Everybody loves new stuff!

One of the things I just won't stop harping about (there are many) is the work I'm putting into bringing MalexMedia.Net™ up to speed with the new version of Drupal. I'm shooting for new levels of usability, more powerful features, and general improvements all across the board.

Among all of the other major changes in the pipeline, two particular things have occupied most of our time in the last week or so: emoticons and chat room. Click on the picture above to see a sneak peek at the progress we've made!

One of the problems we've had with the site has been the Emoticons we've been using. Now, don't get me wrong, they're beautiful and effective, they just weren't created by any of our artists. That wouldn't normally be an issue per-se, but I misunderstood the terms of the license agreement when I downloaded them, and thought it would be okay to use them without attributing the original artist.

Let's just say my understanding of copyrights and licenses left quite a bit to be desired in those days. To set the record straight, the emoticons we're currently using are called Rubato, were created by an artist called ~Chromakode, are great as they can be, and will be gone from the site in the next few days or weeks. (Actually, I've just been glancing through Chromakode's art for the first time since... ever... and I gotta say, after almost two years of looking at the same emoticons every day it's a strange feeling seeing the same artistic style manifested in other works.)

After all, even if I didn't feel guilty for practically stealing this guy's work, we have an incredibly talented graphic designer in our organization! I can't think of any reason why he shouldn't have a chance to show off his stuff by making some awesome-tacular emoticons for the site.

At this point, it's practically all over but the dancing: I'll be installing the new emoticons on this site in the next week or two. However, I did want to see what people think of them before I do that. So here goes: What do you think?

Like I said above, the other major change currently being worked on is the chat room.

Now, I'm not one to "fix it" if it "ain't broken", but any of us who have used the current chatbox should be able to heartily agree: it's broken. Add to that the fact that it just won't play nice with the new version of Drupal, and I've got quite a bit of "fixing" to do.

Over the last few years, we've used a chatbox made for Drupal by an independent third-party programmer. It's seen nice improvements here and there, but it remains buggy, slow, and just this side of painful to use.

Now, even when "fixing" is in order, I'm not usually a fan of completely reinventing the wheel. However, the current chatbox has been grating on me for almost two years now, and I've developed a pretty comprehensive wish-list of features.

What could I do? I had to write an entirely new chat room from scratch!

I've been at it for a few days now, it's already up to 982 lines of code, and it's barely approaching halfway done. However, it does function, as you can clearly see from the screenshot above.

A few of the more notable improvements over the current chatbox:

* It's ajaxy! That means that it should end up being smoother, faster, and much more fun to use for all of us using decent browsers. (Even IE users should have nothing to complain about here.)

* It supports emoticons and markup! It actually uses the same filtering system as the rest of MalexMedia.Net (another amazing invention by yours truly) so it should react predictably to emoticons, bbcode tags, and the like.

* It automagically highlights messages which are explicitly aimed at you! Note the second message? The screenshot was taken from fakeuser's perspective. The system highlighted the message because fakeuser's name was at the beginning of the line. This simple feature should make it much easier for complex, multi-threaded conversations to occur in the same chat room at the same time. Since you can explicitly direct a message at a particular user, you should be able to get their attention more effectively.

* You can't see it in the screenshot, but the new chat room is capable of archiving all chat messages in a format which will allow you to browse easily. This is in contrast to the current chatbox, which deletes all messages older than N hours/days. This will mean that we can comfortably host planned meetings and chats in the chat room without worrying about losing an important bit of wit or wisdom. Rest assured, your childish shenanigans will be archived forever.

* Hand in hand with the archival feature is that the new chat room will understand and respect the idea of moderators. Those of us who have moderation privileges will finally have the ability to easily "do something" about a message which contains an obscenity or a trade secret. No, I don't mean deleting messages. (Remember what I said about archiving everything forever?) I mean hiding messages from the public. Mods will be able to hide, review, and unhide questionable messages quite easily with the touch of a button.

* There are also a number of other improvements for mods, but I think you get the picture.

So there you have it. A long list of things you probably didn't read. But that's okay! Drupal, its core modules, and the modules I've designed are all here to help you interact and communicate with us. They're not here to get in your way and confuse you with an illogical layout, inconsistent user experiences, and a plethora of frustrating bugs.

So I'm hoping that, by the time I'm finally done re-writing all of these things, MalexMedia.Net™ will be a little bit more powerful, and a lot more user-friendly.

ttyl!

--Alex Markley