Posted by Simon Goodchild  at January 5th, 2012

Happy New Year! Happy first release of 2012! 

As has been previously mentioned, I am going to be focussing the next few weeks on building up a set of classes that will supplement the existing functions and constants available within WP Symposium to support theme and plugin development.

If you don’t develop, sorry, most of this will be largely invisible to you, so I will try to include other enhancements in parallel as time allows to include in each release.

So what is a PHP class?

If this is your first question, you probably have a little learning curve to tackle. It’s a structured way of programming (object orientated programming, or OOP) that allows code to be extended and re-used. It’s an “open” way of programming.

To find out more about classes, Google for PHP class tutorial, you’ll find loads of resources.WP Symposium has largely been “closed” as the code can’t really be shared around in a cuddly warm way. Okay, there are functions and constants, but there are better ways to do it, including as a set of classes.

If you have a fair idea of what a PHP class is, your first stop should be the Codex on the WPS Wiki.

Initially, three classes will be provided (as described on the WPS Wiki), and these will no doubt grow like crazy as either I realise what’s missing; or as I’m told! So for starters:

• class.wps.php: a PHP class for getting and setting various values for the WP Symposium system.
• class.wps_current_user.php: a PHP class for getting and setting various values for the currently logged in user.
• class.wps_ui.php: a PHP class for displaying on screen elements with options to add CSS class names.

As a say, but just to re-emphasize, these are just the beginning, and they will grow!

Before too long, and when the classes are suitable, I will produce a demonstration theme page (or a few pages) to show how you can then start creating your own WPS pages (and therefore, the layout will be down to your own imagination).

What else is in this release?

Mobile Plugin

Whilst I have your attention, please remember that after updating your WPS mobile plugin, if you make use of it, copy all the files from the WPS mobile plugin folder to the folder in which your mobile “version” resides (/m is the suggested folder).

Access of the forum now honors the security you have set up in WPS->Forum settings.

New forum topics are also now added to member’s activity pages.

Mail and Forum email notifications

You can now set the subject line of email notifications of new mail messages, and new forum topics/replies. Do so on WPS->Settings.

Note that for the “New Mail Message” subject, you can also include [subject] that will be replaced with the subject of the mail message received within WPS.

Mail

For some time now, not being able to show only unread mail messages on the mail page has annoyed me, so no more – you can toggle between all mail and just unread mail.

To add this feature you should reset the ”Mail Page” template (via WPS->Templates) – or manually add [unread] into the template if you’ve modified it previously.

Forum

Some site admin’s prefer the page to reload after posting a reply – you can now choose whether to or not via WPS->Forum settings. The option is called “Refresh forum after reply”.

And finally… Release Notes

Release Notes are now available via your admin screen as a menu item (WPS->Release Notes), along with quick links to other WPS Blog posts. Note that you will need internet access, so any local development offline will mean the content is unavailable.

Discuss on the forum...