Code Tour: 2012 Feb 1 through 2012 Feb 22

[dreamatdrew]

Oh, hey, it's a code tour....


Bug 3852: Support: allow users to see all their current and past requests
Category: Site Administration
Suggested by: ninetydegrees
Patch by: kareila
Description: Have you ever needed to ask for help for something, and then, weeks or months (or even years) later have the same problem happen and know that you to told how to do something but can't remember the actual 'how to'? Well, now, assuming that you have gotten help on a support request, you can go back and look for that wonderful information, back to the beginning of Dreamwidth. (Previously, you had to have a direct link to support requests once they were closed. Now you can get a list of all of yours.)

Bug 4225: Crossroads: new themes
Category: Style System
Patch by: delladea
Description: From inoru_no_hoshi: Aged Wine, Killjoys, and Sakura.
And from nornoriel, Turtle. All for crossroads. YAY themes.

Bug 3419: Set the number of icons to show per page in /icons
Category: Misc UI/Frontend
Patch by: exor674
Description: Have you ever wanted to look at someones icons, but they have eleventy billion, and it kills your connection because it is a sad sad thing like that? No? Only me? Well, now, instead of being dog-piled by someones icons, if someone has above 50 (I think, I could be wrong there), the list of icons gets split into pages. We love pagination!

Bug 4307: siteadmin:themes missing from DW/Hooks/PrivList.pm
Category: Misc Backend
Patch by: kareila
Description: Privilege Management at it's finest. For the record, the fancy stuff that happens, such as issuing invite codes, writing FAQs, and the like, require special privileges (or privs) to work. There are A LOT of these, and they are divided up into sections. There has been a priv to deal with theme stuff before, but it has been granted as part of the 'siteadmin' package, which has other stuff in there too. Now, if you're supposed to be working on themes, but not, say spam reports, we can tell the server "Hey, this person gets to tweak JUST the theme stuff" and it will understand what we mean.

Bug 8: Add ability to subscribe to a particular user's posts to a community
Category: Inbox/Notifications
Patch by: sophie
Description: Does just what it says on the tin: you can now get notifications when a specific person posts to a community. The option for this is near the bottom of the "track this" page, from a post in the community that said person made.
(Also: OMG A SINGLE DIGIT BUG!! YAY FOR SQUISHING IT! YAY sophie!)

Bug 4320: Options for tracking an entry are getting overwhelming
Category: Inbox/Notifications
Patch by: fu
Description: In the interest of making the wall-of-options less wall-y and more useful and easy to use, the list of options on 'track this' has been reorganized. Much less confusion should result.

Bug 2827: Also count screened comments
Category: Journal contents
Suggested by: azurelunatic
Patch by: yvi
Description: The total comment count on an entry in your own journal or a
community you administrate shows only the visible (not screened) comments. If you have an entry with a couple thousand comments but only 26 visible, it's going to show a comment count of 26. Not so helpful on an entry with 1587 screened comments, especially when it's a post you manage. Now, if you have the ability to view screened comments, you'll see something like "26 visible | 1587 screened comments". Currently, this only works on sitescheme, but now that it's been done, it can be worked into S2 styles, so keep your eyes open for that.

Bug 2923: Entries marked as nsfw/18+ by maintainers don't have an explanatory message
Category: Communities
Patch by: teganmul
Description: The "Adult Concepts" and "Explicit Content" messages work a little bit differently on a community; specifically, we differentiate between 'poster says' and 'community administrator says'. The warning pages for these entries now actually tell you what's up when an administrator has marked the post.

Bug 4317: Add archiveofourown.org & FanFiction.net to Other Sites in Profile
Category: Journal contents
Patch by: ninetydegrees
Description: You can now admit to/claim/publicize your identity on AO3 or fanFiction.net on your profile page, should you so choose.

Bug 4330: Labels on /admin/eventoutput form fields are not helpful
Category: Site Administration
Patch by: fu
Description: Have you ever moved, and instead of labeling boxes with "kitchen" and "Office" and "Bedside Table (FRAGILE!!)" you just labeled them with numbers? And then you get where you're going, and have people helping you unpack, and that new neigbhor-who-is-nice-enough-to-offer-to-help-but-not-yet-a-friend grabs Box 3? Or is that another "just me" thing? Anyway, certain fields were only being labeled by number, and anyone working on that place in the code had to go look up what "argument_475" meant. Now the things that go in the kitchen are labeled kitchen, and the fields have apropos labels as well. (And seriously, labeling things is useful!)

Bug 4309: error in LJ::Worker::ProcessSub
Category: Misc Backend
Patch by: fu
Description: ProcessSub was trying to do something it didn't necessarily know how to do, because on a web server the tool it was trying to use was generally there, but workers don't always work on web servers. So we told ProcessSub where to find the tools it needed, and it's now chugging away happily.

Bug 4332: OpenID users don't have the option to be notified when they're invited to a community
Category: Communities
Patch by: fu
Description: OpenID users now have the option to get notifications on community invitations. Yay!

Bug 1220: interest counts not being recorded properly
Category: Misc Backend
Patch by: exor674
Description: Deep Dark Voodoo: lots of things can change the counts of users/communities with a specific interest. They were not necessarily playing nicely with each-other. They have been made to play more nicely with each-other, and interest counts are now somewhat closer to reality.

Bug 4299: New Style: Marginless (+3 color themes)
Category: Style System
Patch by: momijizukamori
Description: From momijizukamori: a new style, "Marginless" with three color themes: Mars, Midnight, and Great Oak.

Bug 4205: need way for users to create pre-paid account if invites are off
Category: Payments
Patch by: fu
Description: When Dreamwidth requires invite codes, you can buy a pre-loaded invite code to create your account. When we're not using invite codes, however, you were still getting that pre-loaded invite code. Which you couldn't use, because codes were off. Cue the rum. Now, the server is smart enough to use the paid time attached to that code, even when codes are not required.

Bug 4120: ColorSide: new themes by nornoriel
Category: Style System
Patch by: delladea
Description: Five new themes with images by nornoriel: Labyrinth, Ouroboros Blue, Ouroboros Flame, Ouroboros Green, and Winter Snow.

Bug 4300: Refactor DW::Setting::View*Style
Category: Misc Backend
Patch by: exor674
Description: Code Refactoring Can Be Fun! Since we have several very similar options that don't vary in logic, we combined things to reduce redundancy and effort, and to make the code prettier.

Bug 989: Additional elements should be wrapped in a heading tag
Category: Style System
Patch by: deborah
Description: Screen-reader users loose a bit of the pretty of the site. The least we can do for them is make it so that the tags which screen-readers use to delimit bits of a page are all there and make sense.

Bug 3078: Styles: refactor the CSS styling of the navlinks module to remove the absolute positioning in some styles
Category: Style System
Patch by: ninetydegrees
Description: Absolute positioning of elements is kinda bad, because it doesn't take into account the differences between the size of, say, your laptop screen versus your smartphone screen. Now, the navlinks module uses relative positioning.

Bug 4219: CSS Structure: add .inner to .header in entries and comments
Category: Style System
Patch by: laitaine
Description: CSS cleanup and adherence-to-standards.

Bug 3227: offer text captcha as an alternative to reCAPTCHA
Category: Misc UI/Frontend
Patch by: fu
Description: Any user who for any reason, be it disability or limited bandwidth or just cuz they don't want to, does not load images, cannot get past reCAPTCHA, because you have to be able to see it. Text-based captchas use machine (and screen-reader) readable strings, like "What is two plus seven", which machines can have a hard time with, but humans can deal with easily.

Bug 4305: remove unused settings in htdocs/manage/settings/index.bml
Category: Misc Backend
Patch by: denise
Description: Even after all this time, there are remnants of LiveJournal things which we don't use that are still sticking around. This is more of the cleanup thereof.

Bug 2773: userpic title should not be keyword
Category: Misc UI/Frontend
Patch by: deborah
Description: For those unaware, when you hover over someones icon, something called a tooltip pops up. Since back when dinosaurs roamed Dreamwidth, this tooltip was based on the icon's keyword, which is not necessarily the most helpful information, for example when someone is using a picture of someone which is so tiny that it only looks vaguely person-shaped anymore, and the only keyword attached is "The Hotness". The tooltip text will now look like "username: keyword, comment (description)". The alt text, which is displayed when an image does not load, or gets used by screen-readers, has also been changed, will now be "username: description (keyword), comment". (I completely made up that example. Please do not come after me with pitchforks.)

Bug 2772: HTML for e-mail comment notifications does not include user pic alt text
Category: Misc UI/Frontend
Patch by: deborah
Description: That tooltip/screen-reader text bit that I just mentioned? Yeah, for email clients that know how to handle HTML email, the user's icon is included in that email. But those tooltips were not included. Now they are. YAY standardization!

Bug 4336: Tabula Rasa: some links are out of order
Category: Style System
Patch by: ninetydegrees
Description: Just like it says on the tin. CSS cleanup and prettification.

Bug 4220: CSS Structure: standardize the Tags Page to match other pages
Category: Style System
Patch by: ninetydegrees
Description: More CSS cleanup and standardization.

Bug 4228: Misc. Styles: new themes
Category: Style System
Patch by: ninetydegrees
Description: A bit of cleanup for some old themes, plus LOTS OF NEW THEMES:
One theme for Funky Circes by inoru_no_hoshi: Killjoys.
One theme by randomling( new theme contributor!): Sandbox; two themes by inoru_no_hoshi: Lichen, Killjoys.
Two new themes for Nouveau Oleanders by dancing_serpent: Lichtsturm; Eyeshadow and Lipstick.
Three themes for Crisped by timeasmymeasure: Eggplanted, Joy, Queries.

Bug 4296: Sidebar overlaps content slightly in Skittlish Dreams tags and icons pages
Category: Style System
Patch by: fu
Description: A few alignment tweaks for Skittlish Dreams.

Bug 4338: Link to view all icons
Category: Style System
Patch by: fu
Description: As part of that icon pagination thing we discussed earlier, we also have a page to SHOW ALL THE ICONS! This is how we get that page.

Bug 4312: Cleanup tables on site-styled /icons
Category: Modernization
Patch by: momijizukamori
Description: A whole lotta tweaks to make icons pages look prettier.

Bug 4339: unable to filter to icons with keywords/descriptions/comments containing parentheses
Category: Icons
Patch by: fu
Description: If you're searching for something based on 'does it contain parentheses', but the stack of things you're searching through always gets handed to you with extra parentheses, the search isn't going to be so useful. Now the extra parentheses aren't being handed to the searcher.


And that's it for this time! Stay tuned for more code-tour-goodness soon-ish.

Comments

[sky]

2773: Oh, that's why all my icon tooltips have HTML in them now :( Gotta say I don't think this was the best resolution for this issue.

[denise]

This was a planned change for accessibility purposes, although in practice it does turn out that including the comment field isn't working out as well and we've got a bug open to change that (so it'll just be username, keyword, and description).

[sky]

Ohh, I see! Glad to hear it.

Do you think you guys will ever consider putting the Name field back in the tooltip & alt text? Or maybe in the hover menu (though I realize that opens up a new can of accessibility worms, lol)? That field was the only thing I ever used the tooltip for, personally. Having the username in it seems a little redundant imho. I recall there was a pretty good debate about all this in Suggestions a while back, but I was never really clear why Name was removed in the first place... at any rate, it would be nice to have some way to see it again without having to take the extra step of going to each user's profile.

[denise]

No, we aren't planning to put the display name into the alt/title text or the hover menu, because in most non-RP cases the display name is completely disconnected from anything having to do with the account and it wouldn't make sense there. See further discussion in the above-linked thread to get into how you can approximate the results, though.

[sky]

If it's really that irrelevant, I wonder if it shouldn't just be gotten rid of entirely? The field as a whole seems a bit pointless if it's relegated only to the Profile and treated as though no one ever uses it for anything important. It seems to me that encourages people not to put their name in there, or really use it for much of anything.

[sophie]

Which bug is that? I'm curious about why it's not working out so well.

[goodbyebird]

Shiny! :D

[lorax]

Ooo, Bug 3852! I was just trying to find an old support request! Yay!

Is this live yet?

[ninetydegrees]

This I can answer :)

Yes, although it's not linked to from the main page yet: http://www.dreamwidth.org/support/history.

[lorax]

Awesome, thank you!

[sophie]

Bug 8 was not just a single-digit bug - it was the last open single-digit bug. :D All the single-digit bugs have now been resolved!

[musyc]

Icon pagination. Um. How can I express this in a calm and rational manner.

;LAKJSD;LFKJAL;SKDJFL;KJSADFLKJ I LOVE YOU DREAMWIDTH ;LKJSAVLKN;'O9UOEIFN

Yes, that was calm.

And OH MY GOD congratulations on that last single digit bug!!

[redcirce]

I love reading these posts, even if I have no idea how the bugs were squished.

Yay dreamwidth!