New software features for Indymedia

national | indymedia ireland | news report Tuesday July 26, 2011 23:01 by 1 of Indymedia

Updates to Oscailt software

The software that runs the Indymedia Ireland website known as Oscailt has been updated with two new features that will be of interest to our users. The software itself will be officially released in the next few weeks so that other sites using the software can include these updates too.

The first feature is a basic WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) editor has been added to the publish form. This uses the TinyMCE HTML editor. It has been configured to offer some basic operations such as bold, italics and underline. These were already present through the use of tags but it was apparent people were not aware or unfamiliar with manually using tags. This should make it easier to format your posts and highlight certains sections. A more extensive set of functionality has not been included because of the potential for the rest of the site HTML to be broken.

 The second bit of new functionality is that when you publish a story, you will be able to edit it again for corrections for up to 2 hours. It will also be possible for editors to extend this time but for the extended period a password will be required. This password is generated when the story is published and displayed to you. An editor can also reset this password and issue you a new one. There is a toggle button which will turn off the WYSIWYG editor and allow you to work on the tags directly

For the first initial two hours though the software will use session cookies (these are widely used on practically all websites) to enable you to edit. This means when you view the story the software will check to see if your session matches the one temporaril stored against the story and if it does, then it will present you with the link to edit it.

Note: From the moment you publish a story to doing a re-edit, you will have to wait approximately 5 mins. This is part of the spam control software.

Hopefully people will find these new tools useful and the next few weeks will be used for sorting out any technical issues. If you have problems or suggestions please use the contact form to let us know