Some suggestions

[Rechosen]

As promised in my introduction post, here are some points that I'd like to see changed in the next release of Lifetype:

• The page titles
  Lifetype doesn't seem to have a nice system to generate SEF (Search Engine Friendly) page titles. It's all up to the template. However, the possibilities of the template to generate nice titles are limited. I'd like to see more title generation coming from the code itself, not from the template. Search engines will love it, and therefore, users will love it.
• Capitalization
  Lifetype 1.1.4 is not really precise with capitalization of important words. For example, "archives" is without a capital a by default, and "my Links" is even worse. Of course, this can partly be fixed by telling the browser to capitalize the strings (text-transform: capitalize; in the stylesheet) but text browsers and search engine crawlers won't do that.
• XHTML compliance
  The included WYSIWYG editor generates markup language that is not XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant. For example, when inserting a smiley, it adds 'border="0"' to the img tag. I would like to see those errors fixed. Also, if it's possible, could you allow us to apply a class and/or id to a selection of text in the WYSIWYG editor? That would allow us to style the text in a uniform way more easily.

I hope you will consider adding these features / corrections to Lifetype, as I think they'd increase the quality of this great piece of software.

[jondaley]

You can probably do some of this yourself, can't you? At least the second one, that is just changing the locale files.
The smiley change is a plugin to tinymce isn't it? So, that is probably reasonably easy to edit yourself.
Is there a strict XHTML way to do border=0? Do you have to do it in the stylesheet?
If you fix it and upload the changed files to bugs.lifetype.net, we can include it.

What do you think the titles should be called? I think this one will be hard, because different people will want different things in their titles.

[Rechosen]

Hmmm... I guess I could. I think I'll investigate it a little further the next few days. Thanks for the hints on where to look for it . I must admit that my javascript knowledge is, well, near zero , so I don't know if I'll be able to mod TinyMCE in the right way, but I can have a look at it anyway. I actually think the 'border="0"' is unnecessary, it probably only serves to prevent the stylesheet from applying a border.

And about the titles, I think they should include, for example, the year, month and, optionally, the date when you are browsing the archives. And also the category that you're browsing, or the blog description when on the main page, something like "Links" when you are browsing those and so on. Of course, the latter ones can also be done using the template, but that creates a lot of differences between the templates. If Lifetype 1.2 featured a smarty code to generate the title, all templates could just put that between the title tags. That'd save blog owners some trouble porting their title system to a new template.

By the way, would it be appreciated if I posted a little tutorial about the way I optimized my Lifetype blog for search engines?

[jondaley]

And about the titles, I think they should include, for example, the year, month and, optionally, the date when you are browsing the archives. And also the category that you're browsing, or the blog description when on the main page, something like "Links" when you are browsing those and so on. Of course, the latter ones can also be done using the template, but that creates a lot of differences between the templates. If Lifetype 1.2 featured a smarty code to generate the title, all templates could just put that between the title tags. That'd save blog owners some trouble porting their title system to a new template.

So, in the blog settings, the blog owner could customize the title string, sort of how we can currently customize the custom_urls, where we would use {postname} - {year} / {month} / {day} tags or something, and then in your template, you could just say {title} or something, right?
You can add a request to bugs.lifetype.net, and see if someone wants to work on it.

By the way, would it be appreciated if I posted a little tutorial about the way I optimized my Lifetype blog for search engines?

Sure.