WebAssist RoadMap for 2011

As a member of this forum and obligated under the WA non-disclosure agreement, I was hoping to get some insight has to what 2011 will look like at WebAssist.

Well the entire year isn't planned out, and as a small business we roll with the punches so anything can change. We will be listening to feedback from you guys and prioritizing what really needs to be done and what we would like to do, so anything can and probably will change.

A list of ten things we may do, in no particular order (feel free to reply with feedback about what ideas might excite you the most or what we should add to the list to help us prioritize):

1) An update to powerstore to include international currency, shipping, and tax options.

2) An update to HTML Editor to use the new CKEditor and improved Advanced Image manager.

3) An update to SecurityAssist to better support encryption through the wizard.

4) An update to DataAssist to include html editor, file upload, date picker, captcha, and validation through the wizard.

5) An email marketing solution which will likely be an update to the user registration solution that includes creating email lists, opt. out options, and click-through tracking.

6) A powerCMS extension that will translate powercms content so you can view it in DW and allow you to highlight and assign content to powercms directly from dreamweaver.

7) A data grid extension, probably based on jqgrid.

8) A calendar/scheduling integration, possibly an extension, but definitely integrated into powerstore to allow selling of scheduled events and services.

9) An update to PowerGallery adding more designs and allow for more customization of galleries... more configurable options and using image resizer so that gallery dimensions can be easily manipulated.

10) Add new form elements to Form Toolkit... possibly a slide bar, star ratings, color picker, and possibly add client validation using jquery to the extension as well.

The 1st idea that jumped off the page at me was Email Marketing Tool with the Click-Though Tracking.

A few others that I know that you've seen me request in the past..

1. Google Checkout for eCart
2. Development based on ezPDF class


Thank you very much for sharing.

Ray,

being selfish for a moment I would like to see

4, 5 & 7 implemented first :-)

Other than that could the data assist update include the possibility of including more than one table in the result recordset and definitely more stuff based on jQuery

And if I was being selfish, I would go with 4, 3, 2, and 5. :)

The DataAssist upgrade is a must in my opinion. That is the core tool of a designer creating sites with custom content management features.

The SecurityAssist upgrade really fall in line with the last statement. I think those of us creating CMS solutions and other log in features for our customers almost always use encryption... this would be just awesome to not have to go through so many modification steps.

My feelings about the CK Editor being implemented is that it just looks and works smoother. I know that sometimes looks only count for so much, but the GUI is what the customer sees and is a lot of time how they judge how good something is or isn't.

I would love to see an email solution that is both robust and practical. But, this would have to be real good to get me away from the paid services I currently use. While I currently pay for a monthly service, I also have confidence in the system I use.

All in all, I think all of things mentioned here look like good ideas and hope they all can come to fruition sooner than later.

Thanks,

Brian

Wishing for the following DataAssist Search capability... Internal MS Word and PDF document searching...

Reading PDF Files
To read PDF files, you will need to install the XPDF package, which includes "pdftotext." Once you have XPDF/pdftotext installed, you run the following PHP statement to get the PDF text:

Copy this code to the clipboard
1
$content = shell_exec('/usr/local/bin/pdftotext '.$filename.' -'); //dash at the end to output content

Reading DOC Files
Like the PDF example above, you'll need to download another package. This package is called Antiword. Here's the code to grab the Word DOC content:

Copy this code to the clipboard
1
$content = shell_exec('/usr/local/bin/antiword '.$filename);


Is there a way to search the contents of DOC, TEXT and PDF files using DataAssist? I think that would be wonderful addition.