

2. I have a set of optional "unit add-ons" coming in as a separate field to the builder, exactly to get diverse icons with functionality there; "print this unit" (gives a separate printable view), drag button, open/collapse button, to top / to other anchor button, etc. This is a great addition to those, and the code for mouseover tooltips is already there in our eStore module and just needs to be copied on.

My final request was going to be (what I originally thought was) a big one until I realized that most of it was currently achievable by Module cloning and cross-module content boxes. Some of it though is not currently achievable without developer intervention. As such I don't know if it's possible.

• It would be nice to have a module called 'Site Library' (or 'Store Catalogue' or similar) where the entire site's contents (or any selected parts of it) could be viewed in a very cool graphic format using 'drill-down' and 'pop-up' technologies. The 'Site Library' would display a summary of every other module's content which could be 'drilled in to' using pop-up boxes:

Here's a couple of (very pathetic) graphics to illustrate:

The Site Library tab would display something like:

Each box (or module) could be 'drilled in to' via a pop-up box, like so:

and so on until the lowest level (the actual post) was reached, at which point the user would be presented with the post page.

Much of the above is already achievable. The pop-up boxes are not (without developer intervention). I don't know the capabilities of AJAX technology so I don't know if the idea has any merit. The idea is simply about enhancing the user experience.

If our local customers illustrated their ideas with graphics like this, I would be in heaven. You should start your posts with a warning saying "Explicit Content"!

The module statistics thing is obviously something that's still missing and that should be there. Accepted feature request for module statistics.

As step one towards the library, I will add in a Modules dynamic content unit that will fetch the module summary stats, and you can then drop them in individually at places (in-module or cross-module) or in one place as a summary page. That's a simple enough add-on, two dozen lines of code + HTML, give or take. (Or did you figure out a way to do pull out complete module stats out-of-the-box already? )

We actually already have a feature for loading other pages and units into AJAX popup windows — for example here (see menus and what's on the "drink" page). I just haven't tested it for public release yet. By creating off-page units and loading them in, in principle you could create all sorts of click-and-pop trails within a page; let's see what we come up with! No confirmation on the drilling-in deal for 1.0 as an out-of-the-box feature just yet (as it's a little bit more experimentation and we want to have WWB out the door very soon), but I like the idea a lot, and it will be looked into.

I have actually in plans an entire site tree hierarchy setup, both for dynamic and static pages (static pages will also get a tree-structure with sub-pages and categories). I don't know if that'll make it to the 1.0 release either, but it's not far into the future in any case, as we will be needing it for our internal dev work soon enough.