Yes, I have started work on the Digests extension at last. With the Smartfeed extension now in Beta, I felt I understood the 3.1 architecture well enough to tackle Digests, the more complex and popular of my two mods.
And it is moving forward rather predictably so far, thank goodness. I can copy and paste a lot of my code from the Digests mod, but much of it has to be retrofitted requiring lots of global find and replaces. But some code that used to work simply doesn’t anymore, and you discover these when you see error messages or when things don’t work right. So everything has to be carefully retested and given that there is a lot of business logic in the extension, it just takes time. Digests is definitely in the top 10% of extensions for code size and complexity. Anyhow, the screenshot shows the Edit Subscribers page in the Administration Control Panel, now moved to the Extensions tab. All the screens look pretty much the same. I removed a couple options that are now handled by the improved architecture.
(Note: the above image shows robots and search engines as subscribers. I changed their user status to member temporarily for my convenience of testing the pagination logic.)
It all looks so easy you are probably thinking the rest will be a breeze. But in some ways this is the easy part, which is why I started here. The User Control Panel interface has to be created, and this will be new since Smartfeed has no such interface. mail_digests.php will need to be recreated and it will have to be made to work with the new improved cron interface built into phpBB 3.1. However, a real cron job will still be needed to ensure digests go out hourly because if you dig into the internals of phpBB’s updated cron capability, it’s up to you to program a real cron job. Of course the documentation will need a major update as well.
I do expect that the migrator program will ingest all your digests settings from phpBB 3.0 so those will not have to be recreated.
So I am guessing I am 1-2 months from having a first cut of a development version for testing. If consulting picks up delays may get extended. Sorry it takes too long but just remember the price is right: it’s free. My consulting is not and when I have business I will prefer it doing this work for no charge.
