dw_dev | Code Tour: 26 Sept 2011 to 11 Oct 2011

Hear me, Dreamers; we have developed. It has been 16 days since our last code tour. We ~~accuse~~ credit our contributors with the following 23 bugs:

Patches:

kareila,

exor674,

pauamma,

fu,

skakri (of Grab!, another installation of the Dreamwidth code),

allen,

ninetydegrees,

alierak, and welcoming

batrachian, a long-time IRC user who has finally succumbed to the siren call of active development.

Themes:

rising,

nornoriel, and another new contributor,

inoru_no_hoshi, who went from chatting in

dw_news comments to reading through the IRC quotes database, to hanging out in IRC, to attending

rising's theme-building seminar, to submitting a theme.

Code review, suggestions, and other miscellaneous assistance:

fu,

kjwcode,

kareila,

denise,

ninetydegrees,

pne,

cesy,

sophie,

silverflight8,

ciaan,

wyntarvox,

sashajwolf,

exor674, and

pauamma.

This tour features 4 items that came through

dw_suggestions, and 3 items that were reported as bugs to Support.

Not listed here, but relevant to developers: Bugzilla was also upgraded, which fixes a "dubious English grammar" issue in notification emails. Thanks,

mark!

Bug 3950: Get rid of bin/worker/friendchange, nothing queues that TheSchwartz job anymore
Category: Misc Backend
Patch by:

pauamma
Description: One of the engines that makes Dreamwidth run is a thing called "TheSchwartz". (While it was actually named after one of

bradfitz's managers, it might also be a Spaceballs joke too.) As

mark explained: "We use [TheSchwartz] for things that can run asynchronously; we don't care if they get done *now*, we just want them to get done *sometime*. So we can tell the user "your entry is posted!" and then fire off a job to do the xpost." When Dreamwidth converted "friends" into "give access to" and "subscribe to read", there was a TheSchwartz worker left over that used to do stuff when friends changed, but had nothing to do now that there were no more friends.

pauamma came through and finally gave that worker its pink slip.

Bug 3952: remove LJ::create_account
Category: Modernization
Patch by:

kareila
Description: This intricate piece of code-machete work updates the machinery behind creating a new account.

Bug 3880: Add date last posted to Expired Accounts
Category: Payments
Suggested by:

cesy
Patch by:

kareila
Description: The Circle Gifts page will soon show the last updated date for all of the accounts in your circle, not just some of them. The person whose paid time expired who updated an hour ago might appreciate a little paid time just because. The person who updated 90 weeks ago ... perhaps not so much.

Bug 3953: move /manage/invitecodes to /invite
Category: Site Layout/Navigation
Patch by:

kareila
Description: As part of a few planned (mostly back-end) improvements to the invite code pages, the page http://www.dreamwidth.org/manage/invitecodes will soon be moved to http://www.dreamwidth.org/invite -- which also should make it easier to distinguish from the community invitation page, which is http://www.dreamwidth.org/manage/invites

Bug 3958: Create an Account: content overlapping birthday tip box
Category: Misc UI/Frontend
Reported by:

pne, lots of diagnosis by

ninetydegrees
Patch by:

fu
Description: Part of the Create Account process had some weird formatting, where some background color was pushing into and partially obscuring an information box explaining why Dreamwidth asks for a birthdate on signup (basically, US companies allowing children under 13 to create online accounts are subject to a lot more regulations, but the displayed birthdate can be changed later).

Bug 3956: Creating an account: "Set Up Journal" step displays wrongly
Category: Registration
Reported by:

pne, lots of diagnosis by

sophie and

kjwcode
Patch by:

fu
Description: The list of suggested communities during journal creation was displaying amazingly badly. This is live now, because it was a quick fix and really obnoxious.

Bug 3951: Expose Image_std to core2
Category: S2 Backend
Patch by:

exor674
Description: This makes it easier to use images when programming journal styles in S2.

Bug 3959: Wrap image alt attribute value with apostrophes
Category: Site Layout/Navigation
Patch by:

skakri
Description: Back-end change to icons to help avoid breaking things.

Bug 3864: Minor issue: add more "save" buttons for Manage Circle page
Category: Circle/Relationships
Suggested by:

silverflight8
Patch by:

batrachian
Description: If you have a very large Manage Circle page, you would have to go hunting for the button to save any changes after making them. When this goes live, there will be save buttons between each section, so they're easier to find and use.

Bug 3964: Hiding of community membership on profile page follows "hide circled by", not "hide community membership" checkbox
Category: Misc UI/Frontend
Patch by:

fu
Description: This bug makes a little less sense out of order, but here goes. One of the new features from this tour introduced a little problem, and this patch fixes that problem. (See bug 2825.)

Bug 31: Expand all comments on page
Category: Misc UI/Frontend
Patch by:

allen
Description: The comments in this bug illustrate one of the reasons why I love Dreamwidth.

foxfirefey was planning to do this, got overbooked, and

allen claimed it. Hooray for devs playing nicely with each other and sharing the goodies! And then the feature! This is a low-number bug, and much-sought-after: the legendary "Expand All" bulk inline expansion for pages that have collapsed comments. This will be available to paid/premium paid/seed accounts.

Bug 3906: Practicality: 18 themes
Category: Style System
Patch and preview pics by:

ninetydegrees
Description:

fu helpfully wrote this bit up:
1 theme by

inoru_no_hoshi (welcome!): Dusky Seas
1 theme by

rising: Coloured Glass
16 themes by

nornoriel: Andune, Dance in the Dark, Decadence, Dusk, Enchanted Forest, Fey Frolic, Juno, Lavender, Love Game, Loveless, Misty Wood, Monster, Sanguine, Underworld, Winter Court, Wolfhood.

Bug 2825: Show communities maintained on profile
Category: Communities
Suggested by:

ciaan
Patch by:

kareila
Description: Okay, the promised explanation from Bug 3964. It would be awesome to show you a list of the communities you administrate right on your profile. It would also be awesome to be able to (optionally, and opt-in, so no one has to scramble to go hide it once it goes live) show that to others. (And then, in the implementation, there was a bit of a mix-up involving what checkbox did which and went where, but that got straightened out in Bug 3964.)

Bug 3886: Show circle on interest search
Category: Search
Suggested by:

ciaan
Patch by:

kareila
Description: Ever wondered how many of the people in your actual circle who had a heretofore-unmentioned in their entries (but listed on their profile) interest in knitting? Wading through 17 pages of users is actually no fun. Or maybe you wondered how many people with a fairly obscure interest that is mostly held by people you know are actually in your circle. You will be able to filter by circle membership in interests searches when this patch goes live!

Bug 3967: Typo in DW::Worker::ContentImporter::UserPictures
Category: Importer
Patch by:

pauamma
Description: Fixes a typo in previously committed code.

Bug 1805: Manage subscription filters page doesn't work properly in IE
Category: Browser Issues
Patch by:

skakri
Description: From a bug report through Support, reported by

sashajwolf and with additional diagnostic work from

cesy and

wyntarvox: The Manage Access Filters page, which is notably difficult to use to start with, was doing fun (where by "fun" I mean the bad kind of fun) things in some (older) versions of Internet Explorer, making the "Not in access filter" and "In access filter" lists get narrower and narrower each time the ">> Add" or "<< Remove" buttons were used. Oh, IE. *sigh*

Bug 3971: Delete bin/worker/load-friends-gm, not used anymore.
Category: Misc Backend
Patch by:

pauamma
Description:

pauamma "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome file?" Removing more code that was made irrelevant in the WTF split ("Watch/Trust = Friend") back in 2009.

Bug 3972: Automatic .../index redirects do not preserve get arguments.
Category: Routing/TT
Patch by:

exor674
Description: If a URI has to be redirected behind the scenes for any reason, it used to strip off the arguments, which are things like ?style=mine and the like. They will be preserved henceforth, so the ?kittens=cute (actual example from patch, demonstrating yet again why

exor674 is totally awesome) will remain even if something has to be redirected.

Bug 3954: convert htdocs/invite.bml to TT
Category: Routing/TT
Patch by:

kareila and

exor674
Description: This is one of those behind-the-scenes fixes that paves the way towards an image denoting used/unused status of invite codes (which will make it easier for visual users, but doesn't change anything for people without images).

Bug 3970: remove LJ::server_down_html
Category: Modernization
Patch by:

kareila
Description: More obsolete stuff going away as

karzilla swings the mighty code-machete.

Bug 3961: convert directory frontend to TT
Category: Routing/TT
Patch by:

kareila
Description: This cleans up some back-end for the Directory Search for users and the Community Search pages.

Bug 3729: Non-Apache-specific way to to grab multiple form values
Category: Routing/TT
Patch by:

exor674 and

fu
Description: This one mostly matters to people who would like to install the Dreamwidth software on their own sites. One of the goals of the Dreamwidth Open Source Software project is to make it matter a lot less where someone tries to install a clone of Dreamwidth. This part of the code was assuming that it was installed on an Apache server, which would cause a problem if someone, say, wanted to install Dreamwidth on an IIS server, or maybe Nginx, or even a toaster (I'm not sure that poptarts and bagels really need a social journaling service, but if you want to try it, more power to you).

Bug 3982: code status no longer contains title of changeset
Category: Frontend
Patch by:

alierak
Description: The Code Status page wasn't displaying the summary for the items listed there; you had to click through to see what it was.

alierak picked up the server truncheon and fixed that.

Incidentally, the Code Status page will show you what is live and what is waiting for the next code push. As always, code pushes are announced in

dw_maintenance, and real-time updates happen in

dreamwidth; in the event of unexpected turbulence, the captain will turn on the 'fasten seatbelts' sign.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Yay for fixes!

It's sometimes disappointing when something doesn't happen fast, but there's always that YAY IT WORKS when eventually it happens. Bugzilla has a long memory.