Chain of command management in SMS was always a little clunky and cumbersome.  At the start of planning for Nova, I took a long, hard look at the page and tried to figure out what would be the best change to the page to make it easier to use and even more fun to use.  With everything else going on with Nova, the page kinda fell off my radar until I was poking around the jQuery UI site the other day.  There was a slick little plugin that allowed taking an unordered list and dragging items around to sort them.  It got me thinking about the chain of command page again until I came up with a gameplan.

This afternoon, I put the finishing touches on the chain of command page and I’m really excited because it accomplishes everything I set out to do with the page when Nova planning started.

So what’s changed and what can you look forward to?  Here’s a rundown:

• The chain of command can hold any active character, be it a playing character or an NPC.  The only distinction the management page makes is in the dropdown menu where you select the character to add.  Besides that, Nova treats an NPC in the chain of command the same as it does a playing character.
• Reordering the chain of command doesn’t require changing a bunch of dropdown menus like SMS.  Instead, we’re using a jQuery UI plugin called Sortable.  What you’ll see are blocks with character names in them.  You can click and drag the block up and down through the list until you have them where you want them.  If you need to reorder more than one person, do them all then click the Update button at the bottom.  Nova uses AJAX to go out to the database and update the order without refreshing the page.
• Don’t want someone in the chain of command?  Just click the X on the right side of the box and they’re gone.  No refresh and no longer in the database.
• Adding characters to the chain of command couldn’t be easier.  In SMS, we just inserted a blank record at the end.  Now, you can select the character you want to add, eliminating the need to create the position then say who you want in that slot.

There are still a few things to patch up though.  IE has an annoying bug where clicking in the URL bar and hitting enter won’t update the list from the database, only clicking the refresh button or CTRL-R will refresh it.  It should refresh no matter what.  Currently, you can add a character as many times as you want.  It should work like the posting pages where, once you’ve selected the person, it won’t let you select them from the dropdown again.  Unfortunately, the way the page is built, that might not be a realistic goal.  We’ll have to see how it goes in the coming weeks.

I’m not going to make a big deal out of this yet, but I started playing around today with a jQuery UI plugin called sortable.  It’s a great plugin that turns a list into a sortable list.  Drag the items to the order you want.  So what?  Three words: chain of command.  ‘Nuff said.  More once it’s more built.

As we inch toward Nova’s release, I want to take some time to talk about features that are landing in the trunk. There’s no doubt that Nova is a new beast, but we want to make sure we’re showing you what’s gone in to making SMS’ successor.

The first feature I want to talk about are the new adaptive menus in the admin control panel. These first showed up during M4 and were a quick way for us to show a user what section of the ACP they’re in. The idea is simple: show the menus for the section you’re currently in right at the top of the menu column. If you’re writing a post, you’re going to see all the writing options on top. If you’re sending a private message, those are the menu items you’ll see on top. The same goes for every section of the ACP.

So why did we make this change? In my experience with SMS, you’re usually doing things around a single section, be it the manage section or the reports section. To make it easier and faster to get to the other items in that section, we’re putting it all at the top. After that, it just made sense so you could tell quickly which part of the ACP you’re in.

So what about the rest of the menus? Like SMS, they have groupings and orders. Nova respects those and will display the rest of the menus in the order they should appear save for the active section at the top.

This is a small feature but I think in the end it’s going to be a timesaver and help people navigate through Nova’s control panel.

Nova is starting to pick up steam now.  On January 14th, a day early, I wrapped up work on M2.  On March 1st, 31 days early, I wrapped up work on M3.  To put it into perspective, January was a pretty active month with 132 checkins to the trunk.  In February, there were 219.  Quite the rise and there are a lot of great changes to play with in the recently released M3 build.  So, without any further delay, here’s what happened in February.  The following report covers revs 374 through 592.

• Cleanup on the Facebox files
• [Nova bug] hover states of buttons across the system were broken because of a conflict with Facebox
• Added LiveQuery plugin to solve a major issue with removing private message recipients
• [SMS Bug] we now no longer allow blank private messages to be sent
• Updated the credits
• Removed some unused files and images
• [Nova bug] disabled buttons would still have a hover effect
• Changed system email off notifications. Some forms cannot be submitted (docking request and contact) if system email is off while others can.
• Added the security question to the initial install
• [Nova bug] FROM was static, not dynamic
• [Nova bug] proper parsing of text emails
• Private messaging
• Renamed messages/compose to messages/write
• Using jQuery to set the focus on fields on page load
• Added automatic redirect after uninstalling Nova
• Updated private messages to allow 3rd URI segment to select tab
• Upgraded to jQuery 1.3.1 (previously was 1.2.6)
• Documentation for the messages controller pages
• Documentation for the sim controller pages
• Turns out CI’s Email library wasn’t broken, they’re documentation just wasn’t specific enough … rolling back changes that were made to get the emails working right
• Added ability to remove private messages from the inbox and outbox
• Upgraded to CodeIgniter 1.7.1
• Upgraded to jQuery UI 1.6-rc6
• [Nova bug] private message could be sent without an author
• [Nova bug] menu library would hide some menu items because it thought a user didn’t have access
• Updated the schema to use a X_genre format instead of genre_X
• Added the write controller and ability to post mission posts, personal logs and news items
• Schema updates
• Added model method to the installation that sets the character set and collation before install
• Started work on the user panel to replace the personalized menu feature from SMS
• Updated all controllers to use a consistent naming scheme and added a doc with those names
• Put the player and character models in the constructors because they’re used on almost every page
• Removed LiveQuery since jQuery 1.3 added the same functionality
• Documentation for write controller pages
• Updated the Auth library to accept a URI as one of its parameters for checking access
• Added mission notes to the mission post page
• Access control documentation
• Wrote several tutorials about extending Nova
• Upgraded to jQuery 1.3.2
• Some efficiency updates to the user panel
• Lots of work on the admin template (still going on)
• Updated the rank location helper
• Added comment moderation
• [Nova bug] view awards page for a player didn’t display OOC awards separately
• Added pagination to the list post and list log pages
• Updated schema to allow for pending players, not just active and inactive
• Updated the login template (still going on)
• Added a line to the top of the list post and list log pages showing how many items there are
• Lots of documentation updates
• Removed all references to SMS in the documentation

A pretty busy month!  We’re in to M4 now, so keep your ear to the ground for check-in info in less than a month!  If you haven’t already, make sure you check out Nova M3 and see what we’ve been working on.