dw_dev | Code Tour: 7/21

Greetings, dwenizens, and welcome to this week's edition of the Code Tour. I'm pretty exhausted after the week of travel I had, so let's just take the witty introduction as read and dive right into the code, okay?

All of these fixes and features are live with last night's code push. We resolved 50 bugs, 45 with a patch and 5 as duplicates/invalid. Three fixes are security fixes we decline to describe publicly to give other sites running the code a chance to patch the issue.

Bug 318: Add "useful posting" links to update.bml
Category: Usability
Patch by:

afuna
Description: This patch adds in a hook to the "useful links" box on the update page. Right now it just contains a link to the Poll Creator for paid accounts, but if you have any other suggestions for what might go in there, we'd love to hear it in

dw_suggestions.

Bug 445: New logged-in homepage
Category: User interface
Patch by:

afuna
Description: This was an incredible amount of work, and Afuna did such an incredible job on it! This patch implements the logged-in homepage, which you can see by logging in and going to http://www.dreamwidth.org. It's done as modules, so we can add and remove them in the future as we decide what else we want there, and we have a "phase two" planned for the future that will let people re-order, remove, or collapse modules they don't find useful.

Bug 612: Need custom 404s
Category: Error messages
Patch by:

pauamma
Description: This patch implements custom 404s, so when you hit a page that doesn't exist, the resulting page will be in your default site scheme and contain the important navigational elements that let you get back to doing something useful.

Bug 652: Drifting layout
Category: Styles
Patch by:

av8rmike, from a layout by

jennielynn1127, which in turn was based on an OSWD layout (whew!)
Description: This patch adds the first version of the Drifting layout. You can choose it at the Select Style page! (We'll get a thumbnail/preview image in soon.)

Bug 675: Allow OpenID users to join a community
Category: Interoperability
Patch by:

foxfirefey
Description: This fix lets OpenID users join a community (to be able to read locked posts, etc). (In the future we'll also be adding the ability for maintainers to invite OpenID accounts to closed communities.)

Bug 800: Allow classes to be passed into print_navigation (core2)
Category: Styles backend
Patch by:

afuna
Description: This enhances the style backend to add some more CSS classes to things. (I think. The style system is still deep voodoo to me.)

Bug 912: Page does not jump to just-posted comment when collapsed
Category: Bugfix
Patch by:

kareila
Description: As I'm sure many people noticed (and reported!), there was a problem where if comments were collapsed, posting a new comment would make the post-submit page return to some random point in the comments, not the comment you just posted. This patch fixes that, as well as migrating the code in question into a separate module so we can change/update it more easily in the future.

Bug 1081: Need header/footer background color props
Category: Styles backend
Patch by:

afuna
Description: This patch adds in support for defining custom colors of various layout elements through the customization wizard.

Bug 1108: Handle OpenID results in directory search
Category: Usability
Patches by:

kareila and

alierak
Description: This patch adds in a new filtering option for directory search results, so that you can choose to filter by personal, community, or OpenID accounts.

Bug 1140: remove sysban types
Category: Code cleanup
Patch by:

denise
Description: This patch removes some unused code for sysban types. (Sysbans are various criteria that site administrators can use to block people from doing things because of abuse.) The two types removed were for things that we don't use, but the code was still there because it was inherited from LJ.

Bug 1156: payment system needs to obey payment sysban types
Category: Site administration
Patch by:

denise
Description: And speaking of sysbans, this patch makes it so that the payment-related sysban types are checked when someone goes to make a payment, thus allowing us to block people who make fraudulent payments and save ourselves some time and hassle. (It hasn't happened yet, thank goodness, and hopefully it won't happen for a while, but we believe in being prepared.)

Bug 1282: Add custom colors to S2 layouts
Category: Styles backend
Patch by:

liv
Description: I am almost certain that this patch lets people define custom colors for certain people on their reading list through the customization wizard, but for all I know, it could allow

liv to take over the world. (I did mention that I find the styles system deep voodoo, right? Fortunately we have people who get it...)

Bug 1294: Review approve.bml, remove pending-related code if unused
Category: Code cleanup
Patch by:

denise
Description: This patch removes some old and unused code from the page that you use to approve community membership requests.

Bug 1332: Navstrip stretches out Transmogrified footer
Category: CSS fix
Patch by:

afuna
Description: This patch fixes the Transmogrified layout so that it appears the same way both with and without the navstrip enabled.

Bug 1344: Broken poll markup results in wrong/misleading errors
Category: Bugfix
Patch by:

afuna
Description: This patch fixes some of the error messages that happen if you post a poll with invalid syntax.

Bug 1355: Allow <user name > linking to OpenID accounts with username.domain.tld in addition to ext_
Category: Usability improvement
Patch by:

foxfirefey
Description: This patch makes it so that you don't need to remember (or find) the "ext_XXX" name for linking to OpenID identity users. You can link to them with their URL now, like so: <user name=rahaeli.livejournal.com> produces

rahaeli.livejournal.com. (Previously, you would have had to look that up and use <user name=ext_286> -- who can remember that?)

Bug 1364: Darken color of Tropo Red text
Category: Display
Patch by:

denise
Description: After the results of the survey in

dw_news a few weeks ago, this patch darkens the text color of the Tropospherical site schemes. If you're one of the people who preferred the color lighter and find the new darker color unpleasant, you can use the Stylish extension in Firefox to lighten it, or check the User Stylesheets instructions on the No LJ Ads wiki.

Bug 1378: remove last references to S1 props from User.pm
Category: Code cleanup
Patch by:

foxfirefey
Description: This is more removal of old/outdated code, in this case things that referenced the S1 style system (which we don't support).

Bug 1400: Memcache openid-to-userid mapping
Category: Backend
Patch by:

afuna
Description: This patch adds in memcache support for the fix for bug 1355 above. Memcache is a system that stores frequently-accessed data in memory (which is fast to look up) instead of on disk (which is slow to look up), which speeds the performance of the site considerably and lets us get away with spending less on hardware and getting faster performance.

Bug 1423: misc. suggestions generator tweaks
Category: Usability
Patch by:

denise
Description: This patch spruces up the suggestions generator a bit: the poll posted as part of the entry will have the entry title as the title of the poll, and a new "I have no opinion either way" option. It also wraps various sections in CSS classes, so people who don't like long entries can use CSS to suppress display of the whole entry, the long description + the poll, or just the poll.

Bug 1427: Arguments cause a page to be indexed as different content on search engines
Category: Bugfix/security fix
Patches by:

afuna and

kareila
Description: This patch fixes a problem with the previous implementation of this, to sanitize user input and prevent a cross-site scripting injection vector.

Bug 1429: html from link to me module gets mangled on LJ
Category: Bugfix
Patch by:

afuna
Description: If you cut and pasted the old code in the "link to me" section on the bottom of the profile onto a LiveJournal-based site, the HTML output would be mangled because of the presence of an extra class that the HTML cleaner parsed as a cue to do weird things. This patch removes that extra class.

Bug 1434: Moderated comms UI quickfixes
Category: Usability
Patch by:

denise
Description: In another example of me using my position as half-owner of the site to scratch my own personal itches, this patches a few things that annoyed me about moderated-posting communities: the link to the moderation queue now appears on the community management pages and on the navstrip of the community itself if you're a maintainer or moderator of the comm.

Bug 1436: FAQ link should go to /faq, not /faq.bml
Category: Cleanup
Patch by:

denise
Description: This is more work in our attempts to remove .bml from the end of various links in places on the site. (It's an ongoing project!)

Bug 1439: Add a CSS class 'entry-author' to comments when made by the entry's author
Category: Styles backend
Patch by:

foxfirefey
Description: This adds an "entry-author" CSS class to comments made by the entry's author on custom comment pages, meaning people can style those comments to appear in different fonts/colors/etc to mark in some way that they were made by the entry's poster.

Bug 1444: Ban user shouldn't be in contextual popup for communities
Category: Cleanup
Patch by:

foxfirefey
Description: This changes the ban text that appears in the contextual popup when you hover over a community from "ban user" to "ban community" (which prevents a community maintainer from sending you comm invites).

Bug 1449: Userpic in entry preview does not work when posting to a community
Category: Bugfix
Patch by:

kaisa
Description: This fixes a broken-userpic problem with previewing entries being made to a community, and is also

kaisa's first contribution to us! Congrats and thank you,

kaisa.

Bug 1451: tropo-purple hover menus look strange in dreamwidth.org/interests
Category: Display
Patch by:

afuna
Description: This fixes a CSS problem with the Tropospherical Purple scheme.

Bug 1452: links in comment pages with ?style=light in the URL point to style=mine, not style=light
Category: Bugfix
Patch by:

yvi
Description: This patch fixes a bug with our aliasing of ?format=light to ?style=light.

Bug 1455: Fix up CSS issues with the action links on the profile page
Category: Display
Patch by:

janinedog
Description: This patch fixes up some CSS issues that were causing some links on the profile to display incorrectly.

Bug 1457: need "moderation queue" function
Category: Code cleanup
Patch by:

kareila
Description: This patch adds a function to get the count of a community's post moderation queue instead of querying the database directly, allowing us to add that count in a few various other places on the site without having to duplicate code.

Bug 1459: $init->{style} always equals 'mine'
Category: Bugfix/security fix
Patch by:

kareila
Description: This patch fixes up another possible cross-site scripting vulnerability in code checked in last week, sanitizing the user input to prevent problems.

Bug 1463: remove all references to scrapbook/fotobilder
Category: Code cleanup
Patch by:

kareila
Description: We're not using Scrapbook/Fotobilder, LJ's image hosting solution, because we want the chance to write our own that does things the way we like to do them. Support for the system was scattered everywhere through the code, though, so this patch removes it all so we don't have to try to shoehorn our solution in against functions and methods that were already there.

Bug 1471: long entries push edittags form to bottom of page
Category: Usability
Patch by:

kareila
Description: This patch reorders the page elements on the Edit Tags page for specific entries, so that the box to add the tags to the entry appears before the entry itself. (This means that you don't have to scroll and scroll and scroll to get to the edit tags box when you're tagging long entries.)

Bug 1472: Text field larger than database field on sysban note field
Category: Bugfix
Patch by:

kareila
Description: This limits the input field on the sysban administrative page to cut off at the length limit for that field in the database, preventing the end of long notes from getting silently eaten. (Now it just prevents you from making notes longer than the db field will accept.)

Bug 1473: When titles start with usernames, there isn't a link to the entry on $PAGE
Category: Bugfix
Patch by:

mark
Description: This bug was a result of us showing off the new Journal Search page to the #dw irc channel for review and suggestions before springing it on all of you! (Hence the mysteriousness of what the bug actually refers to -- we wanted it to be a total surprise.)

azurelunatic discovered that if there was a <user name> tag starting the entry title, the link on the search results page was unclickable; Mark fixed it by stripping all HTML from entry titles on the search results page.

Bug 1479: Drifting journal title wraps too early
Category: Display bugfix
Patch by:

afuna
Description: Fixes a CSS issue with the new Drifting layout.

Bug 1480: Add search to the Explore menu
Category: Usability
Patch by:

foxfirefey
Description: Adds a link to the Journal Search function to the Explore menu of site schemes if the user has the ability to use it (ie, is paid).

Bug 1483: Empty LatestInbox widget shows confusing error message
Category: Bugfix
Patch by:

afuna
Description: This fixes a problem with the new logged-in homepage where an empty inbox would produce weird errors.

Bug 1485: LJ icon for filtered groups on entry page in default view
Category: Display fix
Patch by:

snakeling
Description: This updates an instance of the LJ-style icons to use our icons instead.

Bug 1486: No more friends page in the 101 roundup at the end of registering
Category: Site copy fix
Patch by:

foxfirefey
Description: This removes references to "friends page" from the page that appears after you complete your registration.