Feature idea : "invisible posts"

[nussi]

Hi there !
I've a feature idea : "invisible posts"
The principle is that at this moment a post can be either "published" or "programmed". I was thinking about an "invisible" state, that would place the post in a state where it would be published but not reachable by any serendipity public link (archives, categories, etc.). It would be reachable with a link created by the user.
Why that ? For example on my blog I created a "Menu" post : it's kind of a frontpage to all the posts I think could be of interest to other people, but wich are also too old to be seen on the index page. For the moment I have a link to that post with the "HTML nugget" plugin. Everything's fine, but the "Menu" appears in the archives.
I've lots of other applications to this (a post with credits for example). I also imported pictures and texts from my older web site into posts. For all theses posts I changed the post date to 2000-01-01 00:00 to make sure they do not appear on the index page.
It would also be nice if when thoses posts would be displayed with no date (since the date is not relevant at all in these cases)
OK that's it for my stupid idea

If just have another comment : in the serendipity release I downloaded last week (v.0.6-pl2) the french language file was not provided. I had to get it from the CVS repository and some other file (to be able to select it in the administration suite). I don't know if lots of french people will be able to that (especially if they're as good in computer science as our lovely french soccer team is at playing ... soccer )
And the final request : in the language file, you may want to change the first lines to
@define('LANG_CHARSET', 'ISO-8859-1');
@define('DATE_LOCALES', 'french, fr, fr');
@define('DATE_FORMAT_ENTRY', '%A, %e %B %Y');
@define('DATE_FORMAT_SHORT', '%d.%m.%Y %H:%M');
@define('WYSIWYG_LANG', 'fr');

most important is the DATE_FORMAT (that's the way dates are written in France)
Cheers

[garvinhicking]

Hi Nussi!

Your idea sounds nice, however it would require some background work -- and it aims more in the direction of a CMS where you can really store 'entries'. A blog is basically only the chronologic order of diary-entries...so I think this will get a low priority for us developers.

But if you could provide a patch for that, we could implement it. However that will change quite a few functions (just grep for 'isdraft) and a DB layout scheme change (change the isdraft-type from enum/boolean to a varchar). And comment-plugins and/or the RSS feed may have problems with those kind of entries, or they should be hidden at all...

I have added your DATE_FORMAT fix to the latest CVS - thanks! We currently only publish maintaineance patches for the 0.6 version branch, as we are about to release 0.7 in a while. That's why new languages like french are only in CVS yet...

Regards,
Garvin.

[nussi]

Hi Garvin,
That's OK for me. It was clearly a feature oriented toward CMS, and I didn't imagine it would take so much work. Anyway, I'm fine and I don't really need it, as I told you, I could work around the problem (my question about the number of entries per page was also for that )
About creating a patch why not, but I've been really busy lately. I'm also developing the whole day (but I'm on the dark side of developement : ASP ... ) and sometime I just don't feel like putting myself in front of a computer again when I come home. I don't know how you guys do that
Thinking about it, I could do that only a couple of years ago. Should try again maybe ...

Thanks again for you work !