Default Hooks for 3.2

[svit]

I have installed the 3.2 b2 and was able to play with the existing layout and hooks. While the default skin has been perfected to a stage when it is clean and really fine tuned, I can see the existing hooks are falling behind in terms of development, layout, usability and coding. I have chosen 3 examples of hooks which come with the packages as default and only ones which I think could/should be developed much further:

1. Recent gallery images hook - as many clients have reported we are not happy with the slider which breaks the cleanness of the whole skin, in 2011 this hook, could be animated and sliding left/ right, even paginating and have many other options (like not showing photos of certain albums, show no of comments etc) this is a major hook as it sells the content of the gallery module and has majot impact on the whole presentation. In my opinion it should be perfected.

2. Featured blog entry hook - in my opinion this hook isn't really useful as it grabs only several lines of text of the blog and presents them over the whole width of the page. Such width could easily show 2 entries instead of one and many other interesting data related to the entries. At the same time its role is to present content of the key module of the pages and as such it should be really attractive.

3. mini calednar hook - again this hook doesn't do much, it shows the calendar without any significant highlighting of the events behind it. In old times I was using a calendar module for phpnuke which was highlighting in colours each calendar date depending on the event category. Again as a hook which presents a very important data for each community I think it should be significantly perfected.

This was just to show my thinking of importance of the hooks as they are selling our valuable content to our readers, I believe it should be as good as the rest of the system and each little improvement of the hooks would bring a great benefit to our communities.