[geeklog-devtalk] Plugin What's New Enhancement

[Michael Askew]

Howdy,

I've been getting ready to install geeklog 1.3.9 and filemgmt 1.3 RC2 
on my site (club-lu.net). I'm thrilled about the What's New block's 
plugin support but I thought it looked kind of awkward having the 
comments for plugin objects (e.g. files) under the plugin's heading 
instead of the "COMMENTS" heading.

So I decided to try enhancing the plugin interface a bit to support 
showing comments on plugin objects. I like the way it turned out. I've 
added support for these features to the filemgmt and geekary plugins.

Patches are attached; the affected files are lib-common.php and 
lib-plugins.php (geeklog), and functions.inc (filemgmt, geekary). To 
see full copies of the changed files you can download the tarball of my 
sites code at

http://demo.club-lu.net/filemgmt/singlefile.php?lid=1

You can also see the new code in action there. Please let me know what 
you think. I would appreciate it if you would roll the geeklog changes 
into the official geeklog distribution.

Here's an explanation of, err, What's New:

* A new plugin API function has been added; it's called 
"plugin_getwhatsnewcommentsinfo_{pi_name}". It takes one argument, the 
id of an item that has new comments (the "sid" column from the comments 
table) and returns a two item array consisting of a name for the item 
and the URL for the item. If for some reason (permissions problems, 
configuration options) the items new comments should not be shown the 
function should return false.

* The COM_whatsNewBlock function now selects all new comments (grouped 
by sid and type) for plugins that support the What's New comment 
section (plus those for articles and polls); for each one it asks the 
appropriate plugin for the name and URL of the item the comments apply 
to, and if appropriate, adds the item to the list of recent comments. 
When 15 items with new comments have been found it stops.

* Two new functions were added to lib-plugins.php to build a list of 
plugins supporting the What's New comment section and to call the 
getWhatsNewCommentInfo function for a given plugin.

-Michael Askew

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