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jjeaton / wp-veriteco-timeline

WP VeriteCo Timeline integrates NUKnightLab's (formerly VeriteCo's) Timeline JS into the WordPress back-end.
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join up? #12

Open titaniumbones opened 10 years ago

titaniumbones commented 10 years ago

hi,

I've been working on a half-assed rewrite, you've seen the pull requests I think. My coding quality is lousy, but I am trying to add some new features.

Would love to work together on a new release if you're interested. Mhy goal would be to eliminate the custom post type entirely, and just permit a more robust use of the custom fields. It would I think be both simpler and more useful; but I don't htink I'm accessing the newer features of timelinejs very well.

Thanks, matt

jjeaton commented 10 years ago

I'd definitely love some help on the plugin, I took it over because it desperately needed some updates and fixes but I've been too swamped with client work to make my changes.

I'd prefer to fix the bugs that currently exist before we add new features, so we have a better base to build on, namely fixing all the issues currently in the tracker (some of which you've started on).

Why do you want to eliminate the CPT? I see that as the marquee feature of this plugin over the other TimelineJS plugins out there. The others are usually just a shortcode that pulls in a JSON feed from somewhere. The CPT provides an easy way to generate the timeline without needing an external JSON feed.

We'll need to do a lot of testing on the newer versions of TimelineJS to ensure existing installs don't break with the upgrade.

titaniumbones commented 10 years ago

So, all that's really needed to create a timeline entry are the custom FIELDS. I'm a historian, so my students' projects often involve timelines. It's not at all uncommon for them to write posts or create new post types that refer to historical events. By using custom fields, and allowing them to be displayed for all post types, one can permit any type of content to be displayed. I've done a sort of hacky job of this in my rewrite branch,

https://github.com/titaniumbones/wp-veriteco-timeline/tree/rewrite

it can be installed in parallel to the current wp-veriteco-timeline plugin, so if you have a test site you want to fool around with go ahead. I renamed the shortcode to [NUKT] -- go ahead and give it a try if you like.

Obviously the namespace change temporarily breaks compatibility with the older plugin version -- that's on purpose for now, though the names oculd easily be changed back. If that's done, I don't think existing installs will break on upgrade, since every time you edit a timeline post the timeline.json file gets regenerated. I suppose there might be some issue with the jquery version or something -- so it be necessary to upgrade WP itself to a recent version.

m

jjeaton commented 10 years ago

So, I'm with you on the benefits of having other content types on the timeline. That's a great feature, but I can't do it by just removing the CPT as anyone who uses the plugin now, will upgrade and then lose the ability to access their current timeline.

What we can do is:

  1. Keep the existing Timeline CPT
  2. Provide an interface that shows all the registered CPTs, and allow the user to select which ones they want to be able to include in timelines.
  3. The timeline fields appear on only the custom types that a user has opted-in to.

This allows the flexibility of using different custom types and still provides for backwards compatibility with existing users.

Thoughts?