Since June, as part of my work for PGX, I’ve been doing on-site full-time
consulting for iovation here in Portland. iovation is in the business of
deterring online fraud via device identification and reputation. Given the
nature of that business, a whole lot of data arrives every day, and I’ve been
developing PostgreSQL-based solutions to help get a handle on it. The work has
been truly engaging, and a whole hell of a lot of fun. And there are some really
great, very smart people at iovation, whom I very much like and respect.
So much so, in fact, that I decided to accept their offer of a full time
position as “Senior Data Architect.” I started on Monday.
I know, crazy, right? They’ve actually been talking me up about it for a long
time. In our initial contact close to two years ago, as I sought to land them as
a PGX client, they told me they wanted to hire someone, and was I interested. I
said “no.” I said “no” through four months of contracting this summer and fall,
until one day last month I said to myself, “wait, why don’t I want this job?”
I had been on automatic, habitually insisting I wasn’t interested in a W2
position. And with good reason. Aside from 15 months as CTO at values of n
(during which time I worked relatively independently anyway), I’ve been an
independent consultant since I founded Kineticode in November of 2001. Yeah.
Ten Years.
Don’t get me wrong, those ten years have been great! Not only have I been able
to support myself doing the things I love—and learned a ton in the process—but
I’ve managed to write a lotofgreatcode. Hell, I will be
continuing as an associate with PGX, though with greatly reduced
responsibilities. And someday I may go indy again. But in the meantime, the
challenges, opportunities, and culture at iovation are just too good to pass up.
I’m loving the work I’m doing there, and expect to learn a lot over the next few
years.
So what, you might ask, does this mean for Kineticode, the company I founded to
offer support, consulting, and training services for Bricolage CMS? The truth
is that Kineticode has only a few technical support customers left; virtually
all of my work for the last two years has been through PGX. So I’ve decided to
shut Kineticode down. I’m shifting the Bricolage tech support offerings over to
PGX and having Kineticode’s customers move there as their contacts come up for
renewal. They can expect the same great service as always. Better even, as there
are 10 associates in PGX, and, lately, only me at Kineticode. Since Kineticode
itself is losing its Raison d’être, it’s going away.
I intend to remain involved in the various open-source projects I work on. I
still function as the benevolent dictator of Bricolage CMS, though other folks
have stepped up their involvement quite a lot in the last few years. And I
expect to keep improving [PGXN] and DesignScene as time allows (I’ve actually
been putting some effort into both in the last few weeks; watch for PGXN
and Lunar/Theory announcements in the coming weeks and months!). And, in fact,
I expect that a fair amount of the work I do at iovation will lead to blog
posts, conference presentations, and more open-source code.
This is going to be a blast. Interested in a front-row seat? Follow me on
Twitter.
Bricolage 2.0 was released today. This is a pretty big deal, and a long time
coming. The most important changes, from my point of view, are:
Revamped UI. As a 2006 Google Summer of Code project, Marshall Roch
added a slew of Ajaxy goodness to the Bricolage UI. It used to be that, to
dig down into a document, you needed to click through reloads for every
level. Now the entire structure of a document is available on a single
screen, and digging down takes place in situ. This means faster, easier
document editing.
There are other niceties too, thanks to Marshall, like as-you-type
autocompletion of category URIs and keywords, popups for associating related
documents, dynamic field generation for document keywords and user contacts,
and animated workflow actions for moving, deleting, and publishing
documents.
These changes mark a truly impressive improvement in usability for the
people who use Bricolage every day, and will by far be the most welcome
change for our users.
Finer content control. Thanks to another 2006 Google Summer of Code
project, Christian Muise implemented what we call “element occurrence
specification.” Bricolage document structure is controlled by administrators
creating document types with hierarchies of elements. Elements may contain
fields—the types and value of which may also be specified (text, textarea,
select list, etc.)—and other elements.
In previous versions of Bricolage, if an element was a subelement of a
document, one could add any number of that element to a document. Fields
were a bit more controlled: you could only say whether one or many instances
of a field were allowed in a given element.
Element occurrence specification allows administrators to have much finer
control over document elements by specifying the minimum and maximum number
of instances of an element or field may occur. For example, one can say that
a document may have only one instance of a field, or must have three, or may
have between 3 and 5, or may have at least 3, or may have any number,
including none.
Want every book review you publish to contain at least three but no more
than 10 ISBN numbers? Want exactly four pull-quotes in every article? You
can do that in Bricolage 2.
MySQL support. This, too, was a 2006 Google Summer of Code project, by
Andrei Arsu. Yes, you can run Bricolage 2.0 on MySQL 5.0 if you want. This
was a pretty big project, and I’m surprisingly pleased at how well it works
now that all the kinks have been worked out (special thanks to Waldo
Jaquith for being brave (foolish?) enough to start a Bricolage project on
MySQL and thus to shake out some bugs).
Apache 2 support. This was started quite some time ago by Chris Heiland,
hacked on later by Scott Lanning, and finally finished by yours truly. I
look forward to dumping Apache 1 in the future.
There’s other stuff, too, lots of little things and not-so-little things.
Altogether they go a long way toward making Bricolage better.
It’s been quite a day, and I’m glad to have it out the door. Four years is a
long time to wait for a major release, and it happened not because of me, but
thanks to the work of others who have picked up the gauntlet. Huge thanks
especially to:
The Google Summer of Code, especially the 2006 projects (yes, we finally
shipped them!).
Phillip Smith, who spearheaded the terrific new bricolagecms.org design,
updated the Bricolage 2.0 context-sensitive help, and generally pushed
forward the Bricolage marketing and social media agenda (follow
@bricolagecms!).
Just a quick followup on the completion of the Bricolage Git migration last
week, today I completed writing up a set of GitHub wiki documents explaining
to my fellow Bricoleurs how to start hacking. The most important bits are:
Working with Git, explaining how to get set up with a forked Bricolage
repository
Contributing a Bug Fix, an intro to the Git way of doing things (as far as
I understand it)
Creating a Release, in which the fine art of branching, tagging, and
releasing is covered
If you’re familiar with the “Git way,” I would greatly appreciate your feedback
on these documents. Corrections and comments would be greatly appreciated.
I also just wanted to say that the process of reconstructing the merge history
from CVS and Subversion was quite an eye-opener for me. Not because it was
difficult (it was) and required a number of hacks (it did), but because it
highlighted just how much better a fit Git is for the way in which we do Open
Source software development. Hell, probably closed-source, too, for that matter.
I no longer will have to think about what revisions to include in a merge, or
create a branch just to “tag” a merge. Hell, I’ll probably be doing merges a
hell of a lot more often, just because it’s so easy, the history remains intact,
and everything just stays more up-to-date and closely integrated.
But I also really appreciate the project-based emphasis of Git. A Subversion
repository, I now realize, is really very much like a versioned file system.
That means where things go is completely ad-hoc, or convention-driven at best.
And god forbid if you decide to change the convention and move stuff around!
It’s just so much more sane to get a project repository, with all of the
history, branches, tags, merges, and everything else, all in one package. It’s
more portable, it’s a hell of a lot faster (ever tried to check out a Subversion
repository with 80 tags?), and just tighter. it encourages modularization,
which can only be good. I’ll tell you, I expect to have some frustrations and
challenges as I learn more about using Git, but I’m already very much happier
with the overall philosophy.
Enough evangelizing. As a last statement on this, I’ve uploaded the Perl scripts
I wrote to do this migration, just in case someone else finds them useful:
bric_to_git migrated Subversion from r5517 to Git.
stitch stitched the CVS-migrated Git repository into the
Subversion-migrated Git repository for a final product.
It turned out that there were a few files lost in the conversion, which I
didn’t notice until after all was said and done, but overall I’m very happy. My
thanks again to Ask and the denizens of #git for all the help.
Now that I’ve successfully migrated the old Bricolage SourceForge CVS
repository to Git, and also migrated Subversion to Git, it’s time to stitch
the two repositories together into one with all history intact. I’m glad to say
that figuring out how to do so took substantially less time than the first two
steps, thanks in large part to the great help from “doener,” “Ilari,” and
“Fissure” on the Freenode #git channel.
Actually, they helped me with a bit more tweaking of my CVS and Subversion
conversions. One thing I realized after writing yesterday’s post was that, after running git filter-branch, I had twice as many
commits as I should have had. It turns out that git filter-branch rewrites all
commits, but keeps the old ones around in case you mess something up. doener
also pointed out that I wasn’t having all grafts properly applied, because
git filter-branch only applies to the currently checked-out branch. To get all
of the branches, he suggested that I read the git-filter-branch documentation,
where I’ll find that git filter-branch --tag-name-filter cat -- --all would
hit all branches. Actually, such was not clear to me from the documentation, but
I took his word for it. Once I did that, to get rid of the dupes, all I had to
do was git clone the repository to a new repository. And that was that.
This worked great for my CVS migration, but I realized that I also wanted to
clean out metadata from the Subversion migration. Of course, git clone throws
out most of the metadata, but git svn also stores some metadata at the end of
every commit log message, like this:
This had been very handy as I looked through commits in GitX to find parents to
set up for grafts, but with that done and everything grafted, I no longer needed
it. Ilari helped me to figure out how to properly use git filter-branch to get
rid of those. To do it, all I had to do was add a filter for commit messages,
like so:
This properly strips out that ugly bit of metadata and finalizes the grafts all
at the same time. Very nice.
Now it was time to combine these two repositories for a single unified
history. I wasn’t able to find a good tutorial for this on the web, other than
one that used a third-party Debian utility and only hooked up the master
branch, using a bogus intermediary commit to do it. On the other hand, simply
copying the pack files, as mentioned in the Git Wiki–and demonstrated by the
scripts linked from there–also appeared to be suboptimal: The new commits were
not showing up in GitX! And besides, Ilari said, “just copying packs might not
suffice. There can also be loose objects.” Well, we can’t have that, can we?
Ilari suggested git-fetch, the documentation for which says that it will
“download objects and refs from another repository.” Perfect! I wanted to copy
the objects from my CVS migration to the Subversion migration.
My first attempt failed: some commits showed up, but not others. Ilari pointed
out that it wouldn’t copy remote branches unless you asked it to do so, via
“refspecs.” Since I’d cloned the repositories to get rid of the duplicate
commits created by git filter-branch, all of my lovingly recreated local
branches were now remote branches. Actually, this is what I want for the final
repository, so I just had to figure out how to copy them. What I came up with
was this:
It took me a while to figure out the proper incantation for referencing and
creating remote branches. Once I got the refs/remotes part figured out, I
found that the master, rev_1_6, and rev_1_8 branches from CVS were
overwriting the Subversion branches with the same names. What I really needed
was to have the CVS branches grafted as parents to the Subversion branches. The
#git channel again came to my rescue, where Fissure suggested that I rename
those branches when importing them, do the grafts, and then drop the renamed
branches. Hence the line above that adds “-cvs” to the names of those branches.
Once the branches were imported, I simply looked for the earliest commits to
those branches in Subversion and mapped it to the latest commits to the same
branches in CVS, then wrote their SHA1 IDs to .git/info/grafts, like so:
openmy$fh,'>',".git/info/grafts"ordie"Cannot open grafts: $!\n";print$fh'77a35487f18d68b96d294facc1f1a41745ad914c '=>"835ff47ee1e3d1bf228b8d0976fbebe3c7f02ae6\n",# rev_1_6'97ef646f5c2a7c6f47c2046c8d289c1dfc30a73d '=>"2b9f3c5979d062614ef54afd0a01631f746fa3cb\n",# rev_1_8'b3b2e7f53d789bea962fe8047e119148e28865c0 '=>"8414b64a6a434b2117294c0568c1012a17bc863b\n",# master;close$fh;
With the branches all imported and the grafts created, I simply had to run
git filter-branch to make them permanent and drop the temporary CVS branches:
Now I had a complete repository, but with duplicate commits left over by
git-filter-branch. To get rid of those, I need to clone the repository. But
before I clone, I need the remote branches to be local branches, so that the
clone will see them as remotes. For this, I wrote the following function:
It’s important to skip the master and HEAD branches, as they’ll automatically be
created by git clone. So then I call the function and and run git gc to take
out trash, and then clone:
It’s important to use the file:/// URL to clone so as to get a real clone;
just pointing to the directory instead makes hard links.
Now I that I had the final repository with all history intact, I was ready to
push it to GitHub! Well, almost ready. First I needed to make the branches local
again, and then see if I could get the repository size down a bit:
And that’s it! My new Bricolage Git repository is complete, and I’ve now pushed
it up to its new home on GitHub. I pushed it like this:
git push origin --all
git push origin --tags
Damn I’m glad that’s done! I’ll be getting the Subversion repository set to
read-only next, and then writing some documentation for my fellow Bricoleurs on
how to work with Git. For those of you who already know, fork and enjoy!
Following up on last week’s post on migrating the old Bricolage SourceForge
CVS repository to Git, here are my notes on migrating the current Bricolage
Subversion repository to Git.
It turns out that migrating from Subversion is much more of a pain than
migrating from CVS. Why? Because CVS has real tags, while Subversion does not.
So while git-svn tries to identify all of your tags and branches, it’s really
relying on your Subversion repository using standard directories for all of your
branches and tags. And while we’ve used a standard for branches directory, our
tags setup is a bit more complicated.
The problem was that we used tags every time we merged between branches. This
meant that we ended up with a lot of tags with names like
“merge_rev_1_10_5665” to indicate a merge from the “rev_1_10” branch into
trunk at r5665. Plus we had tags for releases. So Marshall took it upon
himself to reorganize the tags in the Subversion tree so that all release tags
went into the “releases” subdirectory, and merges went into subdirectories named
for the branch from which the merge derived. Those subdirectories went into the
“merges” subdirectory. We ended up with a directory structure organized like
this:
This was useful for keeping things organized in Subversion, so that we could
easily find a tag for a previous merge in order to determine the revisions to
specify for a new merge. But because older tags were moved from previous
locations, and because newer tags were in subdirectories of the “tags”
directory, git-svn did not identify them as tags. Well, that’s not really
fair. It did identify earlier tags, before they were moved, but all the other
tags were not found. Instead I ended up with tags in Git named tags/releases
and tags/merges, which was useless. But even if all of our tags had been
identified as tags, none had parent commit IDs, so there was no place to see
where they actually came from.
So to rebuild the commit, release, and merge history from Subversion, I first
created a local copy of the subversion repository using svnsync. Then I cloned
it to Git like so:
By starting with r5517, which was the first real commit to Subversion, I avoided
the git-svn error I reported last week. In truth, though, I ended up running
this clone many, many times. The first few times, I ran it with
--no-metadata, as recommended in various HOWTOs. But then I kept getting
errors such as:
git svn log
fatal: bad default revision 'refs/remotes/git-svn'
----------------------------------------------------
This was more than a little annoying, and it took me a day or so to realize that
this was because I had been using --no-metadata. Once I killed off that
option, things worked much better
Furthermore, by starting at r5517 and passing the --no-follow-parent option,
git-svn ran much more quickly. Rather than taking 30 hours to get all
revisions including stuff that had been moved around (and then failing), it now
took around 90 minutes to do the export. Much more manageable, although I also
started making backup copies and restoring from them as I experimented with
fixing branches and tags. Ultimately, I ended up also passing the
--ignore-paths option, to exclude various branches that were never really used
or that I had already fetched in their entirety from CVS:
The call to svn2git converts remote branches to local tags and branches. Now I
had a reasonably clean copy of the repository (aside from the 120 or so commits
from when Marshall did the tags reorganization) for me to work with. I opened it
up with GitX and started scripting out merges.
To assist in this, I took a hint from Ask Bjørn Hansen, sent in email in
response to a Tweet, and tagged every single commit with its corresponding
Subversion revision number, like so (in Perl):
The nice thing about this is that it made it easy for me to scan through the
commits in GitX and see where things were. It also meant that I could reference
these tags when I wrote the code to manage the merges. So what I did was sort
the commits in reverse chronological order, and then search for those with the
word “merge” in their subjects. When one was clearly for a merge (as opposed to
simply using the word “merge”), I would disable the search, scroll through the
commits until I found the selected commit, and then look for a likely prior
commit that it merged from.
This was a bit of pain in the ass, because, unfortunately, GitX doesn’t keep the
selected commit record in the middle of the screen when you cancel the search.
Mail.app does this right: If I do a search, select a message, then cancel the
search, the selected message is still in the middle of the screen. But with
GitX, as I said, I have to scroll to find it. This wasn’t going to scale very
well. So what I did instead was search for “merge”, then I took a screen shot of
the results and cancelled the merge. Then I just opened the screenshot in
Preview, looked at the records there, then found them in GitX. This made things
go quite a bit faster.
As a result, I added a migration function to properly tag merges. It looked like
this:
By referencing revision tags explicitly, I was able to just use git rev-parse
to look up SHA1 hash IDs to put into .git/info/grafts. This saved me the
headache of dealing with very long IDs, but also allowed me to easily keep track
of revision numbers and branches (the branch information is actually superfluous
here, but I kept it for my sanity). So, basically, for
[qw( trunk@5524 rev_1_8@5523 )], it ends up writing the SHA1 hashes for r5524,
the existing parent commit for r5524 (that’s the $commit^ bit), and for the
new parent, r5523. I ended up with 73 merges that needed to be properly
recorded.
With the merges done, I next dove into branches. For some reason, git-svn
failed to identify a parent commit for any branch. Maybe because I started
with r5517? I have no idea. So I had to search through the commits to see when
branches were started. I mainly did this by looking at the branches in ViewVC.
By clicking each one, I was able to see the earliest commit, which usually had a
name like “Created a branch for my SoC project.” I would then look up that
commit in ViewVC, such as r7423, which started the “dev_ajax” branch, just to
make sure that it was copied from trunk. Then I simply went into GitX, found
r7423, then looked back to the last commit to trunk before r7423. That was the
parent of the branch. With such data, I was able to write a function like this:
Here I only needed to look up the revision and its parent and write it to
.git/info/grafts. Then all of my branches had parents. Or nearly all of them;
those that were also in the old CVS repository will have to wait until the two
are stitched together to find their parents.
Next I needed to get releases properly tagged. This was not unlike the merge tag
work: I just had to find the proper revision and tag it. This time, I looked
through the commits in GitX for those with “tag for” in their subjects because,
conveniently, I nearly always used this phrase in a release tag, as in “Tag for
the 1.8.11 release of Bricolage.” Then I just looked back from the tag commit to
find the commit copied to the tag, and that commit would be tagged with the
release tag. The function to create the tags looked like this:
subtag_releases{print"Tagging releases\n";formy$spec(['rev_1_8@5726'=>'v1.8.1'],['rev_1_8@5922'=>'v1.8.2'],['rev_1_8@6073'=>'v1.8.3'],){my($where,$tag)=@{$spec};my($branch,$rev)=split/[@]/,$where;my$tag_date=`git show --pretty=format:%cd -s $rev`;chomp$tag_date;local$ENV{GIT_COMMITTER_DATE}=$tag_date;systemqw(git tag -fa),$tag,'-m',"Tag for $tag release of Bricolage.",$rev;}}
I am again indebted to Ask for the code here, especially to
set the date for the tag.
Since I had created new release tags and recreated the merge history in Git, I
no longer needed the old tags from Subversion, so next I rewrote the
--ignore-paths option to exclude all of the tags directories, as well as some
branches that were never used:
With this in hand, I killed off the call to svn2git, opting to convert trunk
and the remote branches myself (easily done by copying-and-pasting the relevant
Perl code). Then all I needed to do was clean up the extant tags and run
git-filter-branch to make the grafts permanent:
subfinish{print"Deleting old tags\n";my@tags=grepm{^tags/},map{s/^\s+//;s/\s+$//;$_}`git branch -a`;systemqw(git branch -r -D),$_for@tags;print"Deleting revision tags\n";@tags_to_delete=grep{/^\d+$/}map{s/^\s+//;s/\s+$//;$_}`git tag`;systemqw(git tag -d),$_for@tags_to_delete;print"Grafting...\n";systemqw(git filter-branch);systemqw(git gc);}
And now I have a nicely organized Git repository based on the Bricolage
Subversion repository, with all (or most) merges in their proper places, release
tags, and branch tracking. Now all I have to do is stitch it together with the
repository based on CVS and I’ll be ready to put this sucker on GitHub!
More on that in my next post.
Following a discussion on the Bricolage developers mail list, I started down
the path last week of migrating the Bricolage Subversion repository to Git. This
turned out to be much more work than I expected, but to the benefit of the
project, I think. Since I had a lot of questions about how to do certain things
and how Git thinks about certain things, I wanted to record what I worked out
here over the course of a few entries. Maybe it will help you manage your
migration to Git.
The first thing I tried to do was use git-svn to migrate Bricolage to Git. I
pointed it to the root directory and let it rip. I immediately saw that it
noticed that the root was originally at the root of the repository, rather than
the “bricolage” subdirectory, and so followed that path and started pulling
stuff down. In a separate terminal window, I was watching the branches build up,
and there were a lot of them, many named like:
David
David@5248
David@584
tags/Release_1_2_1
tags/Release_1_2_1@5249
tags/Release_1_2_1@577
Although many of those branches and tags hadn’t been used since the beginning of
time, and certainly not since Bricolage was moved to Subversion from its
original home in SourceForge CVS, because Subversion has no real concept of
branches or tags, git-svn was duly copying them all, including the separate
histories for each. Yow.
I could have dealt with that, renaming things, deleting others, and grafting
where appropriate (more on grafting in a minute), but then I got this error from
git-svn:
bricolage/branches/rev_1_8/lib/Bric/App/ApacheConfig.pm was not
found in commit e5145931069a511e98a087d4cb1a8bb75f43f899 (r5256)
This was annoying, especially since the file clearly does exist in that
commit:
svn list -r5256 http://svn.bricolage.cc/bricolage/branches/rev_1_8/lib/Bric/App/ApacheConfig.pm
ApacheConfig.pm
I posted to the Git mail list about this issue, but unfortunately got no
reply. Given that it was taking around 30 hours(!) to get to that point (and
about 18 hours once I started using a local copy of the Subversion repository,
thank to a suggestion from Ask Bjørn Hansen), I started thinking about how to
simplify things a bit.
Since most of the moving stuff around happened immediately after the move to
Subversion, and before we started committing working code to the repository, it
occurred to me that I could probably go back to the original Bricolage CVS
Repository on SourceForge, migrate that to Git, and then just
migrate from Subversion starting from the first real commit there. Then I could
just stitch the two repositories together.
From CVS to Git
Thanks to advice from IRC, I used cvs2git to build a repository from a dump
from CVS. Apparently, git cvsimport makes a lot of mistakes, while cvs2git
does a decent job keeping branches and tags where they should be. It’s also
pretty fast; once I set up its configuration and ran it, it took only around 5
minutes for it to build import files for git fast-import. It also has some
nice features to rename symbols (tags), ignore tags, assign authors, etc. I’m
aware of not tool to migrate Subversion to Git that does the same thing.
Once I had my dump, I started writing a script to import it into Git. The basic
import looks like this:
I used svn2git to convert remote branches to local tags and branches The
--no-clone option is what keeps it from doing the Subversion stuff; everything
else is the same for a new conversion from CVS. I also had to run
git reset --hard to throw out uncommitted local changes. What changes? I’m not
sure where they came from, but after the last commit is imported from CVS, all
of the local files in the master branch are deleted, but that change is not
committed. Strange, but by doing a hard reset, I reverted that change with no
harm done.
Next, I started looking at the repository in GitX, which provides a decent
graphical interface for browsing around a Git repository on Mac OS X. There I
discovered that a major benefit to importing from CVS rather than Subversion is
that, because CVS has real tags, those tags are properly migrated to Git. What
this means is that, because the Bricolage project (nearly) always tagged merges
between branches and included the name of the appropriate tag name in a merge
commit message, I was able to reconstruct the merge history in Git.
For example, there were a lot of tags named like so:
% git tag
rev_1_8_merge-2004-05-04
rev_1_6_merge-2004-05-02
rev_1_6_merge-2004-04-10
rev_1_6_merge-2004-04-09
rev_1_6_merge-2004-03-16
So if I wanted to find the merge commit that corresponded to that first tag, all
I had to do was sort the commits in GitX by date and look near 2004-05-04 for a
commit message that said something like:
Merge from rev_1_8. Will tag that branch "rev_1_8_merge-2004-05-04".
That commit’s SHA key is “b786ad1c0eeb9df827d658a81dc2d32ec6108e92”. Its
parent’s SHA key is “11dbbd49644aaa607bd83f8d542d37fcfbd5e63b”. So then all I
had to do was to tell git that there is a second parent for that commit. Looking
in GitX for the commit tagged “rev_1_8_merge-2004-05-04”, I found that its
SHA key is “4fadb117a71a49add69950eccc14b77a04c8ec68”. So to assign that as a
second parent, I write a line to the file .git/info/grafts that describes its
parentage:
Once I had all the grafts written, I just ran git filter-branch and they were
permanently rewritten to the new hierarchy.
And that’s it! The parentage is now correct. It was a lot of busy work to create
the mapping between tags and merges, but it’s nice to have it all done and
properly mapped out historically in Git. I even found a bunch merges with no
corresponding tags and figured out the proper commit to link them up to (though
I stopped when I got back to 2002 and things get really confusing). And now,
because the merge relationships are now properly recorded in Git, I can drop
those old merge tags: as workarounds for a lack of merge tracking in CVS, they
are no longer necessary in Git.
Next up, how I completed the merge from Subversion. I’ll write that once I’ve
finally got it nailed down. Unfortunately, it takes an hour or two to export
from Subversion to Git, and I’m having to do it over and over again as I figure
stuff out. But it will be done, and you’ll hear more about it here.
Today I’ve finished just about over two and a half weeks of hacking on
Bricolage. It has been a couple of years since I gave it much attention, but
there was so much good stuff that other people have contributed that, since I
had a little time, it seemed worth it to give it some love. So here’s a quick
list of all that I’ve done in the last two weeks:
Fixed all reported issues with Bricolage 1.10. Scott Lanning kindly
released 1.10.5 yesterday with all of those fixes.
I integrated the element occurrence branch that Christian Muise had worked
on as his 2006 Google Summer of Code project. Christian’s project added
support for maximum and minimum specifications for subelements in Bricolage,
which allows administrators to define how many fields and elements can occur
in a story or media document. All I had to do was add a few UI tweaks to
support the new fields and their specification in the story profile, and all
was ready to go. Oh, and I did have to go back and make the SOAP interface
work with the feature, but the only reason it never did was lazy hacking of
the SOAP interface (way before Christian’s time). Nice work, Christian, and
thank you for your contribution!
I fixed a few bugs with Arsu Andrei’s port of Bricolage to MySQL, which was
his 2006 Google Summer of Code project. Arsu did a terrific job with
the port, with only a few minor things missed that he likely could not have
caught anyway. This work had already been merged into the trunk. Thanks
Arsu!
I fixed a bunch of bugs from Marshall Roch’s AJAXification of Bricolage,
carried out during his 2006 Google Summer of Code project. Marshall
actually did a lot more stuff than he’d planned, as it all went quite
smoothly. I found only a few minor oversights that I was able to easily
address. This work represents the single most visible change to how users
user Bricolage since we launched the project back in 2001. Editing stories,
in particular, is now a lot cleaner, with far fewer page loads. Thanks a
million, Marshall!
I completed the work started by Chris Heiland of the University of
Washington, Bothell, and Scott Lanning of the World Health Organization to
port Bricolage to Apache 2. They really did most of the hard work, and I
just spent several days integrating everything, making sure all the features
work, and updating the installer to handle differences in configuration. I
thought this would take me a day or two, but it actually took the better
part of a week! So much has changed, but in truth Bricolage is now better
for running on mod_perl 2. Expect to see Apache 2 bet the recommended
platform for Bricolage in a release in the near future.
I integrated a number of patches from Brian Smith of Gossamer Threads to
allow the installer to be run as a non-root user. The key here is if the
installer has to become the database super user, which is required for
ident authentication, and of course whether files are to be installed
somewhere on the system requiring super user access. This work is not done,
yet, as make upgrade and make uninstall are not quite there yet. But
we’re getting there, and it should be all done in time for 2.0, thanks to
Brian.
I added support for a whole slew of environment variables to the installer.
Now you can set environment variables to override default settings for
installation parameters, such as choice of RDBMS, Apache, location of an SSL
cert and key, whether to support SLL, and lots of other stuff, besides. This
is all documented in the “Quick Installation Instructions” section of
Bric::Admin/INSTALL.
I fully tested and fixed a lot of bugs leftover from making the installer
database- and Apache-neutral. Now all of these commands should work
perfectly:
make
make cpan
make test
make install
make devtest
make clone
make uninstall
I improved the DHTML functionality of the “Add More” widget, which is used
to add contact information to users and contributors, rules to alert types,
and extensions to media types. I think it’s pretty slick, now! This was
built on Marshall’s AJAX work.
All of these changes have been integrated into the Bricolage trunk and I’ve
pushed out a developer release today. Please do check out all the goodness on
a test box and send feedback or file bug reports! There are only a couple of
other features waiting to go into Bricolage before we start the release
candidate process. And, oh yeah, tht title of this blog post? It’s not a lie.
The next production release of Bricolage, based on all this work, will be
Bricolage 2.0. Enough of the features we’d planned for Bricolage lo these many
years ago are in the trunk that the new version number is warranted. I for one
will be thrilled to see 2.0 ship in time for OSCON.
And in case it isn’t already clear, many thanks to the Google Summer of Code
and participating students for the great contributions! This release would not
have been possible without them.
Also in the news today, the Bricolage server has been replaced! The new server,
which hosts the Web site, the wiki and the instance of Bricolage used to
manage the site itself, is graciously provided by the kind folks at Gossamer
Threads. The server is Gossamer Threads’s way of giving back to the Bricolage
community as they prepare to launch a hosted Bricolage solution. Thaks GT!
The old Bricolage server was provided by pair Networds for the last five
years. I’d just like to thank pair for the generous five-year loan of that box,
which helped provided infrastructure for both Bricolage and Kineticode. Thank
you, pair!
And with that, I’m going heads-down on some other projects. I’ll pop back up to
make sure that Bricolage 2.0 is released in a few months, but otherwise, I’m on
to other things again for a while. Watch this space for details!
Yes indeed, I am back. Was I ever gone? Well, yes, I’ve been rather busy for the
last 15 months.
But December 31 was my last day at Values of n. I’m really pleased with the
work I did there. Sandy in particular, was a pleasure to work with. I really
think that the work that Rael and I did with Sandy has been important work. Dare
I say potentially paradigm-shifting? At any rate, I’m convinced that Sandy is
really going to go places. If you haven’t signed on to become her client, do
try. Though I will no longer be as intimate with her as I have in the past,
we’re still going to keep in touch—I’m still her client. And Rael will do a
great job pushing forward with her.
So why did I leave? Well, the truth is that, after Julie’s dad died in July, I
found that I no longer had the resources to commit to the 80-100 hours/week
required to work in a startup. It was just no longer that important to me. Don’t
get me wrong, it was rewarding work, but my priorities completely realigned. It
was vital that I continue helping Rael to get Sandy’s career launched, but once
that was done, it was time for me to move on.
And what am I doing now? Well, first and foremost, I’m taking a few months off.
I’m going to spend a lot more time re-acquainting myself with the two terrific
women with whom I share a house, and just generally reset myself. Take a few
deep breaths. Relax and enjoy life a bit. Sleep in now and then. That sort of
thing.
That’s not to say that I’ll be sitting on my ass all the time. I have a very
long list of things I want to do during this time, including catch up on my
blogging (hence the title of this post), fix some bugs in Bricolage and help get
2.0 out the door, update my Perl libraries (I’ve got some great ideas for
improving SVN::Notify), finally get all my digital photos organized, etc. I
already spent much of last week revamping our mail system (I outsourced it to
FuseMail). And all that’s leaving aside all the things Julie and I want to get
done around the house. That’s the really important stuff.
But do watch for more blog posts in the coming months, too. There are a few
interesting things I want to write about, and I’ve got some serious catching-up
to do. Interested in following along on my adventures? Follow me via Twitter.
I’m very pleased to report that the Google Summer of Code Bricolage projects
have all been successfully completed. The contributions of the three Summer of
Coders, Marshall Roch, Christian Muise, and Andrei Arsu, will be included in the
next major release of Bricolage. On behalf of the Bricolage community, like to
extend my gratitude to Google for sponsoring these three excellent students to
dramatically improve the interface, capabilities, and compatibility of
Bricolage.
So what got done? Here’s a rundown:
Marshall Roch added many slick Ajax features to Bricolage. The story profile
now manages the editing of all elements and subelements in a single screen,
with no loading of a separate screen for subelements. You can navigate to
subelements by clicking on a tree structure right in the story profile.
Subelements more than three levels down will be loaded dynamically when you
get to them. You can also drag and drop fields and elements to reorder them.
Other stuff that Marshall Ajaxified:
Document and category keyword editing
Document category association
Document output channel associations
Organizations in the source profile
The “Add More” sections of the user, contributor, media type, and alert
type profiles
Roles in the contributor profile
Assets on desks and My Workspace
Marshall worked hard to integrate more interactive features into this
2000-era application, and I, for one, appreciate his hard work. Great job,
Marshall!
Christian Muise added support for an occurrence specification to element
types and field types. That means that when you make an element type a
subelement of another element type, you can specify the minimum and/or
maximum number of times that it can be a subelement. So when an element of
the parent type is created, it will automatically add the minimum number of
instances of a subelement specified for that parent type. This will allow an
entire element tree to be pre-populated as soon as you create a new story or
media document. Leaving the min and max occurrence set to 0 (zero) maintains
the old behavior (no required subelements and an unlimited number can be
added).
Christian did the same for field types, too. The old “Required” and
“Repeatable” attributes are gone; now you just specify a minimum number to
require that number of instances of a field, and a maximum number to limit
the number of instances. Together with the element type occurrence
specification, this functionality allows Bricolage administrators to have a
lot more control over the structure of the documents created by editors.
Christian worked hard to complete this project, despite other huge demands
on his time this summer (including a full-time job!). But thanks to his
active participation on the developer mail list and his willingness to ask
questions of his mentor, Scott Lanning, and myself, he overcame all
obstacles to implement these features. He even wrote a number of new tests
to ensure that it works properly and will continue to do so for the
foreseeable future.
Excellent work, Christian, and thank you so much for your contribution!
Andrei Arsu ported Bricolage to MySQL 5. Bricolage has always run on
PostgreSQL and used a number of PostgreSQL-specific features to ensure that
it ran properly and well. Andrei took these on, converting the existing
PostgreSQL DDL files to work on MySQL, figuring out how to convince MySQL to
work with some of their idiosyncrasies, and writing compatibility functions
in the MySQL driver and upgrade module so that things should largely “just
work.” As a result, for the first time ever, you can now build and run
Bricolage on MySQL. Can compatibility with other databases be far behind?
Andrei picked up Perl very quickly during this project, and was able to
understand how such horrible code as the Bricolage installer worked without
running screaming from the project. His code was well-written and his
approaches to compatibility flexible and scalable. Well done, Andrei!
Future Plans
The next tasks toward getting this code integrated and released are as follows:
Andrei will merge his MySQL port into subversion trunk. This should actually
be fairly straight-forward.
Marshall will merge his Ajaxification work into trunk. I don’t expect that
there will be any conflicts with Andrei’s work, as the two projects were
orthogonal.
Christian will merge his occurrence specification work into trunk. This will
require that he work some with Andrei to ensure that his changes to the
PostgreSQL DDLs are propagated to the new MySQL DDLS. He will also then need
to work with Marshall to make sure that the occurrence specification works
properly with the Ajaxified UI.
Once these tasks have been completed, we’ll be ready to release a development
version of Bricolage with all three of these major improvements. The development
release will allow members of the Bricolage community to start to play with the
new features, report bugs, and make further suggestions for improvement. Expect
the release sometime in the next six weeks or so.
Again, my thanks to Marshall, Christian, and Andrei for their hard work this
summer, and for all that they have contributed to the Bricolage community and
project. I hope that each will remain involved in the community, not only to
support the features they’ve added, but to work with other members of the
community to add new features, help newbies, and generally to spread the word.
Some time ago, I decided that all objects in Bricolage 2 would have Universally
Unique Identifiers, also known as “UUIDs.” A UUID is guaranteed to be
universally unique, never to be generated again by the same or any other system
now or in the future. As anyone using Bricolage knows, all stories and media
already have IDs, so why have UUIDs, as well? How does their purpose differ?
Well, first of all, the existing IDs are not really identifiers. What they are,
instead, are primary keys. However, a primary key should ideally be a
surrogate key, meaning that it has no other meaning outside of identifying a
single database row. Sometimes you can use an “intelligent key,” meaning an
attribute of the object being stored (such as a user login), for the primary
key. But the problem with intelligent keys is that, should their values ever be
changed (say a user’s name changes and company login name conventions dictate
that the login must be changed to represent the new name), all foreign key
references will be broken. It is therefore easier, and more agile, to use a
surrogate key with no inherent meaning to the object with which it is
associated.
Now, once you start using an object ID that is actually a surrogate key for
something other than identifying a row in a database, you add new meaning to
it. At that point, it is no longer a surrogate. In Bricolage, this comes up when
users want to use IDs for story URIs. At that point, the ID is no longer just a
primary key identifying a database row, but it is also an object identifier.
What happens if that identifier changes? Well, in general, it won’t, so you’d be
safe to use it for both purposes. But sometimes it does.
When? Some Bricolage users have decided to upgrade to a newer version of
Bricolage by setting up the new version on a different server, exporting their
data from the old server, and then importing it into the new. This can work
reasonably well, but it has what may be an unintended side-effect for those who
use the ID in the URI: all objects will get new primary keys when they’re
inserted into the new system.
What? you cry! Yes, that’s right. Because the ID is used solely to identify a
row in a database, when you insert an existing object into a new database, it
gets stored in a new row. It therefore gets a new ID, and your URIs suddenly
start to 404. Ouch.
The solution to this problem is to give Bricolage objects a universally unique
identifier that can work anywhere, that means nothing other than “this is a
unique identifier for this object,” and which are guaranteed not to change when
you move an object from one system to another. Happily, the UUID standard exists
for just this sort of thing. You are free to use a story’s UUID in its URI
without having to worry about it ever changing. IDs may change, but you don’t
have to worry about those.
For these reason, the forthcoming Bricolage 1.10.0 has added UUIDs to story and
media objects, these being the objects most in need of UUIDs, and they are
available for use in URIs. Looking to the future, the Kinetic Platform,
currently under development and the platform to which Bricolage 2.0 will be
ported, never exposes the primary key IDs at all. There is only the UUID for
referencing objects externally. I judge this a very good thing.
So, I’m thinking of implementing permissions in the Kinetic Platform differently
than they’re implemented in Bricolage. Bricolage has a number of fixed
permissions: READ, EDIT, RECALL, CREATE, PUBLISH, and DENY. These permissions
are cumulative, so that if you have EDIT permission, it implies READ, and if you
have CREATE, it implies RECALL, EDIT, and READ.
This design was based on Windows NT permissions (roughly), and has worked
reasonably, well, but is annoying for various reasons. The most serious drawback
is that it’s difficult to understand. I always tell people who need to manage
Bricolage permissions to read Bric::Security, and then read six more times.
But aside from the impenetrability of the current permissions design, it’s also
difficult to add new permissions: where should they fit into the hierarchy? This
is what happened with RECALL and PUBLISH, which were added in a later version of
Bricolage. To this day, it’s a bit confusing to some that, with RECALL
permission, you can RECALL a story but not CREATE one.
So I’m looking around for other permissions patterns. Unix is nice, in that
READ, WRITE, and EXECUTE permissions are all entirely independent, and apply to
three classes of objects (file owner, file group, everyone). But Unix only needs
to worry about files; Kinetic applications will have many more objects for which
permissions will need to be specified. RT uses discreet permissions with names
like “AdminQueue”, “CommentOnTicket”, “CreateTicket”, and “StealTicket” to be
applied to every user or group. This strikes me as somewhat more useful, since
the permissions are much more descriptive and can be targeted to particular
objects. In fact, the permission names even indicate to what types of objects
permissions apply!
So I’m thinking of leaving the cumulative permissions model behind and switching
to more descriptive, discreet, and potentially numerous permissions. I’m not,
however particularly fond of RT’s approach of storing the permissions as strings
in the database. Now, I could keep them as numbers, where each permission has
its own unique number. This is similar to how Bricolage permissions work. Only
I’d have to always use List::MoreUtil’s any() function to see if a
permission was in a list.
For example, say that an object had permissions with the numbers 1, 2, 5, 8, 12,
49, and 50. If these were stored in an array, then every time I had to check
permissions, the can_do() function would have to search through those numbers:
sub can_do {
my ($self, $to_check) = @_;
my $perms = $self->perms;
return any { $_ == $to_check } @$perms;
}
This isn’t the most efficient approach, unfortunately. If there are a lot of
numbers, and you were always checking one that was towards the end of the list
of permissions, it’d always take a long time. So, an alternate approach–one
that conveniently works well with discreet permissions–is to use powers of two
for the permissions numbers: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, and so on. Then,
for a given object, these can just be stored in a single number that’s created
by bit-wise ORing them together: 1 | 2 | 8 | 16. Fortunately, PostgreSQL has
a nice aggregate function for this, bit_or(). (I’ll have to create my own
for SQLite.) Anyway, then the can_do() function becomes much simpler and more
efficient:
sub can_do {
my ($self, $to_check) = @_;
return $self->perms & $to_check;
}
If the value of $to_check was in the list bit-ORed into their permissions
number, it will be returned; otherwise, 0 will be returned. Not bad, eh?
So anyway, I’m soliciting feedback. Are discreet permissions better than
cumulative permissions? And if so, are bit-wise ORed numbers the best way to
represent an object ACLs?
Well, I’ve finally gone and done it. I’ve released Bricolage 1.9.0, the first
development release towards 1.10.0, which I plan to get out sometime next month.
Among the new features in this release that I’m most excited about are a
revamped UI, LDAP authentication, and PHP 5 templating support.
The new UI is really nice. Marshall Roch ported it all to XHTML 1.0 strict
plus CSS. All the layout is done with CSS now, instead of the old 1999-era table
layouts we had before. The result is much smaller page loads, sometimes up to
70% smaller, Marshall tells me, and therefore much faster loads. Playing around
with the new version (now powering the Kineticode and Bricolage Web sites, I
do indeed find it to be a lot zippier. Couple the new UI with the new
mod_gzip support and static Mason components, and things just perk right
along! Oh, and the expandable interfaces for both lists of objects and for
editing interfaces is very nice, indeed. Thank you Marshall for the great work!
Kineticode added the LDAP authentication support. We’ve been using a patch for
it against 1.8.x for our internal version of Bricolage and it works great. Now
we authenticate off of an OpenLDAP server, using the same usernames and
passwords we use for our email, Subversion, and RT servers. The configuration
is simple, via bricolage.conf directives, and you can even limit users who
authenticate to members of a particular LDAP group. Users must exist in
Bricolage, and if LDAP authentication fails, you can fall back on Bricolage’s
internal authentication. I’m hoping that the LDAP support goes a long way
towards attracting more enterprise customers with single sign-on requirements.
And finally—yes, you heard right—Bricolage now supports PHP 5 templating in
addition to the existing Perl-based templating architectures (Mason, Template
Toolkit, and HTML::Template). So how did we add PHP 5 templating to a
mod_perl application? Easy: we hired George Schlossnagle of Omni TI to
write PHP::Interpreter, an embedded PHP 5 interpreter. Now anyone can natively
execute PHP 5 code from a Perl application. Not only that, but the PHP 5 code
can reach back into the Perl interpreter to use Perl modules and objects! Here’s
an example that I like to show off to the PHP crowd:
<?php$perl=Perl::getInstance();$perl->eval("use DBI");$perl->eval("use DateTime");$dbh=$perl->call("DBI::connect","DBI","dbi:SQLite:dbname=dbfile");$dbh->do("CREATE TABLE foo (bar TEXT, time DATETIME)");$now=$perl->call("DateTime::now","DateTime");$ins=$dbh->prepare("INSERT INTO foo VALUES (?, ?)");$ins->execute("This is a test",$now);$sel=$dbh->prepare("SELECT bar, time FROM foo");$sel->execute();$a=array("foo","bar");foreach($sel->fetch()as$val){echo"$val\n";}$sel->finish();$dbh->do("DROP TABLE foo");$dbh->disconnect();?>
Note that George plans to add convenience methods to load Perl modules and call
Perl class methods. Now, to execute this code from Perl, all you have to do is
write a little script, call it pphp, like so:
Then just execute your PHP code with the script: pphp try.php. Yes, this
does work! For years, when I’ve run across a PHP coder who wanted to try to
tell me that PHP was better than Perl, I always had a one-word reply that left
him cursing and conceding defeat: “CPAN.” Well no more. Now PHP hackers can
use any module on CPAN, too!
And as for Bricolage, the integration of PHP 5 templating is completely
transparent. Users just write PHP 5 templates instead of Mason templates and
that’s it! For example, this is a fairly common style Bricolage Mason template:
<%perl>;formy$e($element->get_elements(qw(header para _pull_quote_))){my$kn=$e->get_key_name;if($kneq"para"){$m->print("<p>",$e->get_data,"</p>\n");}elsif($kneq"header"){# Test sdisplay_element() on a field.$m->print("<h3>",$burner->sdisplay_element($e),"</h3>\n");}elsif($kneq"_pull_quote_"&&$e->get_object_order>1){# Test sdisplay_element() on a container.$m->print($burner->sdisplay_element($e));}else{# Test display_element().$burner->display_element($e);}}$burner->display_pages("_page_");</%perl>
The same template in PHP 5 looks like this:
<?php# Convenience variables.
$story=$BRIC["story"];$element=$BRIC["element"];$burner=$BRIC["burner"];foreach($element->get_elements("header","para","_pull_quote_")as$e){$kn=$e->get_key_name();if($kn=="para"){echo"<p>",$e->get_data(),"</p>\n";}elseif($kn=="header"){# Test sdisplay_element() on a field.
echo"<h3>",$burner->sdisplay_element($e),"</h3>\n";}elseif($kn=="_pull_quote_"&&$e->get_object_order()>1){# Test sdisplay_element() on a container.
echo$burner->sdisplay_element($e);}else{# Test display_element().
$burner->display_element($e);}}$burner->display_pages("_page_");?>
Yes, you are seeing virtually the same thing. But this is just a simple template
from Bricolage’s test suite. The advantage is that PHP 5 coders who are familiar
with all the ins and outs of PHP 5 can just jump in an get started writing
Bricolage templates without having to learn any Perl! The Bricolage objects have
exactly the same API as they do in Perl, because they are exactly the same
objects! So everyone uses the same API documentation for the same tasks. The
only issue I’ve noticed so far is that PHP 5 does not yet have proper Unicode
support. Since all content in Bricolage is stored as UTF-8, this means that the
PHP 5 templates must treat it as binary data. But this is okay as long as
templaters use the mb_* PHP 5 functions to parse text.
Overall I’m very excited about this, and hope that it helps Bricolage to reach a
whole new community of users. I’d like to thank Portugal Telecom—SAPO.pt for
sponsoring the development of PHP::Interpreter and its integration into
Bricolage. I believe that they’ve really done the Bricolage community a great
service, and I hope that the Perl and PHP communities likewise benefit from the
integration possible with PHP::Interpreter.
And just so that the other templating architectures don’t feel left out, here is
how the above template looks in Template Toolkit:
[% FOREACH e = element.get_elements("header", "para", "_pull_quote_") %]
[% kn = e.get_key_name %]
[% IF kn == "para" %]
<p>[% e.get_data %]</p>
[% ELSIF kn == "header" %]
[% # display_element() should just return a value. %]
<h3>[% burner.display_element(e) %]</h3>
[% ELSIF kn == "_pull_quote_" && e.get_object_order > 1 %]
[% PERL %]
# There is no sdisplay_element() in the TT burner, but we"ll just
# Play with it, anyway.
print $stash->get("burner")->display_element($stash->get("e"));
[% END %]
[% ELSE %]
[% # Test display_element(). %]
[% burner.display_element(e) %]
[% END %]
[% END %]
[% burner.display_pages("_page_") %]
These templates come from the Bricolage test suite, where until this release,
there were never any template tests before. So you can see that the PHP 5
templating initiative has had major benefits for the stability of Bricolage,
too. Now that I’ve really worked with all four templating architectures in
Bricolage, I can now say that my preference for which to do goes in this order:
Mason, because of its killer autohandler and inheritance architecture
PHP 5 or Template Toolkit are tied for second place
HTML::Template
In truth, all four are capable and have access to the entire Bricolage API so
that they can output anything. So what are you waiting for? Download Bricolage
and give it a try!
The Bricolage development team is pleased to announce the release of Bricolage
1.8.6. This maintenance release addresses numerous minor issues in Bricolage
1.8.5 and adds a number of improvements, including SOAP, document expiration,
and bric_queued fixes. The most important changes include:
Improvements
Added JavaScript code to validate that the username in the user profile does
not have leading or trailing spaces. [David]
Events in the event log are now returned (and displayed) in reverse
chronological order. [David]
The SOAP server now uses a user’s template sandbox when executing previews
(such as with bric_soap --to-preview workflow publish). Reported by
Marshall. [David]
Bric::Biz::Workflow now caches calls to allowed_desks(). This will allow
desks to render much Faster, since most assets on a desk will list the
same desks in the “Move to” select lists. [David]
When the PUBLISH_RELATED_ASSETSbricolage.conf directive is enabled,
aliases are now also republished. Only aliases that have previously been
published will be republished, and only the last published version will be
republished, rather than any versions created since the last publish.
Suggested by Serge Sozonoff. [David]
A story or media document published with an expire date earlier than the
scheduled publish time no longer bothers with the publish but just expires
the story or media document. [David]
Media documents without an associated media file will no longer be displayed
in the search results when attempting to relate a media document to an
element. Reported by Adam Rinehart. [David]
Bug Fixes
Form validation and group management now properly work in the user profile.
[David]
The SFTP mover now works with bric_queued. [David]
Cloned stories now properly set the published_version attribute to undef
rather than the value of the original story, thus preventing the clone from
having a published version number greater than its current version number.
Reported by Nate Perry-Thistle and Joshua Edelstein. [David and Nate
Perry-Thistle]
When a category is added to a story that creates a URI conflict, the new
category does not remain associated with the story in the story profile
after the conflict error has been thrown. Reported by Paul Orrock. [David]
Contributor groups created in the contributor profile are no longer missing
from the contributor manager search interface. Reported by Rachel Murray and
Scott. [David]
The favicon.ico works again. [David]
Stories are now properly expired when the BRIC_QUEUEDbricolage.conf
directive is enabled. Reported by Scott. [David]
When a template is checked out of the library and then the checkout is
canceled, it is no longer left on the desk it was moved into upon the
checkout, but properly reshelved. Reported by Marshall. [David]
Super Bulk Edit now works for media as well as stories. Reported by Scott.
[David]
When a template is moved to a new category, the old version of the template
is undeployed when the new version is deployed to the new category. The
versions in the sandbox are properly synced, as well.
For a complete list of the changes, see the changes. For the complete history
of ongoing changes in Bricolage, see Bric::Changes.
Bricolage is a full-featured, enterprise-class content management and publishing
system. It offers a browser-based interface for ease-of use, a full-fledged
templating system with complete HTML::Mason, HTML::Template, and Template
Toolkit support for flexibility, and many other features. It operates in an
Apache/mod_perl environment and uses the PostgreSQL RDBMS for its repository. A
comprehensive, actively-developed open source CMS, Bricolage has been hailed as
“quite possibly the most capable enterprise-class open-source application
available” by eWEEK.
The Bricolage development team is pleased to announce the release of
Bricolage 1.8.6. This maintenance release addresses numerous minor
issues in Bricolage 1.8.5 and adds a number of improvements, including
SOAP, document expiration, and bric_queued fixes. The most important
changes include:
Improvements
Added JavaScript code to validate that the username in the user
profile does not have leading or trailing spaces. [David]
Events in the event log are now returned (and displayed) in reverse
chronological order. [David]
The SOAP server now uses a user’s template sandbox when executing
previews (such as with bric_soap --to-preview workflow publish).
Reported by Marshall. [David]
Bric::Biz::Workflow now caches calls to allowed_desks(). This
will allow desks to render much Faster, since most assets on a
desk will list the same desks in the “Move to” select lists.
[David]
When the PUBLISH_RELATED_ASSETSbricolage.conf directive is
enabled, aliases are now also republished. Only aliases that have
previously been published will be republished, and only the last
published version will be republished, rather than any versions
created since the last publish. Suggested by Serge Sozonoff.
[David]
A story or media document published with an expire date earlier
than the scheduled publish time no longer bothers with the publish
but just expires the story or media document. [David]
Media documents without an associated media file will no longer be
displayed in the search results when attempting to relate a media
document to an element. Reported by Adam Rinehart. [David]
Bug Fixes
Form validation and group management now properly work in the user
profile. [David]
The SFTP mover now works with bric_queued. [David]
Cloned stories now properly set the published_version attribute
to undef rather than the value of the original story, thus
preventing the clone from having a published version number greater
than its current version number. Reported by Nate Perry-Thistle and
Joshua Edelstein. [David and Nate Perry-Thistle]
When a category is added to a story that creates a URI conflict,
the new category does not remain associated with the story in the
story profile after the conflict error has been thrown. Reported by
Paul Orrock. [David]
Contributor groups created in the contributor profile are no longer
missing from the contributor manager search interface. Reported by
Rachel Murray and Scott. [David]
The favicon.ico works again. [David]
Stories are now properly expired when the BRIC_QUEUEDbricolage.conf
directive is enabled. Reported by Scott. [David]
When a template is checked out of the library and then the checkout
is canceled, it is no longer left on the desk it was moved into
upon the checkout, but properly re-shelved. Reported by Marshall.
[David]
Super Bulk Edit now works for media as well as stories. Reported by
Scott. [David]
When a template is moved to a new category, the old version of the
template is un-deployed when the new version is deployed to the new
category. The versions in the sandbox are properly synced, as well.
For a complete list of the changes, see the changes.
For the complete history of ongoing changes in Bricolage, see Bric::Changes.
Bricolage is a full-featured, enterprise-class content management and publishing
system. It offers a browser-based interface for ease-of use, a full-fledged
templating system with complete HTML::Mason, HTML::Template, and Template
Toolkit support for flexibility, and many other features. It operates in an
Apache/mod_perl environment and uses the PostgreSQL RDBMS for its repository. A
comprehensive, actively-developed open source CMS, Bricolage has been hailed as
“quite possibly the most capable enterprise-class open-source application
available” by eWEEK.