For those closely tracking Nova’s development, we’re putting the final touches on milestone 3 and are hoping to release in the next few days, a full month ahead of schedule!  Lots more in the coming days.

Let’s face it, SMS may be good, but there are definitely ways to improve it.  Countless people have weighed in over IM, in IRC, on the forums, on the blog, and over email about what’s good about SMS, what’s bad about SMS, and what’s just plain ugly.  While at times it may not seem like, we take all those suggestions to heart and carefully consider the pros and cons of everything that comes in.  Some have been more outrageous than others.  For instance, and not to pick on anyone, but a suggestion that SMS behave more like Second Life was dismissed pretty quickly because of the monumental effort it would’ve taken.  Others, like the ability to moderate people on activation was something we took to heart and put in to a recent release of SMS.  What it boils down to is the scope of the change.  The latter of the two examples had pretty limited scope and could be accomplished with fairly minimal effort.  The former, not so much.

Over the years, we’ve gotten pretty consistent requests for a few features and in the last few weeks, we’ve finally answered them for Nova.

Remember Me

That’s right, Nova finally has a remember me feature.  CodeIgniter gives us a lot of freedom to work with cookies in a very easy way, so it seemed like a no-brainer to focus some effort on getting it working.  And, as of about a week ago, it’s working like a charm.  One thing SMS suffers from is the issue of people being logged out while they’re working in SMS.  We’ve told people it’s a server setting, and that’s true, but there are ways to override the setting.  Over the years, we’ve made it a habit of not allowing SMS to alter server settings.  That changes with Nova.

For starters, we’re setting session life (how long the server holds on to your session data) to 24 hours.  That means that regardless of what your server is set to do (unless your host has tightened thing way down to prevent changing the settings), the server will hold on to your session data for 24 hours or until you close your browser.  After that, autologin kicks in.  If, when logging in, you’ve selected the remember me checkbox, Nova will see if a cookie exists on your computer, and if it does, it will attempt to do an autologin.  It should be transparent to a user which is the ultimate goal.  If you’re on the unauthenticated side and the autologin fails, it’ll continue as normal.  If you’re in the control panel, it’ll prompt you to login.  We’re going to store cookies for 14 days, at which point the cookie will be destroyed and you’ll have to login again.  If you click logout, the cookie will be destroyed and you’ll have to login next time you come to the site.

This is a great step forward for Nova and is one of those features we’ve been aching to add for years.  CodeIgniter gave us the means and the tools to do it in the most efficient way, so it only made sense to finally pull the trigger.

Private Messages to Multiple People

Gone are the days of sending the same PM to four different people.  As of today, Nova allows someone to send a private message to as many people as they want.  Send it to one, two, or the whole crew.  Nova knows what to do and just does it.  We’re still in the very early stages of this feature, but we have the core of composing a private message done and working.  From here, we just expand further to replies, replying to all, and forwarding.  It was always one of the big goals of Nova to improve private messaging and today we made a huge step forward with this feature.

In the process, we’ve also managed to make adding and removing recipients a much simpler process than it is in SMS.  What we start with is a dropdown menu with the entire crew.  Select a member then click on the Add Recipient link to the right of the menu and they’ll immediately appear below the dropdown menu.  Select the next member and click the add button again; there’s a second name.  If you make a mistake, just click the red X icon to the left of the name and they’re gone.  Easy as that.  If you don’t want to send a message to multiple people, just select the name from the dropdown and continue as you normally would.  As soon as you add multiple people, it uses the list instead of the dropdown menu.  I’m sure there will be bugs and kinks to be worked out, but the goal is to roll this out to mission entries as well, allowing us to use a single page for posting a mission entry instead of two (one for a solo post and another for joint posts).  There will be lots more on this as we get into the Write controller in the coming weeks, but we’ve taken some big steps these last 2 weeks in remedying some of SMS’s deficiencies.

January was a busy month for Nova with a lot of the final details of M2 getting ironed out as well as some good work on M3.  The following changes cover revs 241 through 373.

• Changed globals table to be the settings table since more and more people are having issues with tables and pages and variables called globals in SMS
• Changed the views folder to use an _base directory instead of _global
• Removed the old layout library
• Played around with some Firefox 3/Safari 3 only code that provided rounded corners
• Updated jQuery to version 1.3.1
• Updated jQuery UI to version 1.6-rc5
• Added a character promotions table to track promotions and demotions of characters
• Moved the Nova license to the root
• Removed the old lightbox plugin in favor of a different one
• Renamed img folders to images across the board for consistency
• Added a docking request form
• Changed email structure to allow for text or HTML emails sent from the system
• Added a rank history tab in the player bio
• Removed all PHP short tags
• Fixed a bug with parse errors in DS9 install file
• Updated all install files to use double quotes on description fields
• Added a security questions table to the system for resetting passwords
• Updated the install controller to allow for player and character information to be set during install as well as some system level variables
• Reset password functionality
• Added Facebox that will prompt user to change their password if they’ve reset it
• Making sure Nova can’t send emails out unless systemwide email is turned on
• Updated Facebox to version 1.2
• Added an AJAX controller for handling all Facebox and AJAX requests
• Fixed bug where news comment authors were being keyed off of player ID instead of character ID
• System authentication
• Setting up the admin template
• Added Auth library to handle authentication
• Updated Simplepie to version 1.1.3
• Adding a system unique identifier
• Worked on the UI tabs
• Remember me functionality
• Lots of CSS tweaks
• Lots of JS tweaks
• Documentation updates
• Added links on the view news, view post, and view log pages to get the RSS feed
• Changed the scope selector of Facebox

One of the big pieces of news for January was that we released M2 to the community for everyone to play around with.  Reception has been very positive so far and we’re looking to continue the practice for M3 and on.