Future directions
LUGNET’s FTX document format is designed to accommodate all sizes of documents
-- from hundred-page tomes all the way down to single sentences, even single
words. This flexibility yields potentially limitless uses: page templates,
news content, weblogs, descriptive fields in databases, and countless other
applications.
The following are under consideration as future possibilities related to LUGNET
Member pages. Some are planned for activation soon, while others are still in
the “idea” phase.
- A continuous member-visible log/index of all changes/additions to pages, possibly served as an RSS (Rich Site Summary) document.
- Automatic indexing -- so unlinked pages won’t get lost and to make outlines and forward/backward browsing easier.
- Automatic linking to/from member homepages.
- Indexing and searching of member-created page content.
- Library of templates for photo galleries -- (document and narrate collections of images using a “wizard-style” approach, enabling a variety of alternative viewing options from a single starting point. May include thumbnailing, date-stamping, background decor, etc.
- Templates for commerce-related activities -- (sales, auctions, locators, trading posts, etc.)
- Templates for database-related activities -- (descriptive data repositories of, say, architectural styles/examples/models for the lugnet.build.arch group, etc.)
- Templates for weblog-style activities -- with RSS integration
- Templates for discussion-related activities -- (light integration of the .ftx document format with newsgroup postings)
- Support for other (non-.ftx) data formats (such as .txt; .dat for LDraw models, parts, etc.; some .html; and potentially raw images)
- Uploading/downloading large content batches (via zipfile or tarball).
|
