[Phpwebsite-developers] The Fat Controller

[Shaun M. <sh...@ae...>]

Today, I have been mostly looking at the announcement module and how it  
posts and expires announcements today and there are a number of bugs  
and holes in the design which I've reported but I thought I'd put them  
all in one place and in context. I was just going to mail the team this  
email but thought it might be useful discussion for developers in  
general. And it gave me an excuse to put my email address on another  
mailing list.


There's three fields which cover if an announcement is shown or not in  
the announce module.

active - this is controlled by 'Hide/Show' in the settings and the  
Approval module. Hide/Show also activates/deactivates the fatcat db  
entry.
poston - the date an announcement is posted.
expiration - the date an article is to be expired.

There was a bug in the past announcement block where it ignored poston.  
I submitted a bug report and fix today.
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php? 
func=detail&aid=929870&group_id=15539&atid=115539

The poston/expiration settings are ill thought out with regard to  
categories. These don't activate/deactivate the fatcat entry so fatcat  
will report announcements that are approved but outside the date range.  
I've raised a bug report for that.  
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php? 
func=detail&aid=930107&group_id=15539&atid=115539 . I'm not sure how to  
fix that.

You may also not want to expire an announcement but there is no setting  
for this. There's also no way to specify a year or time of day in the  
interface - all important for those 'Happy New Year' posts that you  
queue up whilst sober. I RFE'd that -  
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php? 
func=detail&aid=929861&group_id=15539&atid=365539


However,

There's also a pagemaster and menuman RFE -  
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/? 
func=detail&atid=365539&aid=722741&group_id=15539

...and I'm sure you could argue a case for blockmaker, article, jobman,  
listings.....

Expanded Workflow abilities were mentioned in interviews with the team  
on phpwebsitemanual.com which will be very welcomed by me at least  
coming from a journalistic background where everything has to go past  
the right desk before it gets out or you're embargoed on a story until  
noon on May the 14th but you must get the article ready to beat the  
press.

To recap, the current workflow controls are...

1) Announce (as detailed above) with it's problems

2) We have FatCat being told what is active or not from the modules and  
which category.

3) The Approval module tells modules to hide/show content on submission  
only.

4) Other modules have their own methods.


So we have workflow information spread about all over the place.

This gelled together, to me, as the basis of an expanded role for  
FatCat as a 'FatController'. A kind of central control module with  
which you controlled the showing and hiding of content as well as  
categorising it and I guess an audit trail should be in there also so  
perhaps we don't need userid, datecreated, dateupdated in the module  
either. Fatcat already stores content ids and active or not settings  
but not timed control settings so those would be need to be added.  
Currently you can view expired announcements for instance because  
FatCat knows nothing of expiration dates.

FatCat currently doesn't control the ability to display content - each  
module does. In the new 'FatController' world, each module would have  
to ask the controller what it is allowed to display and workflow info  
like active, poston, expiration, dateCreated, dateUpdated etc, would  
come from the controller, not the module.

Thoughts?


Shaun
aegis design - http://www.aegisdesign.co.uk