I committed revision 1000 to the Nova repository a few minutes ago. Hard to believe there have been over 1000 commits already and it’s been less than a year. A lot of work is done, but there’s still lots to do.

April showers bring May flowers, or at least that’s the way it’s supposed to work.  Not sure about that, but what I do know is that April was a pretty solid month for Nova development and sets us up nicely heading in to May.  The following report covers revs 743 through 906.

• Archived old changelogs
• Fixed typo in access page URL
• Built specs form management and specs section management
• Added a bunch of icons for the admin section
• Updated admin pages that used text links with icon links
• Extended the CI URI library to be able to check for whether a value is numeric or not without using extra code
• Added a role description to the schema
• Built roles and role pages management sections
• Fixed bug with Facebox where the window would flicker before opening the page
• Added Vulcan ranks to the Enterprise install file
• Documentation updates
• Added a blank genre file for users who want to create their own
• Updated the menu schema
• Updated Site Settings to change menu items when the sim type is changed
• Added a loading graphic to the install process
• Added a progress bar to the install process
• Built the menu management page
• Added the ability to duplicate a role and all its pages
• Added an FTP config file to use later on
• Added an index.html file to the core directory to prevent a user from viewing the directory listing
• Updated the language files
• Built the rank, skin and theme catalogues
• Fixed bug in Auth library where system model wasn’t loaded but was still trying to be used
• Removed all references to the DBPREFIX constant (using $this->db->dbprefix instead)
• Added focus events to steps 3 and 4 of the install to put the cursor in the first input box
• Updated site messages schema to allow a type
• Updated site messages install data and started to move the system over to pull page headers from the database instead of a language file
• Updated the MY_form_helper to only check for IE 7 and lower since IE 8 fixes a major bug with posting multiple button elements
• Fixed bug where Chain of Command management page wasn’t properly ordered
• Added a characters controller
• Moved Chain of Command management to the characters controller
• Added helpers for building rank and position dropdown menus
• Added AJAX event to the join form … when selecting a position from the list, Nova will go out to the database and pull back the description and display it below the menu
• Built the deck listing management page

Our focus in May is on data management.  It’s arguably one of the biggest pieces of Nova and will probably take about 6 weeks to do.  Once it’s done though, the road will be paved for M5 and some awesome character and user management stuff!

Like last month, we’re also making a build of Nova available now that includes all the work done during April.  Any bugs found in the M4.052009 build should be reported on the forum.

Sounds like a pretty boring feature highlight, huh?  It’s actually a little cooler than it sounds.

If you read the blog regularly, you know that we did some drag-n-drop functionality for the chain of command management page.  Continuing along those same lines, we wanted to look at how we do things and SMS and ask ourselves if there’s a better way to do it.  For open slots, there definitely was.  Enter the slider.

No doubt you’ve all seen a slider either in your computer’s operating system or on the web and used it to set a value.  Well, the same thing is in Nova now.  When you navigate to the positions page, each position has a slider that goes from zero to fifty (we figured that no one should really have a need to have more than 50 slots of a position open at any given time).  There’s a counter above the slider to tell you what he current value is.  Just move the slider to where you want and you can update the number of available positions.  It’s a really slick way of doing it and we’re excited to get it into people’s hands!

For an example, check out the jQuery UI Demo page for sliders.