Sitewide bells n' whistles

[Andrea_R]

Whatcha got? once I'm done fixing up a bunch of little issues (hello missing spell check) and adding the custom header option to half the themes, I'd like a few sitewide stats and who's online deals.

I already have a list of popular themes in use. (Thanks ron! )

i admit I only skimmed the related threads in the other forum, but they seems to be scanty and brief. how hard was it to mod related plugins for this?

[Luke]

Well, aren't you the little poster today.

Sitewide stats (basic) and users online isn't really that tough. It's something that can be stored in a global table. In fact, I've got a users online deal that does work globally. I'm not using it globally at the moment, but it worked when I tried it.


Was the custom header deal fixed? Last I read it had a big hole in it.

And spell checking? Heh, Firefox has it built right in. It's even checking this nice little quick reply box I'm typing this in as we speak.

[Andrea_R]

Gotta do something while waiting for all the tabs to load... 

Yeah, figured it wasn't tough, just hadn't actually, you know, *looked* at it. 

Didn't hear about the big hole in the custom header thing.

Spell check - the RTE comes up with an error when a user tries it. Seems we don't have pspell or aspell on the server, so it tosses an unhelpful (to me) error.

[Luke]

Ah... That's the thing. Gotta build Apache with pspell enabled.

[Andrea_R]

It was built for us when we got it. Ron tired to use yum to get it again, but it spun off into la-la land on us and it was late that night...

[Luke]

Riiiiight.

So when things are good, it's all Andrea. If they go south, it's all Ron. Gotcha.

Seriously though, I'm pretty sure that the pspell mod/library comes with apache, but it isn't enabled by default. Running a quick buildapache should allow for it to be included.

Just make sure you backup your config file, but I don't recall having a problem with it messing with any of the vhosts or additional goodies you may have added into the config file manually.

[Andrea_R]

See, I knew you were smart. Didn't take you long to figure out how things work. 

(just teasing honey... )

[Luke]

Teasing? Heh, he's read your post history all over the place. LOL

[drmike]

I really need to work out a css editor.....

[ron_r]

(just teasing honey... )

That's what you always say. 

I really need to work out a css editor.....

A plugin?

[drmike]

I really need to work out a css editor.....

A plugin?

Doesn't matter really.  I just need to get one done.

[ron_r]

running in a browser?

[quentin]

why don't you just install aspell ? Takes a couple minutes and works like a charm.

Regarding sitewide stuff i have :
- sitewide tags, but not the usual way. They're not built off local categories or a local tags plugin, but they're built off the actual post contents. There's a somewhat elaborate system to determine which words are relevant or not among the most frequent ones. Needs a bit of work at the beginning, then 10 minutes a week maintenance if new popular words came up.
- blogs directory
- i have PMs, friends and more in the works.

I'm not sure what you call sitewide stuff though, because i have who's online, custom stats (based on jpgraph) and a lot more stuff (polls, referals, soon a simpleviewer gallery plugin), but i'd call that local stuff actually.

[Luke]

How do you find jgraph in terms of efficiency? I tried it a bit back a year or so ago, maybe 18 months, and it seemed a little resource intensive for use on the fly.

[quentin]

well i wouldn't use it on a public page, but just on the admin stats page it's ok. Wouldn't be too hard to implement a simple cache, but i don't think users go hitting refresh all day on their stats page (they do on their whos online though, did i mention ads ? lol).
I use it on big-boards.com on public pages but the images are batch-generated.

[Luke]

I wasn't necessarily thinking in terms of MU, but on another project I have in the pipeline.

Mainly it would be in a controlled area, and to generate like a pie chart or something "pretty" like that.

I don't think the images would always be generated on the fly, and caching is already in place for these particular pages (updated once every 4 hours).

If it isn't too bad on resources, I might give it a look.

Originally, I planned on just using css to render a bar graph. But, a little eye candy might not hurt if it's  within reasonable resource usage.

[quentin]

yeah i did the css thing on unblog's stats before, and the day i moved to jpgraph with transparent gradient backgrounds, users went "wow this is incredible!!" etc. Definitely worth the time and efforts IMHO, especially since jpgraph comes with a number of examples which you can easily extrapolate from to do what you want.

[Luke]

Well, the only real competing service out there uses MS SQL, .net, and crystal reports. So, even basic css (with pretty backgrounds) will kick their butt.  Their site runs like ass, and when you look at charts... it takes forever to load.

[quentin]

yeah, when the average joe can generate pretty fancy stuff so easily with jpgraph.

[Luke]

Yep. Exactly.

[drmike]

I had on my todo list doing up a graph for our stats.  It had been requested a couple of times.

[Luke]

It seems your list got shortened up a bit lately Doc.

So hey, maybe at least 1 decent thing came about.

Granted, when my list shrinks, new things fill the gap by a factor of 10.