Auto increment blog post numbers and auto focus on input fields

I was discussing a project with a fellow Pulse user last week and he mentioned these items which I thought would make great additions to the CMS.

When you add new blog entries, it’s hard to know what you should name the .txt files.
If the system could find the highest number and then just increment that would be much better.

Also, when you enter screens the cursor is not even in the field / entry point.
You must use the mouse to click just to gain focus.

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Thanks @TimPlumb for noting these down!

Nice addidtions to look at adding…

I always felt that the numbering in the blog section was a little clunky and exposed a little too much of the workings of the blogging tool to the user. Personally I’d rather just let the user add a new blog post with a title and date and let them drag the post where they want it in the list or other posts (very much like the gallery ordering feature in Pulse Classic).

@pulsecms If you do add an auto increment feature can you jump the numbers by a factor of 3, 5 or 10 (for example) so that I can add or move posts without having to renumber a whole load of them?
Thanks.

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I’ve been working with some PHP today which got me thinking about the naming of blog posts in Pulse.

Rather than having the user have to number the posts in numerical order why not just dive in and let them create the post with the title and date and then create a .txt file using strtotime in PHP?

This will create files using a UNIX timestamp (1437537600.txt, 1416286800.txt, etc) which can then be easily sorted into a logical order very simply.

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Good idea @TimPlumb - or maybe just the title of the blog post or date+title.txt and it auto-fills / auto-creates?

Will need to think about this but it’s on the radar :slight_smile:

Yes auto filling the date is a great idea although I’d like to be able to set the date manually so I can;

  • Add a blog post between others, and
  • Schedule a post to appear in the future
    Thanks.
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I agree with Tim here. As I am just starting to use pulsecms, I do find it odd to need to know the next number to name my post. i have not tried it yet, but, what happens if i mis name or number it! will it show up out of order?

Also, within the file directory itself, it would be more meaningful to me to know either a day or subject or something of a file, rather than just a number.

thanks for your consideration…

Fixed in 5.0.2! :smiley::+1:
http://help.pulsecms.com/article/10-version-history