dw_dev | Code tour: 2010-10-29 to 2010-11-04

We have 25 bugs this week, a lot of it cleanup and backend stuff, as well as 11 new themes. A bunch of these were long-running bugs, so hooray for them finally being closed :-)

Contributors this week are:

alierak with one bug resolved,

exor674 with two bugs resolved,

fu with nine,

kareila with seven,

ninetydegrees with five, and

tyggerdev with one.

Congratulations too to

kerravonsen who got her first theme submission committed!

Bug 3174: Make sitekeywords table case sensitive
Category: Misc Backend, Database
Patch by:

exor674
Description: This allows theme and vgift categories to be capitalized, without affecting interests.

Bug 2317: Implement two-token swap of two usernames
Category: Renames, Less Process
Patch by:

fu
Description: Right now, if you need to swap the usernames of two of your journals you need to buy three rename tokens and undergo a complicated process of back-and-forth. This simplifies the process so you only need two tokens, and perform the swap by filling out a form.

Bug 2966: Entryprops viewer sometimes dies without saying anything useful.
Category: Misc UI/Frontend, Site Administration
Patch by:

fu
Description: This fixes an issue with one of our diagnostic / investigative tools when dealing with crossposted entries in some circumstances.

Bug 3149: prevent entry deletion from memorial accounts
Category: Site Administration, Security
Patch by:

fu
Description: New entries cannot be posted to memorial accounts; this also prevents anyone from logging into the account, and doing anything like editing or deleting entries, for security reasons. Other users may still make comment to existing entries.

Bug 3154: "upgrade" link from account level settings redirects you to the shop front page
Category: Misc UI/Frontend, (Fixing of) Shameless Money Grubbing
Patch by:

fu
Description: The link was wrong; fixed the link.

Bug 1744: Theme categories (tags?) are hardcoded in the code backend
Category: Site Administration, Less Process
Patch by:

exor674
Description: Lovely new tool for us site admins! Theme categories used to be hardcoded, which meant that they could only change during code pushes, and it was just a lot of fiddly work to get new sets of featured themes. This admin tool allows site administrators to create and update theme categories directly on the website (for example, all the NNWM layouts are tagged appropriately; it only took 15 seconds!).

Bug 2925: Enable warnings globally on dev servers
Category: Modernization, Cleanup
Patch by:

kareila
Description: Warnings are good for reminding us about good coding practice, so we decided to turn them on automatically on development environments.

Bug 3137: Drifting: dates overlapping icons when they're on the left in Safari
Category: Style System, Oh CSS
Patch by:

ninetydegrees
Description: Fixes a display issue which only ever happened when icons were on the left.

Bug 3121: theschwartz errors
Category: Misc Backend, Site Administration
Patch by:

fu
Description: theschwartz is the system that runs the various non-realtime services like content imports, crossposts, search indexing, etc. This fixes some of the errors it was spewing into our logs (not system-critical, just annoying)

Bug 2229: update cgi-bin/LJ/ConfCheck/General.pm
Category: Misc Backend, Site Administration
Patch by:

kareila
Description: Cleans up our module which checks our site configuration, which makes the installation and validation process easier for anyone with a DW installation.

Bug 3160: site/suggest needs a graceful exit if no suggestions user is configured
Category: Misc UI/Frontend, Site Administration, Cryptic Error Messages
Patch by:

kareila
Description: Another one in the vein of making it easier for site administrators to figure out what's going on. The suggestions page is specific to Dreamwidth, but is also available on development environments. Used to be we'd get an ugly error when this wasn't set up properly, but now it shows a more helpful message.

Bug 3165: Profile email displays as "error in linkification"
Category: Misc Backend, Cryptic Error Messages
Patch by:

kareila
Description: This cryptic error message showed up on a few profiles, and was pointed out to us after last code push (though apparently it had been there for some time). This removes the cryptic error message by fixing hte underlying cause.

Bug 3176: email alias code cleanup
Category: Modernization, Cleanup
Patch by:

kareila
Description: Cleanup, makes it easier for us in case we ever nee to change this, by refactoring the code so it's all in one place. Also remo=ves a FIXED_EMAIL_ALIAS option inherited from LiveJournal, which does nothing in our case.

Bug 3177: clean up shifts in LJ::Poll
Category: Misc Backend, Cleanup
Patch by:

kareila
Description: More cleanup!

Bug 3191: Have LJ::text_trim use LJ::trim to remove trailing spaces from trimmed string
Category: Misc Backend, Do What I Need to Do When I Need It, Less Tripping Over Obscure Bugs
Patch by:

kareila
Description: LJ::text_trim makes long text shorter; LJ::trim removes whitespace before and after text. So this started after we had an obscure bug caused by inconsistencies after truncating the text, because we removed leading/trailing whitespace in one place, but didn't remove it in another. We decided that we'd always want to remove any trailing/leading spaces after calling LJ::text_trim, so instead of adding LJ::trim to every place we'd called LJ::text_trim (we could potentially forget it the next time!), we made LJ::text_trim just call LJ::trim.

"trim" no longer looks like a proper word to me.

Bug 3179: Refried Tablet: inconsistent element padding/borders
Category: Style System, Oh CSS
Patch by:

ninetydegrees
Description: There were a few doubled spaces and borders in Refried Tablet; this tweaks those so there's only one border, for a more polished look.

Bug 3183: Unnecessary lines at the top of Easy Read layouts
Category: Style System, Oh CSS
Patch by:

fu
Description: There were a couple of out-of-place lines at the top of Easy Read; this removes those, for a more polished look.

Bug 3184: Control strip causes JS files to be included multiple times
Category: Misc UI/Frontend, Bandwidth Friendly
Patch by:

fu
Description: Any time the control strip is on a page, we included some huge .js libraries twice. We have measures in place to avoid that, but the control strip was bypassing it. The fix removes the extra scripts, giving us less stuff to load.

Bug 3193: Replying to a comment in site scheme always shows the default icon
Category: Journal contents
Patch by:

fu
Description: When replying to a comment in site scheme, you'd always be shown the commenter's default icon instead of the icon they used for their comment. This was not good! Fixed.

Bug 3197: Warnings in the logs when user has a custom theme
Category: Misc Backend, Cleanup
Patch by:

fu
Description: Related to Bug 2925 above; just some cleanup of the logs.

Bug 3187: Maintenance mode page is downloaded, instead of viewable from the browser
Category: Frontend
Patch by:

alierak
Description: Discovered last code push: instead of showing the "Dreamwidth is in maintenance mode" in the browser, the page would be downloaded instead. Oops.

alierak dove into our site configuration and fixed that -- thanks!

Bug 3194: "Edit entry" link showing for users who do not have the privs to actually edit the entry.
Category: Misc UI/Frontend, Peace of Mind
Patch by:

tyggerdev
Description: Crossposted entries have a message when editing tags, which states that this change is not crossposted, and invites you to edit your entry (with a link) if you'd like the tag changes to carry over to the remote site. You can choose to allow other users to edit tags on your journal (off by default). The combination of the two led to some people seeing a link to edit the entry when they went to edit someone else's tags.

This did not actually give anyone else the ability to edit your entries, but it is a bit disturbing, so we've fixed it.

Bug 2971: Refried Tablet: 5 themes by rising
Category: Style System
Patch by:

ninetydegrees
Description: Themes:
Damage: purple