Asymptomatic

I don't know why I didn't think of this sooner.

I downloaded a copy of bbPress to put on Red Alt to keep track of support issues. Hey, it's not a ticket-based system, it's better -- It allows the community to pool their knowledge for support. Hopefully that means I won't have to do it all myself.

I'm making some other changes over at RedAlt, too. I'm slowly building a new download section so that things are easier to find. While I'm doing it, I'm writing up that missing documentation for the plugins that are laying around over there. Most of them didn't really need documentation when they started, so I never wrote any, and then as they got more complicated they needed documentation that I never thought to write.

Plus many of those plugins need WordPress 1.6 treatment. Some of them are already ready, just not sitting out there for download yet because they're waiting for the organizational changes to come through. I'm thinking about how I'm going to organize everything so that you download the correct version for your copy of WordPress.

I built a new forum for each plugin (although I think I might be missing one or two, now that I think about it). I'm quite pleased with the way I have been able to integrate the bbPress layout into the new site. How much tweaking I did to the bbPress templates - well, that's another question. Some of the stuff I need to look at a little more closely because although I like the ajax features, I'm not fond of their layout. Specifically the topic informaton that appears near the top of each topic. I'm anxious to change the way it looks, but I don't want to break the way ajax is working there.

Something else I was considering is a plugin to synchronize the Red Alt forum user list with my WordPress user list here at Asymptomatic. If they were the same site, I think it would be easy. If they were on the same server it would be more possible. But neither of these are true. So it looks like there might be a need for a WordPress plugin that accepts requests from remote servers for user authentication. (Someone's going to say "LDAP" and I'm going to say "Stick a sock in it", but I'm just a curmudgeon.) I'll need to think about alternatives to that.

While I'm on the topic of plugins, someone needs to write a plugin that reorganizes the category list in the post-writing screen so that the most-used categories appear topmost in the list. This alphabetical business is for the birds. And while they're at it, it might differentiate the most used category as posted from the bookmarklet, and use that as the default there. It's a minor annoyance, since I only ever use the bookmarklet to post in one category (what you might call "asides", the "linklog") and I always have to scroll down to the "L"s and check that one when I just want to quick link to something. Maybe I should just change the bookmarklet functionality altogether.

Now I'm kind of day-dreaming aloud. :)

Anyway, check out the new forum thing and let me know what you think. And, of course, post support issues over there where we can all get at them.