Admin FeaturesThe idea is, of course, to slowly evolve Clarence towards being a mature system capable of hosting an entire site on its own, and being easy enough to modify (that is, modularized enough) that any person who can upload textfiles to a server can install and use it. ModularizationRight now, that's not the case. Changing the template (aka the "flavor") of a Clarence page takes, in most cases, hand-editing of the PHP strings that make up the HTML of the site in order to tweak the layout. These files should be separated out into their own include files, and dynamically linked in to the page on load, which will make them much easier to edit. Having the entire source code for the site (save for the posts themselves) consist of escaped strings is no fun for anybody, and I'm tired of editing them that way. Better plugin behaviorModules are hard to set up in Clarence right now. That's one holdover from PHPosxom that I'm not happy about. There should be a standard plugin architecture with all the right hooks that will let the system be much more extensible than it currently is without actually hacking the main source file. One way to do that will be to rip out the plugin interface code into its own module, and then have plugins talk to the plugin controller module rather than the actual page generation loop. That way it'll be harder for a plugin to clobber the page, and easier to write a plugin. A Better way to theme.The div tags and such that make up the markup of the page should be made to be more semantic in nature so that themes have more available power to rearrange the page. Right now it's pretty definite that the site will have a straightforward div containing the nav bar, etc. This needs to change so themes like Hemingway will run. Userland FeaturesWeb interface for editingOne of the main things I like about Clarence is the fact that posts are just text files--this lends an enormous amount of flexibility to what can be posted and how. The problem with that is that I can't always get FTP access to my server from wherever I am. In my case, I can only have FTP access to my webserver when I'm connected to my home network--and yes, that's on purpose. SSH is open, but I don't always have time or, err, employer permission to connect to my webserver and write a blog post. Implementing logins and such is a pain, but I guess that it's necessary to implement a web-based post creator and editor. This would, I imagine, work much like PMWiki (also a flat-file only PHP-based thingy) and use the TinyMCE editor, or something along those lines. Ajaxy-nessYeah, the themes could use more than a little help. I'd like to make the default theme a little more functional, although I love how spartan the current theme is. Fact is, most people don't hand-code their own blog templates, so if every Clarence page is going to look somewhat similar (kind of like a lot of Wordpress installations) then it should look nicer than those other blog platforms do out-of-the-box. ...and?These are things that I'd like to have working by the time Clarence 1.0 is released. They may not all make it, and I'm sure this list will grow as time goes on.
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