Your ideas for the 'sticky entry' feature

[yvi]

Title:
Your ideas for the 'sticky entry' feature

Area:
entries

Summary:
I am looking for people's ideas on the not-yet-implemented sticky entry feature.

Description:
This is not a suggestion, but denise said I could use the community for this :)

Lots of people have made the suggestion for backdating entries in communities, but nothing ever happened in that regard. For the past weeks, I have been working on and off on a feature called the sticky entry (I think it's too late to rename it now :)), which will be available for all accounts, personal and communities.

As it is now, the feature has a few basic capabilities: You post or have already posted the entry you want to show up on top of the recent entries pages for the account. You can then, as the journal's owner or a community moderator, designate one entry to be the sticky entry. It will then be loaded on top of the recent entries page, even if you go back in time. This is basically what people know as a 'sticky thread' on forums.

A bit more information: that entry will be style-able independent from entries through CSS, but will just show like a normal entry when you don't have any special CSS defined for it. For now, we don't have options to style it in the 'customize style' options, but we will, at one point :)

Here's where you come into the equation, though. Apart from an icon and a 'pre-subject text' that can be customized it doesn't yet have any great features. Is there anything that you users want to see for this entry? I am drawing a bit of a blank here and would appreciate any input.

[again, a note that while the patch to implement this as I described here exists, it hasn't yet been reviewed and committed, so it could end up a bit different]

Thank you.

Comments

[yvi]

denise, should I edit out the poll?

[denise]

Sure!

[zarhooie]

It should be able to bake me cookies.

No? I can't have that?

Ok, then I guess I'll make due with what's already there. Thank you, yvi!

[yvi]

sub bake_kat_cookies {
    my $delivery_date = @_;

    my $cookie=DW::Chocolate_cookie->new();

    if ( delivery_date eq 'now ) {
        return $cookie;
    }
}

bake_kat_cookies('now');

Oh wait, it's S2. Sorry, S2 can't do that :(

[denise]

I'm going to have to review- it because of the missing ' in line 6! Sorry :(

[zarhooie]

But... :(

[turlough]

Will this be like a "normal" entry with regards to comments? If not I think this is definitely something some people will want for those Friend Only entries. Of course, there should also be the option to disable comments.

[yvi]

It retains all features of the original entry and technically even is the original entry, just printed out of order :) So the number of comments, comment settings and privacy remain completely intact.

[ciaan]

Will it show the date it was originally posted, or will it not show a date at all? I kinda would like it to look like a journal header rather than an entry, but then again, I also would sometimes like to know when it was added. Will there be only one, or will people be able to have more than one? Some people have various indexes for different kinds of fic that they put in multiple future-dated posts.

[yvi]

Will it show the date it was originally posted, or will it not show a date at all?

Right now, it doesn't show the date posted. Partly because I liked it better that way and partly because it isn't one of the recent entries, I suppose. But if people want it to show, it can be done. There is also always the option to post to this community once it's implemented and have everyone vote on what they like best :)

Will there be only one, or will people be able to have more than one?

Currently only one because of the way it is implemented. It could be changed to allow for more.

On the one hand, more would certainly be awesome, as people (including me) already have and need several backdated posts. On the other hand, it might get annoying because they all show on top of every recent entries page, while backdated posts only show on the most recent one. So that means more scrolling.

At the very least, right now people can have one entry that links to all the important entries :) But there's definitely room for discussion here, I'm not set against having more than one.

[inarticulate]

…What you've got right now sounds pretty awesome to me!

[yvi]

Thank you :) I hope it will go live on the site sometime soon :)

[triadruid]

Sounds good so far, but I think I might like to have some sort of different background shading to set it apart, in addition to the pre-subject customization.

My instinct is that this would 'borrow' some other related color in the style (slightly lighter or darker), or perhaps have its own CSS class so that people could customize it if they were comfortable doing so.

[yvi]

or perhaps have its own CSS class so that people could customize it if they were comfortable doing so.

It already has that :) .sticky-entry/-sticky-entry-wrapper , it just falls back on the .entry classes if that isn't defined. As far as I tested, at least :)

but I think I might like to have some sort of different background shading to set it apart,

*nods* It still needs default implementation in the system layouts, yes.

[softestbullet]

I think it should have a little star next to the subject line, like the padlock for locked entries, etc. :D

Or would it be hard to have locked sticky posts with both symbols?

[branewurms]

Oh, I like this idea much better than LJ's sticky posts. (Although I am going to crack up every time I see the words "sticky entry". I have the maturity of a 12 year old.)

Can't think of anything else at the moment I'd like them to have, but it's great to hear they're being worked on!

[yvi]

Oh, I like this idea much better than LJ's sticky posts.

As an... interesting anecdote, backdated entries are shown first on the entries page because they are dated as being posted one second before the end of Unix time. That was interesting to find out ;)

[adalger]

This is hard for me to distinguish from the Custom Text module enough to get excited about it. OTOH, allowing any entry to be flagged "sticky" makes that difference.

Important to me: I assume you've implemented in such a way that it only affects Recent Entries, not other people's Reading pages? I would be very dissatisfied with having to page past 42 pages of sticky entries in people's journals, various communities, etc., before I could even get to my new posts from journals I subscribe to.

[yvi]

his is hard for me to distinguish from the Custom Text module enough to get excited about it.

It's style-independent (custom text has to be entered again when you change styles) and can contain all HTML entries can (though I am not sure how custom text handles that). The first idea was to implement it similar to that module, but because the text would be wiped when you change styles, that idea was abandoned.

I assume you've implemented in such a way that it only affects Recent Entries, not other people's Reading pages?

Of course :)

[snakeling]

The way you're planning to implement it, I don't think it's going to be an issue, but... If I look at someone else's Recent page with ?style=mine, I should see their sticky entry, not mine.

[yvi]

No, not an issue :)

[azurelunatic]

It would be Interesting to see which entries have been designated the sticky over time. If only to the journal owner.

How will it fail when you try to put more than one entry as the sticky?

[yvi]

How will it fail when you try to put more than one entry as the sticky?

You currently can either put in an URL or an entry ID. But either way, the 'save' operation won't result in a valid entry ID being stored. Which just means you end with no post being sticky.

It would be Interesting to see which entries have been designated the sticky over time. If only to the journal owner.

Interesting, yes :) I just have no idea how that could be stored/displayed.

[sky]

I can't think of much to say except 1) this is awesome and shiny, and 2) I hope it will be possible to turn the icon display off. (preferably without having to do any CSS coding, because I'm a total layperson.)

[yvi]

Which icon? The userpic or the tiny star?