I spent most of yesterday’s coding time on the hyperlink modification problem with the new revision of Blog. Basically, when I right-clicked on an existing hyperlink and selected the option to insert/edit a hyperlink, the dialog box that popped up was supposed to be populated with the attributes of the hyperlink that I clicked on. I got this bit working without too much trouble but once the values on the dialog box were changed and you clicked OK, the hyperlink was supposed to be changed and this wasn’t happening. So I spent most of yesterday’s coding time trying to figure out what was going wrong.
As seems to happen to me a lot, I discovered later that the problem wasn’t where I thought it was :p I thought that the hyperlink modification function in WPTools wasn’t working properly since the changes weren’t being saved at all but after about two or three hours of wasted time, I happened to make a change in the Blog entry itself and then do the hyperlink modification and it worked fine! So I realized that hyperlink modifications weren’t somehow being caught by the WPTools component as a change to the content and then I realized that this was a documented case since I was supposed to call a specific function to notify WPTools that a change was being made – duh! Of course, even after that things wouldn’t work for some strange reason till I changed the Hperlink modification function I was using since there were several to choose from. But, I did finally get that bit working.
Then I moved onto image insertion but couldn’t proceed further than a simple bitmap insertion to test out that things actually did work before I had to stop coding for the day. I’ll have to figure out attribute changes and the ability to insert web images (JPG, GIF, PNG) today if I do get to do any coding and then go on to work on modifying the attributes for an already inserted image – as well as change the Blog parsing routines to compensate for the changes that will have to be made to the way the image location is stored in the database since WPTools needs the full path. There are several more problems there in working with images but once I get all that sorted out, I intend to do an interim 7.2 release so that people can test out the new stuff (if they want to work with beta software that is :p) while I move on to further changes.
YAY, beta software!
Hi, I’ve been working with Blog 7.1 and this seems like a good place to bring up just a couple of minor things:
1. I like to hit Save fairly often when working on anything. Saving makes the cursor jump to the top of the entry (switching to Preview and back does the same thing). I wish the cursor would stay where it is after a save…
2. If I collapse the Category window by dragging, I can’t get it back…
3. I wish there were an option to show/hide the calendar/entry list column…Not a biggie but I would like a bigger main edit window.
4. Also, there’s about one toolbar too many. I Customize the toolbars by getting rid of the Edit toolbar and adding the buttons on it to the other, but those buttons disappear after I close Blog and reopen it.
Other than that, I like Blog a lot. (Well, I’d also like to be able to use a different template for the archive pages…I better stop here). The ability to add my own HTML snippets to the Custom list really rocks 🙂