Enhancements to CoreBlock Monthly Archives and Tag Archives

[DrewHeath]

Changes to CoreBlocks are as follows:

1. Tag Archives insertion of post count parentheses moved out of plugin and into template. This is output styling and should be left to the theme author's discretion, not hardcoded inside the plugin.

2. New tag archive style: cloud. Individual tag font sizes are calculated based on relative post count within a range of (em) specified by the user.

3. Added ability to control monthly archive list order (newest to oldest or vice versa).

All changes tested and functioning on habari:master fork.

[chrismeller]

I'm not a fan of #1. Very few themes specify individual block templates (nor should they need to) and removing functionality is generally negative anyway.

#3: By your logic in #1 shouldn't the order of elements be controlled by the theme author as well?

On Aug 14, 2013, at 10:43 AM, Drew Heath [email protected] wrote:

Changes to CoreBlocks are as follows:

1. Tag Archives insertion of post count parentheses moved out of plugin and into template. This is output styling and should be left to the theme author's discretion, not hardcoded inside the plugin.

2. New tag archive style: cloud. Individual tag font sizes are calculated based on relative post count within a range of (em) specified by the user.

3. Added ability to control monthly archive list order (newest to oldest or vice versa).

All changes tested and functioning on habari:master fork.

You can merge this Pull Request by running

git pull https://github.com/DrewHeath/system master
Or view, comment on, or merge it at:

#53

Commit Summary

control monthly archive order direction
new tag archives style: cloud
tag archive enhancement complete
File Changes

A plugins/coreblocks/block.cloud.tag_archives.php (13)
M plugins/coreblocks/block.dropdown.tag_archives.php (2)
M plugins/coreblocks/block.tag_archives.php (2)
M plugins/coreblocks/coreblocks.plugin.php (37)
Patch Links:

https://github.com/habari/system/pull/53.patch
https://github.com/habari/system/pull/53.diff

[mikelietz]

I'm getting blank monthly archives blocks with PostgreSQL. Sqlite doesn't seem to have these troubles, so I'll try to figure out what is going on.

Tag cloud seems to only show different sizes if the counts are displayed. Rather, they all have the same font-size if they aren't counted.

Month sort order in the block config seems fine to me.

[mikelietz]

Accidentally closed this, so I reopened it.

The tag cloud appears to work fine with or without post counts if the check for $block->show_counts is removed (https://github.com/DrewHeath/system/blob/d66c0ede/plugins/coreblocks/coreblocks.plugin.php#L312), passing $count through even when it is not used. Then the font sizes are different either way, but the post counts are only shown when the option is set. I've not looked at the template, though. This also makes the post count show up regardless of the option when the dropdown or list output is chosen.

Tag cloud could be its own block type. I had forgotten habari-extras/commonblocks had one in it: https://github.com/habari-extras/commonblocks/blob/master/commonblocks.plugin.php#L100

As for the month query. Postgres doesn't seem to like the argument for orderby being something not actually selected.

Without an orderby, the current query does
ORDERBY year,month
For both sqlite and Postgres that is equivalent to
ORDERBY year ASC, month ASC

so to sort by oldest,
ORDERBY year DESC, month DESC
seems to work.

So, if they want newest to oldest, change the orderby to 'year desc, month desc'. If they want existing functionality, blanks are fine. Presumably the existing code could be modified to do this instead of using pubdate.

'orderby' => "year {$block->order}, month {$block->order}")

[DrewHeath]

@chrismeller - Regarding #1, I argue that my proposed change adds functionality whereas the current behavior is restricting functionality. If we roughly divide Habari users into three descending levels of competence:

A) capable of editing code
B) capable of designing themes
C) stock installation users

currently only the first group can access the post count for styling.

To offer some typical use case examples, groups B and C are not able to:

• change the bracket type () [] {} etc. or spacing from tag: habari (2) vs habari(2)
• change the color of the post number to be different from the tag
• reduce the post count font-size in relation to the tag
• move the post count to a superscript, and so on

I see no advantage whatsoever to hardcoding insertion of parentheses characters deep within the plugin code.

@chrismeller - Regarding #3, including a sort direction option in the plugin config screen makes this feature neatly accessible to the latter two user skillgroups mentioned above. It would not be appropriate to put that directly into the template because templates should have as little PHP as possible (as they currently do). Separation of concerns and all that...

@mikelietz - I apologize for the Postgres problems. I'm only familiar with MySQL. I will patch along your suggestions later today when I have time. Thank you for testing!

[chrismeller]

Sorry, I was at lunch and saw this on my phone without having the chance to look at the code. The description you provided gave me the impression it was something other than what it is. Ignore my objections, I'm an idiot.