The following is a list of the features you can expect to see as we proceed with 7.x development. This is not a comprehensive list, nor is it in any particular order, so don't anticipate any particular feature until it has been released. Also, please do not contact Plain Black about release dates for these features. We don't publish them, and we won't tell you if you ask.
We'll be rebuilding the Matrix asset. It has been around for 4 years now and is showing its age. The new matrix will be faster, more flexible, and far easier to use.
The survey asset was great when we built it 6 years ago. Since then it's been added to and massaged, but it has some inherent design flaws. Knowing what we know now, and taking advantage of ajax technologies, we can make the survey much more user friendly and powerful at the same time.
There's not really anything to show here, but there will be many upgrades to the shop. We should have plug-ins for PayPal, USPS, and maybe even UPS. We may also have a point of sale mode, for those using the shop in meatspace environment.
WebGUI has always been great at serving dynamic content, but for far too long it's not been good at serving static content. Story manager will change that. This new system will allow you to publish news oriented sites using collections of articles or stories. Think cnn.com for WebGUI. And best of all, these assets will export to static HTML nicely for those that wish to run static sites.
The new Gallery asset defaultly displays photos. However, it has the hooks to display other things, so indeed it might just display video as well.
This feature though is quite controversial. It may not be added because hosting video takes special hosting infrastructure, which most hosting providers won't support. Therefore, this may not be added. Or it may be changed to display videos from other sites like YouTube, Metacafe, Viddler, and Blip.tv.
We'll also be having a look at other updates, like being able to crop, rotate, resize, and maybe even annotate images. If we do these features, they'll find their way into the Image asset as well.
The asset manager will continue to morph into a thing of ajaxian bliss. The idea is to make it so no operation in the asset manager forces a reload of the page. In this way, the asset manager should get much faster to use.
In addition, we'll be adding small features over time like asset helpers and a new search interface.
We'll be restructuring the WebGUI config file, and the New Content menu to work better and faster. The most visible thing to users will be the addition of content categories, which will help clean up the New Content menu, which is becoming a bit unruly since we've added so many asset types.
We'll be building in a maps component tied to the Google/Yahoo Maps API. From there you'll be able to add your own pins to the map and attach data to the pins. This will allow you to build locators for businesses that have locations, such as restaurants and stores. It will also allow you to create "Where are you" type applications, so we could allow all the WebGUI users in the world to show where they are on a giant map.
We're going to improve the performance of the administrative interface. There are a lot of CSS, Javascript, and image files used to support the admin interface of WebGUI. By making some changes to how the admin interface looks and works, we can make it much faster, and use less resources on the network and server. These screens are examples of what the new interface may look like.
NOTE: This is an 8.0 feature, and definitely will not be entirely included in 7.x series. However, you will see parts of it appearing in 7.x, such as an improved asset manager and a new New Content menu.
