=head1 NAME

Bric::ToDo - Bricolage To Do List

=head1 VERSION

$LastChangedRevision$

=head1 DATE

$LastChangedDate: 2006-03-18 01:26:34 +0100 (Sat, 18 Mar 2006) $

=head1 DESCRIPTION

This document lists the items on Bricolage's To Do list.

=head1 OVERVIEW

Bricolage versions are determined by the types of changes required. Minor
version numbers require no changes to the database schema (though data in the
database can be added or changed, e.g, for new preferences), and require few
changes to the libraries. The idea is to try to use the existing tools in the
libraries and the database to do more in the UI, though minor changes to the
libraries are allowed. Major version numbers, on the other hand, change when the
database schema has been altered, or when the changes to the libraries are
significant (including the addition of new libraries), or simply when
significant features have been added.

At any one time, we will list the tasks that contributors have accepted for the
next minor version and for the next major version. After that, we list other
outstanding to do items in descending order of importance: "High Priority Minor
Items," "High Priority Major Items," "Low Priority Minor Items," and "Low
Priority Major Items." Developers who wish to volunteer to take on one or more
of these tasks should announce their plans and version goal on the
Bricolage Developers list <bricolage-devel@lists.sourceforge.net>. Contributions
are welcome.

At the end of this document, the "Blue Sky" section features items that will
likely never be done for the 1.x development of Bricolage, but we'd like to keep
in mind as long term goals further down the line.

=cut

##############################################################################

=head2 High Priority Minor Items

=over

=item *

Add ability to reverse the sort order of items on desks.

=item *

Add "Checkout" button to the "View" screens for stories, media, and
templats. It must be careful about permissions in the same way that
F<comp/workflow/manager/dhandler> currently is. That is to say, in order for
the button to be displayed, the user must have EDIT permission to the
asset. If the asset isn't currently in workflow, the user must have RECALL
permission to the asset or to the assets on the start desk in the current
workflow, and at least EDIT permission to the assets on the start desk.

=item *

Add Checkin & Shelve (And Checkin & Publish?) to the dropdown menu on My
Workspace.

=item *

When clicking "New" for an existing contributor, allow choice of Contributor
Type, and B<then> role. Right now, if you want an existing contributor to be a
contributor of a different type, you have to create a new person, and this
duplication is bad.

=item *

When adding a new person, have user search for existing persons first to ensure
that the person doesn't already exist. That is, when adding a new user, it could
be that the person being added is already in the system as a contributor, so the
new user object can be based on the person object underlying the contributor
object. Similarly, when adding a new contributor, the person being added could
have an existing person record as an existing contributor or user.

=item *

Resolve the "Adding Element and hitting Cancel" issue (See
L<http://bugzilla.bricolage.cc/show_bug.cgi?id=3>).

=item *

Add interface to select from existing keywords for associating with assets.
Note that support Keyword Groups will have to be returned to the API.

=item *

Create backup and restore scripts that make it easy to do, especially given
the difficulties of importing a PostgreSQL database dump from Bricolage (Sam
has more details on this).

=item *

Write distribution documentation.

=item *

Add preferences and the code to enforce them to allow admins to specify that
keywords follow certain rules, such as being all lowercase, or to exclude
certain words (e.g., About.com excludes the keyword "about.com").

=item *

Add ability to "undeploy" templates without deactivating them.

=item *

Add option to the installation system to always use the defaults and
never prompt the user.

=item *

Disallow the Find Stories and Find Media interfaces from searching for and
returning all of the stories and media in the database. [David]

=item *

Update exception handling to allow for option to send error details to a valid
email address or URI. The error page (500.mc) would have a form with all the
details in hidden fields, and a button. When the button is pressed, the info
in the form would either be sent to the specified email adddress or to the
specified URL (on the assumption that that URL would process the form data).

=item *

Adjust listManager and desk interfaces so that they remember the field use to
sort items until the end of a session.

=item *

Add a "preview" action to the Workflow SOAP interfaces. It will work just like
"publish" except, of course, that it "previews" and doesn't checkin the assets
or remove them from desks or workflows.

=item *

Implement a funky hack so that we can have story components like
/story.mc inherit based on the location to which we're publishing
(/foo/bar/story), not the actual location of the component.

=item *

Add media thumbnail to desk view (is there room?).

=back

=cut

##############################################################################

=head2 High Priority Major Items

=over 4

=item *

Add browser-based UI for scheduled burning/syndication.

=item *

Add browser-based UI for mass publication and distribution. This will
primarily be useful for template redesigns that need to be applied to a large
set of pages or a whole site.

=item *

Add better tools for handling special characters (e.g., high ASCII, Latin-1
letters with umlauts and accents and such). May need to select a character set
to be associated with output channels, and convert characters based on the
character set.

=item *

Since elements and element types aren't really deleted from the database and you
can't change an element's type once it has been created, the default templates
are very restrictive.  For example, I wanted to change the pull quote element
from an Inset to a new general Subelement type, but when you delete pull_quote
and try to recreate it as a Subelement, it fails because "pull_quote" already
exists.

The installer should have an option to not install the default elements.  This
seems easy enough by moving those SQL commands to a separate file and executing
them based on whether the user opts to install them.

Better yet, if there was a way to import elements and element types (through
SOAP?[1]), there could be no default, but several different pre-made element
sets that the user could choose to import right after installation depending on
what type of site they wanted (daily newspaper, montly magazine, normal website,
etc.).

=item *

Revamp the element system. See the proposed functional specification here:
L<http://bricolage.cc/docs/design/ElementRevision.html>.

=item *

Add support for Instant messaging (using Jabber server) in Alerts.

=item *

Port installation system to use Module::Build.

=item *

Add C<Limit>, C<Offset>, C<SortBy>, and C<SortDirection> parameters to
C<list()> in all classes. The C<SortBy> parameter can be either a string
identifying a single attribute (column) to sort by, or an array of attributes
(columns) to sort by Note that no matter what attributes are selected, the
object id column must I<always> be the last sorted. Existing C<Order> and
C<OrderDirection> parameters should be considered aliases to be deprecated.
C<Limit> and C<Offset> can be added by using aggregates to ensure that all
objects are selected as single rows instead of multiple rows. See how Story,
Media, and Template do this now for examples. If this isn't possible, it can
be done using derived tables (Stephan Szabo is my hero for suggesting this --
I didn't even know it was possible!). Here's a quick example for person
objects:

  select p.id, p.prefix, p.fname, p.mname, p.lname, p.suffix, p.active,
         m.grp__id
  FROM   ( SELECT id, prefix, fname, mname, lname, suffix, active
           FROM   person
           LIMIT  2
           OFFSET 1) AS p,
          member m, user_member c
  WHERE  p.id = c.object_id AND c.member__id = m.id and m.active = '1';

Obviously, you only change the query to use a derived table if the C<Limit> or
C<Offset> parameter is passed to C<list()>.

MySQL 4.1 also supports this feature, so I feel totally comfortable adding it
to Bricolage and feeling like it's still portable to other databases.

=item *

Add media type associations to actions and allow users to select the media
types they want associated with a particular action. Use the hard-coded action
type media type associations as the default associations when a new action is
created.

=item *

Allow deactivation of objects to cascade into their associations. For example,
if one wanted to delete an output channel, the UI should present the user with
a list of objects it is associated with (story and media type elements,
stories and media, destinations) and ask if the user is sure she wants to
delete it and remove all of the associations. This might be tricky if, for
example, a given story has only that one OC associated with it, or it is the
primary output channel for a story.

=back

=cut

##############################################################################

=head2 Low Priority Minor Items

=over 4

=item *

Add interface for editing Contact Types.

=item *

Create Makefile for distribution engine only.

=item *

Add UI support for Organizations.

=item *

Add UI support for addresses.

=item *

Add HTML Cleaning Action.

=item *

Link contributors to their assets -- provide a link in the Contributor Manager
and/or the Contributor Profile).

=item *

Add preferences for listManagers to indicate whether they should default to
expand or narrow behavior.

=item *

Add command-line argument to F<bric_dist_mon> that will kill the
currently-running instance.

=item *

Add autopopulation of video media type properties, such as codec, bit rate,
fps, length, etc. Use a tool such as Video::Info.

=item *

Add thumbnails for videos (using a snap from the first frame?) and other media
files (using icons).

=item *

Change template deployment to not append the output-channel post_path to the
template filename. Currently the burners have hacks in them to look in the
post_path for templates but ultimately this should be fixed the right way. If
you choose to accept this mission you'll need to write an upgrade script to
correct template entries in the database and move deployed templates on the
filesystem.

=back

=cut

##############################################################################

=head2 Low Priority Major Items

=over 4

=item *

Add a callback option to custom fields. This feature would allow custom Perl
code to be associated with the field, and to be executed when the field is
filled in by a user. This would perhaps be the best way to allow fields to be
"customized," e.g., when a field needs to be looked up in another database via
the DBI. Yes, this could be a security issue (a serious one!), but we put the
onus on the Bricolage administrator to ensure that the people with access
can't bollocks things up. We just have to make it difficult for people to hack
in and exploit such a field.

=item *

Add a Relational custom field option. This field would allow a link to be
made to another arbitrary object in Bricolage. The custom field form would
have a select list of Bricolage object names (e.g., Story, User, Output
Channel, Event, etc.). When the user wishes to make the link, she's presented
with a manager-type search interface from which to find a pick the object she
wants.

=item *

Add user-created help for user-created fields (add a "Help Text" field to Form
Builder).

=item *

Make Session an object.

=item *

Add ordering to desks, such that their position in workflow can be ordered. This
will likely need some sort of attribute on the desks's membership in the group
for a workflow (since desks can be in multiple workflows).

=item *

Add a flag to the category object to indicate whether or not assets can be
associated with it, and then check that flag in the new asset profiles.

=item *

Add a flag to the category object to indicate whether or not the category is
allowed to have subcategories, and then check that flag in the category profile.

=item *

Add preference groupings (secret groups would probably work well) and present
the grouped preferences together in a profile. Then just list the preference
groups in the Preference Manager.

=item *

Add support for contributor contracts.

=item *

Add support for LDAP authentication.

=item *

Change way objects are deactivated (archived?) in the database such that, where
there are name uniqueness constraints, a new object can be created with the name
of a deleted one without any clashes (e.g., for Elements and Element Types).

=item *

Add file system-like asset browsing (especially for templates and media).

=item *

Create a different way of distinguishing which desks are shared and which are
not, rather than relying solely on the desk name.

=item *

Add explicit directory (a.k.a. story index) support.

=item *

Add object so that a new group can start with the settings (including
permissions) of an existing group.

=item *

Allow Element Types to be subelements. This means that all elements of a
particular type will be subelements, so that if you add or remove elements of
that type, they will automatically be subelements of whatever element for
which the type is defined.

=item *

Add specification for whether Elements added as Subelements of another are
"Required" or not -- just as we currently do for fields in an Element.

=item *

Create separate sand box for previewing stories with templates while templates
are under development -- that is, without deploying them.

=item *

Add support for individual user preferences that can override (some) global
preferences. (Also add group-level prefs?)

=item *

Allow multiple files to be associated with a single media asset (e.g., when
there's an image, a thumbnail, a high-res version, etc., all essentially for the
same asset).

=item *

Implement keyword synonyms. This might include support for various meanings
among keywords and/or support for a prefered keyword among a group of
synonymous keywords. Past versions of Bricolage (pre 1.3.2) included an
incomplete implementation that you might use as inspiration.

=item *

Add a max size option to media Element profiles, for setting a per-element
size cap on uploaded media.

=back

=cut

##############################################################################

=head2 Blue Sky

=over 4

=item *

Add support for Java templates.

=item *

Add basic project management. Tie project tasks to workflow desks.

=item *

Add support for concurrent checkouts, including support for conflict resolution.

=item *

Add support for display of deltas between versions -- something like what
CVSWeb does, in terms of allowing editors to see what has changed between
versions of an asset.

=item *

Integrate with Subversion.

=item *

Integrate with WebDAV (Slide? mod_dav?).

=item *

Add full-text indexing of the database. See
L<http://techdocs.postgresql.org/techdocs/fulltextindexing.php>
for one approach using PostgreSQL.

=item *

Add stronger type checking.

=item *

Add thorough directory (LDAP, NDS, ADS) integration, including group and
permission management.

=item *

Add support for document translation (e.g., Word, QuarkXPress, Acrobat, etc.).

=item *

Add support for skins -- different colors, etc, probably via preferences.

=item *

Allow Elements to be previewed before they're added.

=item *

Add permission granularity down to the user, property, field, and attribute
levels.

=item *

Add reporting, where reports can be templated and saved for particular users,
or to be shared between users.

=item *

Allow items to move through different workflows and/or desks in parallel.

=back

=cut

##############################################################################

=head1 AUTHOR

David Wheeler <david@justatheory.com>

=head1 SEE ALSO

L<Bric|Bric>, L<Bric::Changes|Bric::Changes>.

=cut
