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If you could add one feature to DEV, what would it be?

Michael Tharrington on July 07, 2022

If you could add one feature to DEV, what would it be? Feel free to take an existing feature and describe how you might adjust it if that's your...
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Chris Jarvis

The ability to Schedule posts.

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Michael Tharrington

Ya dang right! I'd love to have that one built in.

I'm uncertain if it still works, but a while back a community member (@toddanglin) created an awesomely handy companion app that is a scheduler called PublishTo.Dev . They describe it here in case your curious!

This one would be a such a great time-saver!

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Dennis Persson

What I do today is to write the article and save it as a draft. Then I just open the app and press publish when it's time. Works less good in the middle at the night though, if I ever would like to post at that time.

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Chris Jarvis

That's what I do. Then come back and try to publish in the morning.

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Michael Tharrington
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Chris Jarvis

Woot, guess I better write another post and use the feature.

Thank you DEV.

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Chris Jarvis

Post will post early Friday morning.

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Michael Tharrington
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Andrew Baisden

Exactly what I was going to say.

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adriens • Edited

🖊️ As an author

  1. Github like feature : be able to autocomplete with emojis
  2. Twitter like feature : Get "Follow us/me" badges/shields (md, html), with the number of actual followers for people and organizations so we can embed them on various platforms

🤓 As an integrator

  1. Be able to trigger Webhook on some event (at least on new post event) so I can trigger actions and automation (into Teams through PowerAutomate and mamny many other usecases like advanced notifications systems, chat bots, Teams notifications, IFTTT and Zapiers automations, GH Actions triggers,....)
  2. Get the followers ids on a given account through API
  3. Ability to get an embed html code snippet mode so I can embed the content on third party websites like Atlassian Confluence or institutional websites, drupal,...
  4. From the API get the Follower of any user of for now it does not seem to be able the case
  5. From the API get all the users following a given tag as for now it does not seem to be possible
  6. From the API get all the tags followed by any user as for now it does not seem to be possible
  7. From the API, get the badges of a given user

📰 As a reader

  1. Ability to follow Series so I get noticed each time a new episode is added
  2. ePub export si I can export them and read the articles confortably at the beach

🤞 Hopefully I'll get at least one of these features 🙏🎅

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Josh Puetz

Ability to get an embed html code snippet mode so I can embed the content on third party websites like Atlassian Confluence or institutional websites, drupal,...

Ooh, tell me more about this use case! Do you have an examples of how others do it?

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adriens

I don't know how to do it but it looks like the "embed" feature like on Twitter or Youtube also Katacoda was making it possible on is paid plan to embed content in any other corporate website

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Khokon M.

That's a detailed list mate! Great job

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Peter Kim Frank

Excellent list. Thank you :)

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adriens
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T "@tnir" N • Edited

I cannot 👍 as it is not "one feature" while 👍 for "Github like feature : be able to autocomplete with emojis"

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Anna Buianova

Autocomplete emojis in the comments (as a user, but not as a developer 😄)

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Suzanne Aitchison

as a user, but not as a developer 😄

100%

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Anna Buianova

Yeah, as a developer I'm like: "good enough!" :D

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adriens

YES ! Also just pointed it

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T "@tnir" N

But yours was not one!

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Bobby Iliev

A way for users to monetize their content 💙

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Michael Tharrington • Edited

That is a nice one!

You can currently connect a payment pointer to your DEV account using Coil (you'll need to set up an account) from your settings here - dev.to/settings/extensions. This monetization method is described a bit in this post and there's a more thorough on how to get set up here.

However, this is just one angle for monetization. I definitely think we can do more here and am open to feedback in this regard.

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Bobby Iliev

Neat! Thank you for those details!

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Michael Tharrington

No probs! Happy to help. 🙌

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Shai Almog

Better SEO tools for authors. Right now I can't have an SEO title or description with our articles (this exists for other sites). Also more segmented tags which might be related.

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Dennis Persson

I agree to this. You can set a meta description today using Front Matter tags, I mention how to do that in this article.

But If I don't missremember DEV adds some extra text to the description which makes it hard to get a proper length on both DEV and original blog site.

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Shai Almog

That's a great resource. I wasn't familiar with that.

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Joe Mainwaring

While I typically don't champion for social features, I have been wanting to be able to see a full list of who likes/unicorns/saves my posts. I can see some of the info from notifications but trying to get a full list has not proven intuitive/possible - limiting my ability to grow an audience and participate among like-minded members of the community.

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Michael Tharrington

I totally feel ya on this request. I would like to more easily see who all liked my post because it likely means we have something in common and I would like to more easily be able to connect with those that I have things in common with.

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Shaiju T • Edited
  • Automatic backup of posts to github or Google drive.
  • Custom domain or sub domain
  • More control over SEO tags , slug
  • Customize blog or profile UX maybe with custom CSS
  • The UX is simple and nice, Make the UX more modern maybe clean minimal card designs etc

:)

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Andy Piper

This should be straightforward to build using the API… not saying it should not be in the platform directly, but I think a backup tool might be low-ish effort to make, in fact, someone might have built on already… goes to check on GitHub

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Andy Piper

Several here - but obviously those are thing you’d need to run yourself, rather than built-in features behind a checkbox in your DEV settings.

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spO0q 🐒

I would love a cropper for featured images

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Michael Tharrington • Edited

YES! 💯

Haha, I'm always screwing around with featured images and trying to get them the right size.

This may not be exactly what you're looking for, but it could help... @pjijin created a cover image generator for DEV that's described in detail here:

By the way, I started up a discussion a while back about companion apps for DEV just in case you're curious:

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adriens

That would be awesome and time saving feature.

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Dennis Persson

I would want the chat feature that did exist but seems to have been removed :)

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Michael Tharrington

I feel ya! That was a strategic cut because it (Connect) was really hard to maintain, but I also really loved having live chat available right here on DEV. For anyone curious, the announcement we made about cutting Connect can be found here on forem.dev (our community around the Forem community platform).

Communities like ours that are primarily asynchronous and work really well for long form content generally pair well with synchronous chat platforms. I do think there's a future where we integrate with existing chat platforms like Discord and/or Slack, but don't exactly know when we'll be able to put our focus on this.

 
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Michael Tharrington • Edited

Awesome to hear this — definitely one to look forward to! 🦅

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Makar

a toggle to filter out seen posts in the feeds when revisiting

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Rafi

Filter home feed by experience levels

github.com/forem/forem/discussions...

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Branislav Petrović

The ability for reader to archive post directly on "post details page" without going to "Reading list" and clicking there on "Archive" button for that post.

alt text

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Amara Graham

Tag suggestions!

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Michael Tharrington

Oooo that's a cool one!

To be clear, we have predictive text for tags — so, when ya start typing in a tag's letters any tags that we've marked as "supported" or tags that have moderators will appear for you to select.

Here's a little screenshot that shows what I mean:

typing in the letter "j" into the tags area shows a bunch of supported tags that begin with "j"

However, I think you're probs suggesting that we offer smart suggestions based on the content of the post. Maybe we'd look at the text and code blocks used with ML and suggest tags accordingly. Does that sound like what ya have in mind?

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Amara Graham

Yes! Exactly what I have in mind :) Thank you for finding the words that I could not.

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Michael Tharrington

Nahhh, no worries! You made complete sense, I just wanted to clarify. Glad to hear this is indeed what you're thinking — it really would be awesome!

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Joe Steinbring

The ability to schedule posts

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Anna Buianova

We are working on it ✨

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Dennis Persson

Could we get the poll feature that's currently for admins only? :)

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Jon Randy 🎖️

I disagree - can you imagine the flood of crappy posts?

  • What's your favourite VSCode theme?
  • What's the best language?
  • Do you like my portfolio?

Honestly, the quality level of content on DEV is getting low enough as it is. Adding this feature would make it way worse. I suspect that is why it is admin only

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Kavisha Nethmini

Absolutely!

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Vicente G. Reyes

Right! A poll feature that'll automatically remove a tag if majority of the mods/admins agree that a post is using an irrelevant tag 😄

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Thomas Hansen

Cute gifs? 😂

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Michael Tharrington

Haha, oh don't worry I got you covered!

dachshunds running around together outside in beautiful hills dressed in hotdog costumes

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Nick Taylor

Kylo Ren on Undercover Boss giving a thumbs up

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MiguelMJ

The option to set the language of a post and your languages as reader

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Megan Sullivan

Post-specific analytics! Right now on the analytics dashboard, I can see overall number of readers over time, but it would be helpful to see a breakdown of which posts people are actually reading.

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Dennis Persson

That is available through the kebab menu for a post in the dashboard. The numbers are bugging a lot though. Choosing infinite timespan seems to list all your followers. The number of comments is a bit off and so on.

stats for article

But I agree, improving the analytics page with new features would be great.

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Megan Sullivan

Oh neat, TIL! Thanks!

Yeah it would be nice if the main analytics dashboard had a way to see which posts people are currently reading without needing to click into each post separately. Like how Google Analytics has a table of for which pages are getting the most hits in a time interval.

Screenshot of a table in Google Analytics. The title is "What pages do your users visit?" and the table has columns for page slug, number of page views, and page value

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Anna Buianova

Also, posting the same article in multiple languages would be nice. So, on the article page a user could switch between the translations (provided by the author).

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DevFranPR

Language tags or filters on featured posts.

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DevFranPR

I was thinking about it and a tag in the post view section to switch between languages would help to publish in more than one language.

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Chris Jarvis

There are badges on our profile pages. How about the ability to put a badge on your avatar. Similar to how a group blog has a team avatar with a smaller avatar of the author of that post.

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Ansh Saini

Ability to preview post in real time while writing it. It's a hassle to switch between both editing and preview tab.

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Allan Simonsen • Edited

How about additional badges?

  • "32 week streek" - 0x20 - 0B100000
  • "64 week streek" - 0x40 - 0B1000000
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🚩 Atul Prajapati 🇮🇳

Chat room

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Andy Piper

I didn’t use the previous chat / Connect feature, I’m curious what folks would use it for over other chat platforms? Personal view is that I enjoy the discussions in the comments, and I enjoy sharing and reading content on DEV, but for me, I’m not sure I need another realtime chat location. Can you say more about how you’d like to use it, or how it could show up for you?

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🚩 Atul Prajapati 🇮🇳

Actually I just want to connect with like minded people but email is not good that's why I like to use chat feature 😉

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Shaiju T
  • Newsletter subscriptions
  • Listen your article, Neural Text to speech
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Lee Wynne • Edited

I’d love for Dev to remember listening progress on a podcast, so I pause on the app, flip back to the desktop, login and pickup where i left off 🎧

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प्रथमेश | Prathmesh 🌟

Add image option directly from unsplash. like medium.com

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Matt Eland

A larger data scientist community!

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Jones Zachariah Noel

On I missed this thread and discovered it now.

Definitely a custom domain! 🚀🚀🚀

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Haikel Fazzani

text / audio / video = real time chat (the big miss)

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Lee Wynne

Not really a feature but i’d to add the links for my linkedin, instagram, fb and tiktok + others in my profile so they show in my header

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Christian Kozalla

Give the reader of a post the ability to actually run code snippets!

That would empower authors to make posts more interactive

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GrahamTheDev

You can embed various codepen type sites to do this already, trying to do it directly on dev.to would be a massive undertaking.

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Christian Kozalla

Good point! I forgot that this is already possible with CodePens etc. 👍

And I suspected it would be a massive coding effort, when I wrote that suggestion yesterday 😅

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Adrien Pétremann

As a redactor, be able to tell in which language my post is written!
As a reader, to filter post by language

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adriens

Why not delegating this task to Apache Tika thanks to its org.apache.tika.language.LanguageI... ?

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Adrien Pétremann

Sure! I think an easy first implementation is letting the author sets the language, but why not using Tika later to suggest language or even enforce it 👍

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adriens

EH EH... LEAN <3

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T "@tnir" N

Site Theme sync with system! Currently we have to choose either.

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Makar

text-to-speech

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Maddy

Maybe not add, but it would be great to improve the Analytics section. I'd like to have a better breakdown on where my readers come from.

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Jon Randy 🎖️ • Edited

Not really a feature, but I think some kind of review process for posts has sadly become necessary. The quality of content has gone dramatically downhill over the last couple of years