Just a quick update (lots more Wednesday night) that I’ve officially wrapped up M4. It’s a great feeling to be done with it and looking back on it it’s a huge accomplishment. Between March 2nd and June 30th, nearly 30,000 lines of code were added. We’re over halfway to the finish line now!

SMS 2.6 introduced a personalized menu that allowed players to store up to 10 of their favorite links in a menu that was always available.  It was just another one of those things that added to the ease of use of SMS and people seemed to respond really well too.  For Nova, we knew we wanted to do something similar, but instead of a menu, we wanted to take it in another direction entirely.  Gone is the menu, replaced now by an entire panel.  It’s already gone through several iterations, but we’ve finally settled on a design that’ll show up in the July milestone build (it wasn’t ready to go out for the June build).

The first part I want to look at today is what we call the handle.  Nova is pretty good about emailing notifications out to people for things like new private messages and new saved JPs.  But sometimes, you’re already on the site and you just want to know when you get a new private message or have a new JP you’ve been working on that needs your attention.  Using the handle, we’re able to show those workflow type items on every page.

The handle is a 22 pixel tall bar that runs across the top of the page when you’re logged in.  On the right side is a link to open the panel (also called dashboard).  There will be more info about the dashboard in another post, today we just want to talk about the handle though.  To the left are spaces for 2 button-type elements.

The first, which always shows, is labled Inbox and gives you quick access to your inbox from wherever you are.  Included in the button is a small icon.  If you don’t have anything new in your inbox, the icon is gray.  When you receive a new message, the icon turns green and a count of the unread private messages in your inbox is shown as well.  (Just so there’s no confusion, triggering the change requires refreshing the page you’re on or moving to another page, it isn’t an automatic thing.)  Once you see the icon light up, you can move straight to your inbox to address whatever private message just showed up.

The second button deals with joint posts and will only appear if you have unattended joint posts.  What’s an unattended joint post?  It’s a saved post where you weren’t the last person to update it.  Meaning, when someone updates a JP that you’re part of it, the button will appear with a count of how many unattended joint posts you have waiting for you.  Clicking the button will take you to the writing control panel and all of your saved entries.  We chose to do this just for saved joint posts mainly because a user will know when they have a solo post that they’ve saved, but you won’t necessarily know right away if you have a JP that needs your attention.

These two enhancements to Nova should help collaboration between players and improve the workflow just a little bit to make Nova even easier to use!

Another month and another series of checkins, moving Nova closer to release.  We’re seeing a light at the end of the M4 tunnel with only a handful of things left to address before we move on to M5 and character/user management.  Lots more information about that as we move forward.  For now though, the following report covers revs 907 through 1082.  Enjoy!

Added:

• Who’s Online
• Position management
• Department management
• Rank management
• Awards management
• Missions management
• Lightness skin (main only)
• Redmond skin (main only)
• New panel in the ACP for seeing stats, activity, milestones and notifications

Removed:

• Old jQuery UI image and override files
• Unused image files
• jQuery equal heights plugin
• BVD test skin

Updated:

• Database schema
• Database models
• Menu management now uses a select menu for the menu item category instead of a text box
• Working toward making language files extensible
• Auth library now has methods for getting the system admin, webmaster and game master flags as well as getting access level for a page
• Utility helper now includes method to print out who’s online so it can be used anywhere in the template
• Nova now handles jQuery UI theme files in a dynamic way that allows a skin to override the defaults, easily letting a skin developer take advantage of the jQuery UI ThemeRoller application
• Better code for generating zebra tables
• Better handling of the CI instance in library files for greater efficiency
• Positions table now has a fourth type associated with it: other
• Genre install files
• The main section now has main and secondary button classes like the admin section
• System constructors now use the Auth library method to check for logged in status instead of pulling data from the session for checking
• Cleaned up some CSS
• Nova now passes an array of pre-formatted language variables to the view instead of using the language object in the view
• The admin error page now shows what page someone was trying to access and a placeholder that will, eventually, show what access levels are needed to access the page
• Install template files

Others:

• Fixed issue in IE7 where content wasn’t being properly used as the button label
• Fixed issue where Nova was using a wrong variable to access some settings
• Fixed issues with errors being thrown by Nova after adding comments
• Fixed issue where Nova was returning bad data from one of the news model methods
• Fixed error where Nova was referencing a class by a name that didn’t exist
• Fixed an issue on the chain of command page where Nova was throwing errors with NPCs on the list

Some great progress this month, but we still have more to do!  Thanks to everyone who posted bugs on the forum and sent emails about issues.  We’ll be continuing to triage those bugs as we push forward with development.