Posts in category “Software Development”

PolarBlog V1.2.2 Released

PolarBlog V1.2.2 has been released.  This release is does not contain any new features and is strictly a bug fix release.  The following issue have been addressed in this release:

  • When saving an existing entry if you used the back button to edit again, when you save the entry the second time you would get a duplicate entry error message.  The duplicate entry detection has been fixed to only operate on new entries and now allows the browser's back button to function without causing problems.  This is an acceptable action as an entry ID is defined when editing an existing entry.  The duplicate detection only needs to operate on new entries where there is no existing entry ID.
  • When editing entries, html entities that were defined were being stripped from the text that in the edit boxes.  This was mostly causing problem with "&" entities within links that display on the page.  This is only an issue if you take the time to replace "&" with the "&" entity so your pages will validate as XHTML 4.01 Strict.  I'm guessing I'm the only one that worries about these sorts of things! ;)
  • Fixed the RSS feed generator to cache the file according to the ttl value defined in the configuration.  Also, the generator now returns appropriate "Last-Modified" and "Expires" headers.  Now if more new aggregators would start respecting these values instead of blindly retrieving the file every time!  It certainly cuts down on the bandwidth that is used
  • Fixed the RSS feed generator to include full entries —both the body and more fields, instead of just the body field.
  • Comment Loop Bug - This was the biggie in this release.  The comment retrieval and display under certain conditions wouldd enter an infinite loop.  This problem was generally only seen by new users because of the nature of the problem.  It also existed for users that had upgraded, although most were likely to never have encountered it.  This problem existed because every comment has a parent ID associated with it.  If a comment was in reply to another comment that had the same comment ID as the entry, an infinite loop was being created.  To fix this problem, all comments associated with an entry are now tagged with a parent ID of 0 (zero).  This prevents the conflict from occurring without breaking the nested commenting system.  When upgrading, you MUST run the install/upgrade utility as a database fix must be made on the comment table.

Comment Looping Bug

For those who have been troubled by the commenting bug, relief is on its way!  I received an email with some very detailed debugging information as well as a solution to the problem.  I've implemented the new code on this blog and will be doing some further testing before releasing this update in the coming days.  More detailed information will be provided with the release posting, but in short this is likely only a problem new users have seen.  If you haven't seen the problem you likely won't, so consider yourself lucky! ;)

PolarBlog V1.2.1 Released

I've released PolarBlog V1.2.1 to fix a very minor comment display issue.  This change simply correct the comment word count display to match the new entry word count display…which was changed to save some space in the last release.  You can live without this update unless you are anal and easily annoyed by these sorts of things as I am!  If you want to do a quick update, download the update and then just copy the "lib/PolarBlog_class.php" file from the tar file.

PolarBlog V1.2 Roadmap

PolarBlog V1.2 will contain the following new features:

  • Ping-O-Matic! Support
  • Improved Entry Index/Archive List
  • Preview Popup
  • Double Entry Prevention
The Ping-O-Matic support has been integrated and is currently running successfully on this site.  If you are interested in the technical details, please see the Implementing Pingers entry.

The Entry Index looked nice when I originally implemented it.  At this point I think it just looks shitty and inefficient.  Sure they match the entry style, but they just waste a lot of space and have too much fluff.  Thus this will be changing to a more basic listing of entries separated into months, still in reverse chronological order.

One of the features from PWL that I had no use for was the entry preview display.  My answer to this was the display/no display option.  That fulfilled my preview needs while also adding the ability to save partial entries that could be finished later without being displayed in the meantime.  Some of you disagree and seem to miss the preview option.  Because of the way saving and displaying of entries works in PolarBlog, the best way for me to add an entry preview option is with a popup preview window.  This will have configuration options so you can set the size roughly the same as the main entry panel display area.  This is necessary because when using the left navigation option, the display area in significantly smaller.

There have been reports of duplicates when creating new entries.  The only way I know this could happen is if you use your browser's back button after creating a new entry.  Currently when you create a new entry if you use your browser's back button to backup and edit the entry, when you resubmit it, a duplicate entry is created.  This is because PolarBlog doesn't know that you've used the back button to (effectively) edit a (now) existing entry.  Thus it see this as a new entry and treats it as such.  But it really isn't, it's an edit of an existing entry.

I will be looking into adding a token value to the submission form.  This value will also be stored in your login session until the entry is created.  At that time it will be removed from the session so subsequent submission will not be excepted.  In the meantime (and always actually), once you create an entry you should only use the "Edit Entry" link to edit your entries.

Looking towards the future, here's some other features that are on the "desirable" list that may see the light of day in PolarBlog at some point:
  • I18N (Internationalization) - This will be the major focus of V1.3
  • Trackback Support
  • Pingback Support
  • Entry Posting via email
If you have other features you would like to see added, please forward them to me for consideration.

10/17/2004
I've updated the entry index to display entries by month and year in reverse chronological order.  You can see it in action on my entry index.  The devfault value for the DEFAULT_ARCHIVE_CNT configuration directive has been changed from 20 to 100 to better support the new index page.