So we're making some pretty big changes to Publish for the 5.2 release (target later in July though it might be August before features and testing are complete, we'll probably provide a beta period for existing subscribers to test out the new features before the official release).
I'll keep this post updated with some thoughts as we finish up development, the first thing I want to point out is a change in the way we treat "authors" for articles.
Author Definition for articles
In the past versions of Engage: Publish we've taken the approach that the author for a version of an article is the user who is editing the article version, meaning it wasn't possible to define who was the author of an article without editing that article with a specific user account. For 5.2 we're changing this, the editor of an article is stored as the Revising User, and the Author will be a selectable list of users, this list will be populated with the users who are in the Authors role that is defined in the Publish Settings.
Things to be aware of, due to this restriction, if you wish to have your "administrators" for Publish also be authors, showing their name as the author credits, you will need to make sure they exist in the Authors Role as well as the Administrator Role.
Start/End Dates
In past version of Publish we've had the notion of Start/End Dates, and the ability to limit when an article/category is visible. In the 5.2 release we're taking this a step further, you can now use the Start Date as a sorting option, so if you want to publish an item in the future, and have it show up at the top of a list when it becomes available you would choose the start date for the sorting mechanism in the Custom Display settings.
AjaxControlToolkit
With the next release of Publish we will be including the AjaxControlToolkit.DLL with the distribution, this should help alleviate issues where users aren't reading the instructions before attempting to install Publish. We will be distributing the most recent release of the toolkit at the time of compilation of the module's release. This might cause issues with other third party modules that are using older versions of the AjaxControlToolkit.
Shortened Links
In the past the request has been made to minimize the URLS that Publish utilizes when linking to other Publish content on the site, an example of a current URL would be http://www.mydomain.com/desktopmodules/itemlink.aspx?itemid=## with the new options for Publish you can utilize http://www.mydomain.com/itemlink.aspx?itemid=## though you will have to make a change to your siteurls.config at the root of your DNN site to make this function properly.
Comment Notification
We've setup a new setting to enable Author notification when a comment is placed on an article they are tied to. We've also made comments something that authors can now approve, though we are working on limiting authors to only approve comments for articles they own.
Tagging Changes
The tagging functionality in the previous releases of Publish worked okay, but in 5.2 we've made some great improvements to the module. Tagging functions a manner where it will now allow you to "filter" by selecting new tags, as a user, and also provides you a breadcrumb type display of where you are in the tag filtering. We've also added paging to the listing of articles when filtering by a tag, this helps in performance/caching issues for sites with a large number of articles and tags.
HTML Validation
One thing we are working on for the 5.2 release is to clean up some of the HTML issues in Publish. We're working on validating our HTML with http://validator.w3.org/.
External RSS Urls
Another modification to Engage: Publish 5.2 is to allow the definition of an external URL for specific Category RSS feeds. This will facilitate the use of Feedburner URLs, as well as shorter URLs by modifying the siteurls.config file for your DNN instance. More on this change when we update the documentation for the 5.2 release.
MetaWeblogAPI Integration
The 5.2 release of Engage: Publish begins the start of our MetaWeblogAPI integration. This first phase implements some of the basic integration with the API, future releases will include more enhancements such as the ability to upload media with your posts/articles as well as further blogging support. Why is MetaWeblogAPI integration important? It provides for means of external Publishing, meaning you can publish articles from desktop software such as Windows Live Writer, but it also provides a possible solution for future integration and remote Publishing of content between instances of DNN.
UI/Functionality Cleanup
One of the major things we've done with this release is to try to clean up some of the UI and functionality within the Engage: Publish module. This includes some changes to the Article and Category edit screens, minimizing sections of these screens that are for custom information, making only the necessary components for creating an article or category visible by default, if you want to add more info such as related categories you can do so by expanding the custom sections. We've also renamed the "Custom Display" display type to "Custom List" which more accurately portrays the functionality that display provides.
SimpleGallery Functionality
The simple gallery functionality for 5.2 has been upgraded to run on the 02.03.16 version of Simple Gallery available from www.ventrian.com
Performance Enhancements
We've overhauled caching with Engage: Publish to increase the performance capabilities of the module. We've also done quite a bit of load testing on Publish, from the display side as well as the article entry side. We believe this to be the strongest/best performing version of the module yet!
More thoughts and topics coming over the next month!