Code tour for 2023-11-22 to 2024-11-30

[ilyena_sylph]

Hey everyone!

Somehow we looked around at it had been an entire year since we did a code tour. What the heck even is time?

This is... not great, so here I am trying to write one for everything that's been done in the last year. Strap in, things might get a bit exciting!

Not every change is live right at this moment, but will be soon (hopefully)!



Issue 2163: check style for width and height when parsing embeds (pull request)
Category: Embeds
Patch by: kareila
Description: Making things embed much more nicely.

Issue 2315: convert /support/changenotify to Foundation (pull request)
Category: Brad in his Basement, BML go boom, Site Modernization
Patch by: kareila
Description: Moving yet more things to Foundation so that Dreamwidth will continue to function.

Issue 2638: Add twitch to embed whitelist (pull request)
Category: Embed
Patch by: chebegeek
Description: Making twitch something that can embed.

Issue 2803: Rework of /customize (pull request)
Category: Brad in his Basement, BML go boom, Site Modernization
Patch by: momijizukamori
Description: Moving yet more things to Foundation so that Dreamwidth will continue to function.

Issue 3029: [#3029] allow listing of multiple accounts for a service on user's profile (pull request)
Category: Profile Prettiness
Patch by: kareila
Description: Allows people to have multiple accounts for a service listed on their profile.

Issue 3083: optionally include expired sysbans in query results (pull request)
Category: Under the Hood (no, not a Red one)
Patch by: kareila
Description: Help for the backend work.

Issue 3214: Convert remaining shop routes to TT/Foundation (pull request)
Category: Brad in his Basement, BML go boom, Site Modernization, Money Money Money
Patch by: momijizukamori
Description: Moving yet more things to Foundation so that Dreamwidth will continue to function.

Issue 3271: standardize "Help/Support" link URL (pull request)
Category: Odds and ends
Patch by: belatedly
Description: There was an odd thing going on where the Help/Support url didn't look the same everywhere.

Issue 3284: translation string cleanup G-J plus restore local community strings (pull request)
Category: Brad in his Basement, BML go boom, Site Modernization
Patch by: kareila
Description: continuing to wrangle the mess of legacy translation strings and the occasional site-specific override.

Issue 3289: allow embeds from pbs.org (pull request)
Category: Embeds
Patch by: chebegeek
Description: Allow pbs to embed neatly.

Issue 3290: allow embeds from libsyn.com
Category: Embeds
Patch by:
Description: More places things can embed from!

Issue 3304: December points bonus (pull request)
Category: User Benefits
Patch by: kareila
Description: The code to allow last year's points' bonus to run.

Issue 3312: Re-add editjoural.bml strings for now (pull request)
Category: A little too eager with the Code Machete
Patch by: momijizukamori
Description: Accidentally removed some text strings that were still in use (for now........)

Issue 3313: Remove a bunch of strings from local deadphrases (pull request)
Category: Code Machete
Patch by: momijizukamori
Description: Got rid of some dead cruft!

Issue 3316: Move /edittags to Template Toolkit (pull request)
Category: Brad in his Basement, BML go boom, Site Modernization
Patch by: momijizukamori
Description: More BML removal! Moving yet more things to Foundation so that Dreamwidth will continue to function.

Issue 3317: Convert /manage/circle/edit to Foundation (pull request)
Category: Brad in his Basement, BML go boom, Site Modernization
Patch by: momijizukamori
Description: Moving yet more things to Foundation so that Dreamwidth will continue to function. Converts /manage/circle/edit to Foundation and gives it a bit of sprucing-up, so it's nice on mobile and has a real color picker for circle colors.

Issue 3318: Fix some minor display issues with updated /manage/circle/edit page (pull request)
Category: Brad in his Basement, BML go boom, Site Modernization
Patch by: momijizukamori
Description: We were missing one of the display icons for the /manage/circle/edit page, and I tweaked some CSS for nicer tablet/split desktop views.

Issue 3321: Convert Customize widgets to TT (pull request)
Category: Brad in his Basement, BML go boom, Site Modernization
Patch by: momijizukamori
Description: Slowly working our way through re-templating old code.... Moving yet more things to Foundation so that Dreamwidth will continue to function.

Issue 3322: Tidy up the edit tag page some (pull request)
Category: Brad in his Basement, BML go boom, Site Modernization
Patch by: momijizukamori
Description: Momiji is entirely too hard on themself, but they say "Rectifying my sins (removing tables from a page conversion I forgot to clean up). Now matches other site styling and actually looks okay on mobile."

Issue 3329: update year in site footer to 2024
Category: Site Prettiness
Patch by:
Description: Linear time is a hell of a thing, innit?

Issue 3331: Convert CustomTextModule, NavStripChooser, and CustomizeTheme widgets to TT (pull request)
Category: Brad in his Basement, BML go boom, Site Modernization
Patch by: momijizukamori
Description: But wait, there's more (widgets to convert to Template Toolkit)

Issue 3332: Clean up some bugs with converted shop pages (pull request)
Category: Site Prettiness, Money Money Money
Patch by: momijizukamori
Description: Some minor bugfixes for post-conversion shop pages!

Issue 3333: Beta Inbox updates (pull request)
Category: Bug Swatting
Patch by: momijizukamori
Description: Fix ALL the inbox bugs!

Issue 3339: trap ERR to see apache errors before the container dies (pull request)
Category: Backend Improvements
Patch by: alierak
Description: More troubleshooting info when a web container fails to start.

Issue 3340: run apache2ctl configtest before starting (pull request)
Category: Bug Swatting
Patch by: alierak
Description: More debugging in prod! (whee!!!!)

Issue 3341: fix typo in error.log filename (pull request)
Category: Typoes
Patch by: alierak
Description: Sometimes typoes get past us! Then they get fixed!

Issue 3343: show build log on cpan install failure (pull request)
Category: Backend Improvements
Patch by: alierak
Description: get debug info when a required perl module fails to install.

Issue 3344: blacklist version 2.207 of IO::Compress and related modules (pull request)
Category: Oh, Perl
Patch by: alierak
Description: avoid using a buggy version of a required perl module.

Issue 3345: cpm won't accept spaces in version spec (pull request)
Category: Ridiculous spaces
Patch by: alierak
Description: fixing a problem with the previous fix, typoes again.


Issue 3352: Fixes for updated shop pages (pull request)
Category: Bug Swatting, Money Money Money
Patch by: momijizukamori
Description: Fixing some more little bugs

Issue 3357: Update more /shop links (pull request)
Category: User experience, Money Money Money
Patch by: alierak
Description: continuing effort to direct traffic to new shop URL, where it really should be.

Issue 3362: theme chooser widget not working correctly with communities (pull request)
Category: User experience
Patch by: momijizukamori
Description: Fixed the problem with picking a theme for communities.

Issue 3365: Fix escaping for edittags page (pull request)
Category: Code is Wild
Patch by: momijizukamori
Description: TIL the HTML cleaner function in Template Toolkit expects HTML attributes to be double-quoted, and thus does not escape single quotes, leading to chaos if your attribute is single-quoted.

Issue 3366: Make our hidden inputs have a value on /manage/circle/edit (pull request)
Category: Brad in his Basement, BML go boom, Site Modernization
Patch by: momijizukamori
Description: This bit of code uses a bunch of hidden form fields to keep track of what users already exist on the list, but when we converted it to TT, these form fields were given names but no values, and an earlier step in the request processing workflow removes inputs without values, which means the code for the page didn't know where to check for changes. This has been rectified.

Issue 3367: Make the linklist button use unicode instead of an HTML entity (pull request)
Category: oh, Perl; Code is Wild, Site Modernization
Patch by: momijizukamori
Description: Moving the linkslist widget from Perl to TT meant that a character encoded as an HTML entity was not getting processed as HTML and was instead just dumping the raw HTML into the button text. As it is 2024 and we have utf8, it is now the actual utf8 symbol that was the HTML entity for, which is much tidier.

Issue 3368: remove more pnote references (pull request)
Category: Code Machete
Patch by: alierak
Description: Mark removed a function without updating everything that was calling it.

Issue 3369: back out commits for removing pnote/pnotes (pull request)
Category: Um, oops?
Patch by: kareila
Description: trying to remove dependencies on Apache, but this method was more deeply embedded than we realized, apparently?

Issue 3373: Show session messages on S2 pages, too. (pull request)
Category: Oh, Perl, Code is Wild, Site Prettiness
Patch by: momijizukamori
Description: To quote Momiji again: "We've had session message flashing (basically little temporary messages like 'Edit successful!' that show after taking an action, and which vanish when you navigate to a new page) for a while now, but when we upgraded the tag editing page, they got added there, too, and we discovered a bug: they didn't show in journal-styled pages, causing them to appear on the next site-styled page you visited instead, which was generally very confusing. This adds those messages to journal-styled pages, currently with very minimal styling.

[note to devs deleted]"

Issue 3374: Manage circle fix (pull request)
Category: Site Modernization
Patch by: momijizukamori
Description: Template Toolkit syntax is kind of cursed.

Issue 3379: update Gift Paid Time profile link to use new shop url
Category: User Experience, Money Money Money
Patch by:
Description: The 'gift paid time' was stuck in the past. Now it's joined us in the present.

Issue 3381: No longer using Freenode. (pull request)
Category: The Depths Of Time
Patch by: pauamma
Description: https://www.dreamwidth.org/about wasn't updated when Dreamwidth IRC moved from Freenode to Libera Chat.

Issue 3389: Add Socchan's Fancy Rats as a mood theme (pull request)
Category: Moods!
Patch by: momijizukamori
Description: Adorable new mood theme! Go check it out! Thank you soc_puppet!

Issue 3393: Add Socchan's Jellyfish mood themes (pull request)
Category: Moods!
Patch by: momijizukamori
Description: Another Adorable new mood theme! Go check it out! Thank you soc_puppet!

Issue 3394: Order history in shop missing dates (pull request)
Category: Site Modernization, User Experience, Money Money Money
Patch by: momijizukamori
Description: Made the shop show order history dates again.

Issue 3396: Convert /customize/viewuser to TT (pull request)
Category: Brad in his Basement, BML go boom, Site Modernization
Patch by: momijizukamori
Description: Another BML page down! Was anyone using this one? Who knows! It was short enough to convert either way.

Issue 3397: Fix profile page link to shop (pull request)
Category: Site Modernization, Regulatory Nonsense
Patch by: momijizukamori
Description: We had to move the shop to shop.dreamwidth.org for extremely unexciting compliance reasons, and most of the references to the old dreamwidth.org/shop got updated, but we missed the one on the profile page -- it would get you to the shop after a redirect, but it dropped the info about the account you wanted to buy paid time for along the way -- which was declared 'suboptimal'. This fixes the issue.

Issue 3399: set up December points bonus (pull request)
Category: Money Money Money
Patch by: kareila
Description: The code for THIS year's points bonus, which needs to go live tomorrow!

Issue 3401: theme widget preview on DW homepage has malformed credit link (pull request)
Category: Code is Wild
Patch by: momijizukamori
Description: Something was wonky about how credit was being displayed. Now it displays correctly!

Issue 3407: Remove debug code causing errors (pull request)
Category: Site Modernization, Bug Swatting
Patch by: momijizukamori
Description: It turns out debug print messages do not make valid JSON! Who knew, right? The layout chooser widget now returns valid JSON that does not cause it to spew errors when you select a new layout.

56 total issues resolved
Contributors: alierak, belatedly, chebegeek, kareila, momijizukamori, pauamma

Comments

[muccamukk]

Thank you for the code tour! When there's a chance, could you add the jellyfish to the moodtheme preview page?

https://www.dreamwidth.org/moodlist

[kareila]

I believe they will show up on page 2 once the next site update goes live!

[muccamukk]

Oh great! Thank you <3

[soc_puppet]

If you want to see them before that, you can check here ✌️ It's not all of them, and a few were reassigned to other moods, but it's a decent preview! Plus there's a download link for the files, in case you want to make a custom version with multiple colors 👍

[muccamukk]

OMG! Those are so cute!

[soc_puppet]

Thanks 😊 They were a lot of fun to make!

[havocthecat]

That is a LOT of work! Thank you!

[havocthecat]

And by that I mean to the coders and to you for writing the code tour!

[ilyena_sylph]

<3 Thanks! They've built some pretty good tools to let people like me help out!

[soc_puppet]

Yay, they're here! I'm so excited 😁🥰

I'm sure you didn't time this to land on my birthday on purpose, but since the timing worked out that way, I'm counting it anyway 😜

[ilyena_sylph]

Oh excellent!!

[msilverstar]

I find the tags Brad in his Basement, BML go boom quite nostalgic

[batrachian]

There are many fewer things in the codebase that haven't been substantially altered since 1999...

[ilyena_sylph]

We try to be entertaining and sometimes a bit nostalgic! Thanks!

[pinterface]

If you haven't already, 3365 (<tag attr='[% var | html %]'> allowing HTML injection in tt) is the kind of thing I'd encourage y'all to file a security bug against the library for. A templating library for the web should not be handing you that particular footgun.

(I filed a similar bug against the mustache spec for this very issue in ... 2013(!). It is, apparently, still unresolved. sigh)

[momijizukamori]

Oh, an excellent point - went ahead an filed a bug with TT for that :)

[teres]

Well done! I'd love to see these live.

[ilyena_sylph]

We're getting there!

[musyc]

Categories and descriptions in these always amuse me greatly. XD

[ilyena_sylph]

Yay! That was the idea!

Well, along with being informative.

[pauamma]

Splorted any coffee lately?

[musyc]

*cackle* I have tried to be very careful about that ever since buying an expensive keyboard. XD

[silverflight8]

Phew, lots to catch up on. Thanks for the code tour!

[darjeeling]

Issue 3362: theme chooser widget not working correctly with communities (pull request)
Category: User experience
Patch by: [github.com profile] momijizukamori
Description: Fixed the problem with picking a theme for communities.

Yessss I was hoping this would get fixed. Thank you!