dw_dev | Code tour, 2010 June 07 - 2010 June 14: 40 patches

Once again, I will be hosting your code tour! This week's edition is brought to you by

sophie's shiny new code tour tool, my newfound discovery of how to make candied bacon (which is delightful, horrifying, or both, based on your views on pork, your views on meat, your views on sugar applied to meat, and your personal dietary requirements), and my immensely wacky sleep schedule.

There are 40 patches in this tour. Congratulations to new committers

dancing_serpent,

rww, and

the_wanlorn! This week, we have: 14 patches by

kareila, 10 patches by

fu, 3 patches from

denise, 2 patches and a theme from

dancing_serpent, 2 patches from returning developer

deborah, 2 from

ninetydegrees, and one apiece from

rww,

foxfirefey,

the_wanlorn,

sophie,

kaisa,

exor674, and

chemicallace.

Thanks also to the usual review/commit/support/suggest/cheering crowds, and especially to

nova for the absolutely lovely wireframe that the revised Edit Profile page is based on,

janinedog and

jadelennox for some initial investigation/work on some of these, to

vadvs,

gariev, and fellows at LiveJournal, and

pauamma who keeps a vigilant eye on

changelog looking for fixes that apply to us.

These are not scheduled to be live until the next code push; code pushes are announced on

dw_maintenance and @dreamwidth.

New Features and Bugfixes

Bug 2711: anniversary promo not ending
Category: Site Administration, fixing what's broke
Patch by:

fu
Description:

denise is probably going to make a calendar notation, now, to test any timed promotion when it's supposed to end, to make sure it actually has.

Bug 2574: Multiple domain cookies for same domain cause infinite loop.
Category: Misc Backend, fixing what's broke
Patch by:

exor674
Description: If Dreamwidth found two cookies of the same name on your computer, it did not handle it at all gracefully. Now it does.

Bug 822: syn_merge console command needs WTF [Watch-Trust-Friend] updating
Category: Syndicated Account Management, fixing what's broke
Patch by:

fu, with some initial investigation by

janinedog
Description: It sometimes happens that two syndicated accounts that are essentially the same get created. When this happens, there's a tool that will allow Support to merge them, but that tool broke in the switch from Friends to Read/Access. It was more complicated than it looked to fix properly.

Bug 1930: Tropospherical cuts off large page elements without a scroll bar
Category: Misc UI/Frontend, fixing what's broke, your reading convenience
Patch by:

fu
Description: In the Tropospherical Red and Purple site schemes, wide content (large images, long comments) were getting cut off without a horizontal scrollbar. The trouble was that if you just made the whole page wider to compensate, then stuff that didn't need to be stretched out would be stretched and tremendously less readable, and everyone would still be unhappy. This patch should make it so that only the stuff that's actually wide will stretch, and there will be a horizontal scrollbar, but the rest of the page should keep in where it was supposed to be. This also might fix an issue with disappearing comments in Firefox 2; let us cross our fingers.

Bug 2468: When entry width is less than sidebar width, sidebar on the right overlaps the entry
Category: Style System, fixing what's broke, your reading convenience
Patch by:

fu
Description: A vexing and elusive problem in Tabula Rasa-based layouts: when the entry was narrower than the sidebar and the sidebar was on the right, the right sidebar would barge into the entry area and overlap the entry. It should now scroll horizontally instead.

Bug 2611: translation string key for crosspost footer is too long
Category: Crossposter, sometimes the translation system is pastede on yey and scary to maintain, fixing what's broke
Patch by:

fu
Description: Problem: Translation strings must be 80 or fewer characters; '/manage/settings/index.bml.setting.xpost.option.footer.vars.comment_image.alttext' is 81. Solution: use shorter words. (Meta-solution:

translation_die_die_die.)

Bug 2668: Filter to entry sometimes breaks
Category: Inbox/Notifications, fixing what's broke
Patch by:

fu
Description: If there were comment notifications for deleted entries in the inbox, this would break the 'filter to entry' feature completely and unenlighteningly. It took a patch to make errors show up in the inbox to even get this troubleshot. Thanks to Support,

noracharles, and

somnolentblue for their assistance.

Bug 2669: outline arrow for cut expansion ajax
Category: Misc UI/Frontend, caring about people with dark backgrounds too
Patch by:

chemicallace
Description: The expansion triangle was dark and nigh unto invisible on a dark background. Outlining it in white is a quick fix to make it visible!

Bug 784: standardize tabbing order on log in pages
Category: Misc UI/Frontend, making the site suck less for keyboard-only users
Patch by:

deborah
Description: Don't you hate it when important things like the OpenID login or Lost Password links aren't in the tab order for a page, so you have to use a mouse to use them (and you don't have a mouse)? Also, isn't it obnoxious when the tab order is different on different pages? Hooray for a fix!

Bug 2564: admin/invites/promo should default to active only
Category: Site Administration, making D's life easier
Patch by:

denise
Description: The owners can manage and view promo codes. Viewing only active promo codes by default makes D's life easier. And on DW, when things drive us crazy, that means it's patch time.

Bug 2655: Nouveau Oleanders: themes not sorted alphabetically in .s2 and .pm files and refers to modish in .pm file
Category: Style System, backend, alphabetizing now makes us less stressed later
Patch by:

dancing_serpent (Second committed patch! Yay!)
Description: It's good to have backend files listing stuff where order technically doesn't matter in some kind of actual order, so people trying to find things can find them. Also there was the little matter of referencing the wrong file (albeit with contents that worked, but still).

Bug 787: Clean up of Edit Profile page
Category: Misc UI/Frontend, making things make sense
Patch by:

kareila; gorgeous wireframe by

nova.
Description: Making the Edit Profile page better! The eye just sort of soaks it in and suddenly everything makes sense. Who would have thought that such seemingly-small changes would make such a difference? Puts the privacy settings in one column off to the side; displays what the privacy of an item will be even if it can't be changed (like your username is, obviously, public; gender is private), some other little tweaks and a hell of a lot of work!

Bug 1254: Option to replace silk icons with text alternatives
Category: Misc UI/Frontend, what the hell are those little pictures anyway, your reading convenience
Patch by:

kareila
Description: It is helpful to low-vision users, people who have difficulties interpreting this-little-picture-means-that, and people who just plain don't like the icons, to have the option to replace site-scheme icons (and the easy option for style icons) with their text, when the text isn't already present.

Bug 2645: put comm name in the moderated post email
Category: Communities, making moderators' lives easier
Patch by:

ninetydegrees
Description: If you moderate more than one community, it helps to say in the notification subject which community this email is about. If you've any email sorting things that depend on a subject of "Moderated submission notification", stand ready to change them.

Bug 2459: Comm invite filters saying the wrong things
Category: English-Stripping, making community admins' lives easier
Patch by:

rww (Ooo, is this a new committer I spy? :D )
Description: It's nice when the system can tell the difference between a lack of rejected community invitations, a lack of accepted community invitations, and a lack of outstanding (sent but no action taken) community invitations.

Bug 663: Allow S2 to access whether the viewer is allowed to manage tags on the journal they are viewing
Category: Style System
Patch by:

foxfirefey
Description: Making it easier for S2 to figure out who to show an "edit tags" link to when viewing someone's entry.

Bug 2637: Can't edit tags on community entries made by deleted users
Category: Tags, community tag management, making community admins' lives easier
Patch by:

the_wanlorn, ANOTHER FIRST COMMIT!!!
Description: Users may come and go, but community entries are forever (unless someone deletes them). Thus, it's good to be able to edit the tags on a community entry even after the user who created the entry has deleted their journal.

Bug 1147: alt text is over-escaped in S2
Category: Style System, your reading convenience
Patch by:

deborah, with the first round of work by

jadelennox
Description: It's never fun to run into an unexpected " when you expected to run into a ". Userpic alt text was having this problem in S2.

Bug 2198: include link to list of allowed/suggested HTML tags on update page
Category: Journal contents, making the user interface make sense
Patch by:

denise
Description: When creating or editing an entry, wouldn't it be nice to have a handy link to the FAQs about the HTML that one can use in entries? I thought so.

Bug 84: Fix the documentation regenerators
Category: Server documentation, fixing what's broke
Patch by:

sophie
Description: Some changes on our end broke server documentation generators that we inherited from LJ, and then we discovered that there was more broken/missing stuff in the stuff we inherited, and after two years of discussion we said screw it; we'll use the wiki for server documentation instead.

Bug 2190: Trim extraneous whitespace when auto-quoting in comments
Category: Journal contents, commenting tools that make sense
Patch by:

kaisa
Description: It's really not necessary to quote whitespace when using the automatic quoting button (and if it is necessary, a person can add it in manually).

Bug 525: Don't pass undef to Cache::Memcached->add/replace/set
Category: Misc Backend, fixing what's broke, memcache
Patch adapted for Dreamwidth by:

denise; missing semicolons added by

kareila; original from

gariev
Description: The server warns you when you hand an uninitialized value to Memcached, and quite rightly so. Uninitialized values can be the "that's what she said" of computing: you may mean a perfectly innocent "oh, someone we both know said something like that the other day!", but the person who hears it may hear it as a "your mom" joke, and that could end badly.

Bug 815: User's default icon is cut off in the title bar
Category: Misc UI/Frontend, making the site pretty
Patch by:

kareila
Description: The size of the navbar is in part driven by the size of the font, leading to some your-userpic-on-the-navbar truncation on some pages when the font is a little too small for the navbar's liking. With bonus not-squishing-the-userpic checking by

fu!

Bug 1289: WTF community edge functions need more functionality
Category: Misc Backend, communities, memcache
Patch by:

kareila
Description: Memcache and community membership weren't always getting along too well: old stuff needed to expire out of memcache when people joined or left, to make sure new members' entries showed up on reading pages and such.

Bug 1598: tags with non-standard characters keep capitalization
Category: Tags, sometimes UTF-8 is WTF
Patch by:

kareila
Description: Fußball fans rejoice: this patch converts assorted extended UTF-8 characters to lowercase when used in tags; fixes bug where tags with extended characters anywhere in them were not converted to lowercase.

Bug 2188: Context-sensitive view journal link post-update for backdated entries
Category: Journal contents, making things make sense
Patch by:

kareila
Description: Adds a "View all entries from the same date" link on entry-posting success page when posting out of normal date flow. It always gives me a kick when my suggestions are implemented!

Bug 2522: community archive display not updating when alternate posting method used
Category: Misc Backend, communities, memcache
Patch by:

kareila
Description: The community archive page did not update when the community was updated by email. That just won't do! Alas for stale memcache.

Bug 2617: t/paid-time.t breaks if the current month does not have 30 days
Category: Misc Backend, testing, fixing what's broke
Patch by:

kareila
Description: The first of May, the first of May! Outdoor ... testing of paid time stuff broke today, because (as it turns out) May does not have exactly 30 days, and the test was expecting a 30-day month. The test is now updated to reflect actual calendar behavior, and actual site behavior.

Bug 2652: Allow LJ::Talk::Post::init to work outside web context
Category: Journal contents, random backend stuff
Patch adapted for Dreamwidth by:

kareila, original LJ patch by

vadvs
Description: The comments to this bug say that this is half the patch from LJ (the other part is not directly relevant and would be handled in a separate bug in any case) and would be useful if posting comments via API, which is good, because I couldn't understand the original. (That is to say, if your eyes just glazed over, no worries.)

Bug 2653: migrate LJ::load_user_props -> $u->preload_props
Category: Misc Backend, we're not LJ
Patch by:

kareila
Description: There's an awful lot of doing that goes into moving from the "LJ::load_user_props" function to the "$u->preload_props" function.

Bug 2656: finish migrating LJ::journal_base to $u->journal_base
Category: Misc Backend, we're not LJ
Patch by:

kareila
Description: This one took a little less doing than 2653.

Bug 2664: remove LJ::can_manage and LJ::can_manage_other
Category: Misc Backend, we're not LJ
Patch by:

kareila
Description: For code that was already replaced, you might think that this one would take less doing.

Bug 2674: category headers on manage/subscriptions/* no printed
Category: Misc UI/Frontend, fixing what's broke
Patch by:

kareila
Description: This passes in category headings to the subscriptions page correctly, and incidentally makes the code prettier-looking.

Bug 2694: fix display logic for "special themes" in moodlist.bml
Category: Misc UI/Frontend, fixing what's broke
Patch by:

kareila
Description: There was some weird logic on the mood theme page. Fixed!

Bug 2675: archive and tags pages unusable in Tehotenion (Transmogrified)
Category: Style System, fixing what's broke, your reading convenience
Patch by:

ninetydegrees
Description: White text on a white background is only good for spoilers, not the archive or tags pages of a journal.

Bug 2671: Crossposting links don't display on site scheme pages
Category: Crossposter, fixing what's broke, your reading convenience
Patch by:

fu
Description: If you crosspost the entry, and have the feature to display the links to the places where you crossposted it turned on, it would be good if those links showed up on the entry when you view it in sitescheme as well as in the S2 style. This bug was filed before I even spotted it on my own journal and suggested that it get fixed.

Bug 2685: Unicode line separator in an entry causes dynamic cut expander to fail
Category: Journal contents, fixing what's broke, your reading convenience
Patch by:

fu
Description: The shiny new cut expander is a very good thing. The shiny new cut expander breaking is not a good thing. Strips some unicode characters that were causing the expander to break.

Bug 2689: Poster + maint option makes no sense for tags control
Category: Tags, communities
Patch by:

fu
Description: If you're going to allow the creator of each entry to create new tags for the community, you might as well allow the whole community (or a custom security group within the community) to add new tags. (This patch does remove the ability for entry author to remove tags from an entry as well as admins, but no-one else; if you were actually using that feature, please do hit up

dw_suggestions.)

Bug 2695: Syntax error in ConfCheck/General.pm for $MAX_WT_EDGES_LOAD
Category: Misc Backend
Patch by:

fu
Description: Syntax error fixed. Nothing to see here. Move along, move along!

New Theme

Bug 2654: Theme: Hunter Green (Nouveau Oleanders)
Category: Style System, the shiny
Patch and theme by:

dancing_serpent (first patch! Hooray!)
Description: A new theme for Nouveau Oleanders:

Dark header and light decorations, with dark green sidebar and footer; light entry background, and dark entry text.