The VDF-GUIdance website is under development again (yes!)
Current version is based on the seawax platform with internal revision 0.92, it took a long time before the switch over to seawax happened. This is a much smoother base platform as the old webapp.

The current status? Have it support at least the same as the old webapp, minus a bunch of annoying bugs meanwhile making the website easier to use. ~ Wil, July 2015
More details are below at "List of Changes"

The previous version of the Web Application was version 3 build 16, dated May 31, 2002 (yes a webapp that ran and ran and ran for over 13 years...)


There are still a couple of known bugs in the system and a number of features that we want to implement in the future.
We have added a list of To-Do's and known bugs in here, in order to give you an idea about what still needs to be done.
These are listed in no particular order and may change as part of the list also many years old.

Known bugs

• The ability to delete contributions and the accompanying repository
• We cannot change the type or the category of an existing contribution.
• Sometimes one cannot save changes to a profile. This happens if only one value is changed.
• Remove the 'request publication' button from the read more menu when the issue is published.
• A user reported an automatic login into someone else's userinfo

Suggestions

• An 'Applies to development environment', supported by: VDF6 / VDF 7 / WebApp / CM (all could apply for one contribution)
• Create an element that allows for support of multiple columns in one page. WIP
• Use our logfile for the statistics
• Add a search button the google button we have now isn't ideal, but it works and for the moment is in the "good enough stage.
• Number of downloads
• Display contributions by order of category.
• Add a development-status to every contribution, such as: research, alpha, beta, stable
• The "+" sign in the menu for a page with sub-pages should be clickable.
• Create a way to view the contributions without the summary and details.
• Show the list in each category in date (most recent at the top) order. Makeing this controllable by the user is preferable.
• If we add a page as a subpage, then we want the "+" to be shown in front of its parents page automatically.
• Assign Hotkeys in the edit windows, for example Control + "S" should save. -> Nice idea, but you can't do this with javascript alone. It is possible to catch single letters and act on that, but not on combined keystrokes such as the <Ctrl>+"S". But html itself allows us to use <Alt>+"S" to activate a 'button' which is what we implemented now.
• Support creation of multiple dynamic pages for a contribution for the contributor too.
• Show a registered visitor all the new/changed contributions since the last time he/she visited.
• An option for subscribed users of the site to receive an email if an article is added of updated.
• Use the date of the contribution file to seed the date of the contribution.
• Add possibility to make an image element behave as a hyperlink
• Try to use a dummy link method for links (edit mode) in preview we just get a working link
• Add support for flash meh, actually have that, also for silverlight, but I see no reason to port that capability.
• The possibility to write a static readme.html from the dynamic page and save this in the repository

List of Changes

2015/10/17 - Wiki engine now also supports https for autolinking and named links.

2015/10/07 - Select uploaded image on contribution was broken.

2015/10/02 - Adding contribution threw error as it had a reference to a table that is not in the save structure (thanks Raphael for the report). Publish contribution threw a rt error on trying to use the persists mail component, switched to not depend on persists anymore. Fix display draft posts for users when logged in as user.

2015/07/27 - Removed Google Advertisements from the site. According to google the site generated 44 euro cents in 11 days of which 42 cents was from somebody clicking an ad, most likely by accident.
Just got an email that I had to add a "this site has cookies" popup according to EU regulations.
Too much trouble for maybe 20 euro's/year, easier to just remove the cruft.

2015/07/23 - Sync with Seawax webshop code (without the webshop parts) this improves seawax logging so that we can better track errors.

2015/07/21 - Edit summary for contribution was only offered for Admin, now contributor can edit as well.

2015/07/21 - Contribution page, fixed aligning on Google ad, added a style and text header.

2015/07/16 - Fix new user credentials to have enough credentials to actually work, with thanks to Raphael Theiler for reporting.

2015/07/16 - Added Google AdSense advertisements to main page, most top level pages and the contribution page.

2015/07/15 - By default now newest contribution is on top in the packages/software etc.. so that they also behave like the What's New section. The order can be changed. In addition you can now also hide the details in the list so that it is easier to find what you are after.

2015/07/15 - The ability to edit the contribution summary was lost after our migration. This has been addressed.

2015/07/15 - Admin, capability to filter search engines out of current session overview.

2015/07/15 - Admin, a button to generate a sitemap.xml and robots.txt for our search engine overlords.

2015/07/11 - Removed "publish" button if contribution already published.

2015/07/11 - The print buttons on the pages did include to much CSS, causing the background to be in black.

2015/07/11 - Removed the "read more" links on the overview pages, you now click on the subject to view the details. The details page now also has a summary with the former details at the top right of the page.

2015/07/10 - Changed wiki parser to insert DataFlex icon when the download file is a DataFlex file, such as .pkg, .vw, .rv, .dg, .dd, .sl

2015/07/10 - Fix the missing http prefix on some of the author website URL by inserting them when displaying author site.

Higher up from here we're no longer working on "build" bases, but using continuous operations model. Dates are military format.

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Build 16 List of Changes

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• A new CMS engine introduced, this engine is based on the so called wiki wiki interface. Wiki is Hawaiian for quick, so basically enables the end-user to write richly formatted texts really quickly. A WYSIWYG interface is one of its possibilities.
• The textsize of all elements are now increased to 4096 characters
• A new stylesheet is in use, the biggest change is the increase in fontsize
• The file-upload part is improved, but still WIP, it now shows the files with size and date in your repository.
• improved the performance of our parser dll with about 50%
• The VDF external_function definition call didn't take into account that the parsed string could be slightly bigger as the original. As a result of this GPFs occured when the dll tried to write the parsed string.
• The code in the dll had some recursive problems in regard with named urls.
• The wiki dll now guards against users not closing any of their formatting tags thus making sure that valid Html is outputted at any time.
• Fixed a problem with unordered lists not automatically closing the tags at a new line
• Added ^Super- and _sub-scripting formatting options to the wiki tags
• Added an option for a printer friendly page on a normal page template.
• Changed colors of links to better match the rest of the colorscheme
• The Menu now shows the currently selected page
• Increased the size of the edit fields while editing for a better overview
• fixed various wiki bugs: the inability of links to see the end of a link if the character wasn't equal to a space, now also the following characters are recognized as end-of-link characters: ")> , sometimes a link showed a "<" sign in front of it, an unordered list wasn't automatically closed if the next line contains a header, a table wasn't automatically closed if the next line contains a header.
• Text inside of a preformatted box doesn't automatically create links anymore.
• Our cascading stylesheet is now W3C conform, the html isn't, but we're working on that.

Build 15 List of Changes
===================
- Increase the time-out for contributors that are logged in. This is now set to 15 minutes
- On some browsers, the contribution object is showing data from the browsers cache instead of the database. Fixed with setting ASP var. response.expires = 0
- A Hyperlink for ftp, news and mailto internet addresses was incorrectly inserted with the Http prefix.
- The cascading style sheet for the printer friendly page was incomplete.

Build 14 List of Changes
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- When a hyperlink is used for the read more text belonging to a contribution, the system tried to link to an internal dynamic page, while it should become a download link
- Added hyperlink encode logic for company website and other external links to try and prevent incorrect hyperlinks.
- Improved readability by making some changes to the site's layout.
- Some parts of the site were really ugly when using Netscape.
- Added a JavaScript test to the login Page
- Increased fontsizes to improve readability on screen resolutions above 800*600
- Removed all the onMouseOver events in the CMS part of the site in favour for a technique that uses buttons instead. This suddenly makes our site' work' on Netscape 4.7
- On a resolution of 1024*768, the fontsize is too small and rows tend to get very long.
- Fixed hitcounter miscount when logging out

Build 13 List of Changes
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- The element-style for contributions was corrupt which was very confusing when adding pictures.
- Added some extra session ID code for preventing time-outs. This may not be good enough yet, but will suffice for now.
- Fixed a problem which prevented drafts to be shown for contributors.
- Removed incorrectly placed logout buttons in admin mode.
- Increased the size of the date fields on the editcontribution template.
- Added a 'Back'-button to the contribpage template. Now supported under all viewmodes.
- Uploading files to the site suddenly stopped working, this was due to some links that were pointing to the same application but with different virtual directories.

Build 12 List of Changes
===================
- All popup windows are now resizable.
- Moving (text)elements up and down generated errors when logged in as a contributor.
- Fields Age and interest removed from profile information. As Sture put it very well
"We are not a dating service" ;o)
- Printer friendly output page added for the 'read more' section on contributions.
- Implemented a hitcounter
- Contributions now have a date created and date updated.
- Database Clean up and worked on getting new content in the system.
- Static readme page reference field removed from asp.