One of the cool things about being a developer is that I get a lot of input into exactly how things work.

One of the downsides of being a developer is that I get a lot of input into exactly how things work.

Whenever I’m not working on client projects, I tend to spend time working on Inflight and Parade, fixing bugs and making changes wherever we feel that they’re needed.

One area of Inflight that really needed some love was the ‘News’ section, which I’ve just finished putting the finishing touches on. Here’s what it used to look like:

And here’s what it looks like now:

What’s different? Well, for one thing you can now schedule news posts – all you have to do is set their publish date to sometime in the future. As someone who tends to write in bursts and then get lazy, this is a must-have feature for me.

Speaking of must-have features, I’ve also added some filtering functionality into the backend. Now, you can click on an author name in the ‘Article authors’ list – and filter articles down to only posts written by that author. You can do the same thing with categories – and if you want to filter posts to ‘written by Eli, in the category Design’, it’s easy – you just click both.

As you can see, Eli needs to write a little more about Design. To remove filters, you can just click the handy ‘Remove Filters’ link that shows up if you’re filtering.

There are still some changes and tweaks that I want to make to the way that news works, and the next piece I’ll be working on is probably the way that comments work – but overall, I’m happy with the how this first part turned out.