Firstly, I'd just like to give a huge thank you for accepting my GSoC proposal. I know I haven't been able to contribute much to phpBB so far but that is purely because the workload at my University is a little on the ridiculous side; not because I lack motivation.
Anyway, since I can't devote much of the next couple of weeks to the proposal while I get my Uni stuff out of the way, I thought I'd at least try to make it a little constructive. I wanted to gather some initial thoughts on the attachment system and maybe lay down my initial planned feature list to get feedback.
My proposal was based on the idea listed over here. If you'll notice, Plupload is mentioned and a brief look over the homepage will show that it has a huge number of useful features that are compatible with various web technologies. The most sensible way forward seems to be to just go ahead and try to get that integrated as it will have been tested much more than any from-scratch implementation. The only problems I can foresee with this method is that it may not mesh well with phpBB's security system (at the very least all the various upload methods need to be heavily tested) and/or will introduce a large amount of javascript overhead.
Javascript overhead probably won't be a problem since there will be no need for page refreshes from attachments any more. I propose that the rich upload feature be added as a preference for users either way. And of course, any users with javascript disabled will not notice any changes, they will simply see the old interface whose functionality should not be changed.
I intend to utilise all the features of Plupload (if the user's browser supports them) however, if for some reason Plupload cannot be used (in whole or in part), these are the core features that I will implement:
- Chunking
- Stream upload
- File size restrictions
- Upload progress
I think prioritising HTML5 solutions is the best way forward as it will ensure the feature is relatively future-proof and any unsupported browsers still have the reasonable mutipart upload to fall back on.
As a final note, I should also mention that I will also add an attachment downloader for all the attachments in a post or topic but that should be relatively trivial to implement but any comments or feedback to do with that will, of course, also be taken on board.
