[pmwiki-users] ZAPchat official release, ZAPdata upgrade...

The Editor editor at fast.st
Sun Nov 19 20:56:57 CST 2006


ZAPchat

Just released an official version of ZAPchat to the PmWiki cookbook.
It is working beautifully and has all the features I hoped to put into
it. I'm not sure wiki's are the *fastest* way to chat--but it does
work, and it actually has some nice advantages.  Like putting markup
in your chat!  And archiving...  And...

There is a nice write up of the ZAP chat commands that are available
(like IRC) and live chat capabilities at the ZAPdemo site.  It's a bit
desolate over there but it's worth looking around.  I'll put up some
instant messaging snippets eventually, but that's a piece of cake
compared to full featured, multi-room, admin operated chatting!

ZAPdata

I also have been doing quite a bit of under the hood work to the main
ZAPcore, fixing a few bugs that somehow have never been noticed
before, and generally tweaking code here and there where possible.

One big change was a significant reworking of ZAP's security system.
There is a nice write up about how it works now at the ZAPdemo site,
but in a nutshell, AuthUser is no longer needed for forms
authentication, I'm relying on admins to control form access through
page attributes, using the usual PmWiki approach, and ZAP's more risky
functions, now ALWAYS require a lock pattern. Though a tiny bit more
work to set up some forms, it is easier to understand, and simplifies
the code base significantly.

A few other nice features I've added are an "inlist" condition
(extremely useful when combined with ZAP's CSV list management
techniques), and a "checktime" condition which can be used in
pagelists (or elsewhere) to determine if pages are older than a
specified time. Also added a [={$groupcount}=] and [={$timestamp}=]
page variable to ZAPget--which can be used in some very interesting
ways. The former is wonderful for telling how many comments there are
on a given post!

ZAPsite.org

Lastly, I've grown tired of the base PmWiki skin I've been using on
the ZAP demo site and decided to update it with a new skin.  In fact
I've spent all day today (got a free day!) to rework the entire site.
I encourage you to check out the new look.  Especially the
documentation popup window, the questions forum, the snippets comments
(really nice!), and the chatrooms.

There's also a good bit more information available and hopefully
reorganized a bit better.  Feel free to give feedback or suggestions
for improvements.  With all the big changes I've done today, there are
bound to be some glitches somewhere.  Appreciate your help tracking
them down.

Cheers,
Caveman!




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