PatronusCharm 1.1 Beta Release - Midnight CST
December 31, 2009 – 12:53 am by Lord RavenclawLong overdue, I am finally releasing PatronusCharm 1.1 Beta. This will soon be followed up by 1.1.1 with miscellaneous improvements and changes I felt were unimportant for the 1.1 release. The changes and new features are numerous, and I may forget plenty but here are some highlights.
Sphinx Search
Sphinx, as you may have seen from my post Sphinx Search: MySQL Fulltext Search Engine Replacement is a replacement for the search engine from PatronusCharm 1.0.1. It’s faster, finds more, and has a powerful language to allow for advanced searching. Most importantly, it allows for searching queries such as “HP”, or “SGA”. The search window has been completely redesigned as well as collapsible. Further improvements will be made here later.
Tagging
Tags have been improved in beta 1.1. Tags can now be multiple words. Improved browsing by tags has been added with a Tag Cloud. The tag cloud allows filtering by usage to get to the more commonly used tags. Clicking on any tag will bring up a list of stories that use that tag.
In addition to the tag cloud, a list of the 20 most common tags is built into the story edit/add dialogs, allowing easy toggling of some of the more common tags.
Story Pairings
At long last, stories can have their pairing(s) displayed. They will soon be searchable, as well as the ability to use custom names for crossovers and the like outside of the large database of canon Harry Potter characters.
And the story bit…
The “main” (first) pairing is shown in the story bit, while the others are shown with a hover-over menu.
Document Multi-Uploader
Multiple file boxes have been added to the Document uploader to assist with fast uploads of new (or old) stories. Currently only 5 document uploads at a time can be done but will be expanded to allow as many as needed.
Google Gears Caching
New with PatronusCharm 1.1 Beta is the ability to utilize certain features of Google Gears. More information on Google Gears can be found in my post Google Gears: Offline Applications. Google Gears is used to cache the 80 or so JavaScript/CSS files and serve them up locally from your computer, ensuring a snappy user experience with JavaScript-based parts of the site.
Display Width
A much requested feature, and made before FanFiction.Net came up with theirs, display widths. By clicking the appropriate link, the width of the story is modified to some percent of the size of the screen for easier, more relaxed reading.
PDF Exports: They’re Back!
PDF exports are back and better than ever. After fixing resource issues (as well as restricting to currently logged in users), users can now export PDFs of a story or chapter. These PDFs are well formatted, much more so than in the past. PDF bookmarking of each chapter allows readers to find each chapter more easily. New chapters start on new pages, allowing for a much more e-book like format. Abuse of PDF exports via automated downloaders will result in banning.
Reviews
Paging
Reviews are now properly paginated in the User Control Panel as well as when displaying reviews from a story. Stories with many reviews will benefit from this
AJAX Reviews
The “Quick Review” at the bottom of each story is now driven by JavaScript AJAX, which is a much more fluid way of submitting reviews. Which leads into a new feature, review drafts.
Review Drafts
Review drafts allow a user to save a review for later. Typing into the box will automatically trigger PatronusCharm to save a copy of your current review, especially good for those who review as they go through the chapter, to prevent lost work due to browser crashes or the need to leave on short notice.
Styling Code
PatronusCharm now supports use of “bbcode” styling tags. These styling tags can be used in reviews. Full Review windows have a bbcode supported editor, as well as user biographies. BBcode tags can be used in Quick Review as well, manually. Supported tags include [url=http://...][/url] for links, [email][/email] for email addresses, [b][/b] for bold, [i][/i] for italics, and [color=#FFFFFF] [/color] for colors.
Member List
A list of members can now be seen by clicking “Member List”, it’s a sorted list of members which links to the profiles of each member. In a future release, this may be sortable by authors/not authors.
Contact Information
User profiles now have support for showing other contact information such as AIM, MSN, ICQ, Skype, and other forms of contact besides email.
Other Improvements
Latest Updates
Latest Updates on the home page has been improved and sorted differently. Mousing over a story shows the details of the newest chapter.
FAQ
A more comprehensive FAQ has been added.
SSL
The ability for users to “force” use of SSL has been added. This can be changed in CP -> Settings -> Force SSL. All non-SSL PatronusCharm links will redirect to a SSL secured version of the site while logged in.
Atom Feed Improvements
- Story feeds have the contents of chapters now, allowing one to read a story from the chapter feed.
- Feeds are now more compliant, returning proper HTTP status codes to optimize use in RSS/Atom readers and allow for proper caching.
News Archive
A new improved news archive has been designed which pulls from the PatronusCharm blog.
Improved Registration
Registration has been improved and the JavaScript powering the backend username/email checks has been rewritten. Also, the CAPTCHA image verification has been changed to use RECAPTCHA.
Improved Performance
And last, but far from least, much of the backend of the site has been rewritten for even greater performance. Caching has been implemented on rarely changing parts of the site, and memcached has been used to improve performance even more on unavoidably slow parts of the site.
