We have been using rich editors to let people format blog comments.  All of the mobile browsers display them correctly but none of them interact with them correctly.  New code has been added to allow mobile browsers to post basic comments while allowing full-computer-users to use the full comment features.

It's been a slow week but, then again, it started with me under the knife in the hospital for a minor outpatient surgery.  I've been recovering and that has been the focus of my life since then.

I have, however, been chipping away at a few things.  One of them involves a tweak to the Facebook Connect system.  What I had built presented an extra screen to navigate if you were already logged into Facebook but not logged into the Mercury site.  Now if you go to the FBC link in that circumstance it will log you in and whisk you straight to where you need to be.

At long last I've also added Tagging to blog posts.  I had this in the old PageEdit system for a long time but I never got around to making it happen in Mercury.  So now it works and you can navigate blogs posts by category or by tag.  I also increased the server-efficiency of navigating those pages tremendously.

 If you're reading this as a result of clicking a link on Facebook then you already know that it works!  If you're reading it because you found it on Twitter, well, next best thing!

After a rewriting of FBC I've set it up so that  properly authenticated accounts can have status updates made on their behalf from the Mercury engine.  Right now it's limited to blog posts but it will probably extend to status updates, photo uploads and anything else that makes sense to publish!

While it stil exists as part of Mercury I ended up abandoning the old code I had for facebook connect.  It worked fine for logins and some basic stuff but the new APIs that Facebook has were not playing well with it.  It's been a frustrating process but I have rewritten the Facebook Connect login code in Mercury and have also extended the functionality with the ability to post on the Facebook wall without additional prompting, given a validated account.

I have yet to stitch it into the blog module and I don't know that I'll have time to do that tonight.  But once I do blog posts can automatically be broadcast to both Twitter and Facebook!

We have had Facebook Connect as a part of Mercury for a long time but apart from using Facebook's "social tools" (which require a popup and an extra step to post) we have not spent time working on pushing content directly to a person's wall.

A late night last night led me to the right articles online and the right configuration so that I was able to push a wall update programmatically.  This won't be super useful until I extend it to posting blogs or status updates but it's the most important step!

The jHTMLArea editor from http://jhtmlarea.codeplex.com/ has added to Mercury.  Why would we need this when we already have a full featured rich editor?  Because sometimes you don't want people to have all that power.  This is a good editor for letting people make comments on blogs and on forums.  They don't get full HTML access and they don't get to upload files.

Although I haven't been posting here very much we have been hard at work on Mercury.  I will be making updates here more often but here is a summary of some of the new things:

Since its inception Mercury has allowed for the creation of custom URLs for pretty much any aspect of the site via the SEO translation folder.  This week we have finally built a good interface to it for both abstracting URLs of any module's functionality and for creating custom URLs for any purpose.  These URLs can functions on their own (being handled behind the scenes with negligible overhead!) or they can be redirects to other URLs.  This last feature is good if you want to create a URL for a promotion of some sort, you want it short and easy but you don't want to mess with the underlying URL structure.

We have also added the concept of templates to the framework.  In most cases the ability to override a display file is all you need to get your site done.  There are times, however, when you might want to have a variety of ways to display the same general type of content; shopping cart item pages and photo gallery pages come to mind.  There is new functionality in Mercury to handle templates as desired while falling back to basic display files by default.  For developers this will speed things tremendously too.  No more having to upload (most) templates through a web interface to make a small display change.  Work locally and edit your files where they stand.  Then FTP them to the server!

The forums have seen some activity but the blog has been neglected.  Fear not, Mercury continues forward!

Currently we are working on our e-commerce module.  This comes on the heels of 14 years of building commercial shopping engines and it will absolutely be the best and most flexible one yet!  We are also considering integrating Zen cart but that one is lower on our priority list.  Our own cart system will be tightly integrated whereas Zen would be bolted on as it were.

Also on the short list are video uploaders and converters, updated profiles with status updates and news feeds and more payment gateway interfaces.