Karma's Nucleus DevBlog

Updated the Plugin API - Event List documentation on the developers version of the docs site. Newly listed events are FormExtra and ValidateForm. (At the bottom of the page)

I think it was immediately after the Nucleus v3.0 release that I was playing around with CafePress. One of the first days of June, to be exact. I set up a nucleuscms store with some products bearing the new Nucleus logo. Just for fun.

Curious about how such a t-shirt would look like, I ordered two. Shouldn't have done that. Really :) The expected two weeks for delivery turned out to be a whopping two and a halve months. The main delay was caused by the customs office, which seriously took its time to calculate the amount of taxes I had to pay. If you're ordering from Europe, shipping charges and taxes take up more than half of the total price. Be warned :)

Anyway, I finally received both and they look quite nice:

Some pictures:

• golf shirt: front & back
• ash grey tshirt: front & back (I think they made a mistake and printed the design of the "white tshirt" variant on an ash grey t-shirt, but I actually like it better this way.)

Sure, you can order products as well. If you really want to walk the streets wearing a Nucleus outfit, that is :) Just visit the Nucleus store. The products have a 0% profit margin, and it's not my intent to change that.

Stuff to read: Sending XHTML as text/html Considered Harmful (Ian Hickson). The main issue is that lots of authors are using XHTML doctypes without actually knowing what they are doing.

The Nucleus admin area uses XHTML 1.0. When in debug mode, those pages are sent as application/xhtml+xml to browsers that accept it. The only advantage there is that "UAs will immediately catch well-formedness errors". When debug mode is off, the pages are always sent as text/html. I don't think this is a problem. We're expected to know what we're doing.

The default skin (grey) however, has a HTML 4.01 doctype. Main reason is that I think it's a bad idea to expect users to write well-formed and valid XHTML when editing skins/templates. Actually, we probably can't expect them to write valid HTML4 either :)

btw, the default skin doesn't validate because of the short closing tags (/>), which have a different meaning in SGML.

I've created a few bug entries. There free to take:

• 1008173 - <%active%> in category list
• 1008171 - cookie-prefix
• 1008175 - Move loadTemplate into MANAGER class
• 1008179 - (docs) Plugin events FormExtra / ValidateForm

For those using PuTTY to connect to CVS (project members with write CVS access), it might be interesting to upgrade to PuTTY v0.55, since it "fixes a serious security hole".

The same goes for users of FileZilla. Since FileZilla uses PuTTY when connecting to SFTP servers, it was affected too. Therefore, FileZilla 2.2.8 was released.

Update: it appears that FileZilla 2.2.8 has been replaced by FileZilla 2.2.8a. Changelog is the same, though.

In a local code repository (not in CVS yet), I'm working on better handling of errors when submitting comments, as well as on the addition of captcha images for anonymous commenting.

I've applied the changes I currently made to this blog, in order to test things a little. The captcha code is largely based on hn_captcha (GPL) from Horst Nogajski, but using a database table and generating image dynamically (created a generic CAPTCHA class for that purpose). The font I used is Dustismo (GPL) from Dustin Norlander. The captcha only shows up for users that are not logged in.

The changes to the error system are that the error is no longer displayed on a separate page, but rather above the comment form itself, with the previous values filled out in the comment form again. To do this, I had to make it possible for a page to send an action such as 'addcomment' to itself, rather than through action.php.

Let me know what you think.

Does anyone know where I can find some GPL licensed TrueType (.ttf) fonts? (to be used with the PHP function ImageTTFText)

Did some work on the family of Nucleus sites today.

• Created placeholders for the documentation, skins and wiki sites, with pointers to the current location of these sites.
• Replaced the plugins website by a similar placeholder. The old plugins site is way outdated and apparently not the best way to handle things. As for the future: either this site will redirect to the plugins section of the Wiki, or this site will become a showcase site.
• Made forums.nucleuscms.org redirect to forum.nucleuscms.org.
• Re-organized the forum according to this forum topic.
• Added a navigation bar on all sites (still missing on nucleuscms.org, though) and on the forum. It's an unordered list, controlled by a single stylesheet. This way, when styles need change, only one CSS file needs to be edited. Where possible, sites should also use an include to insert the HTML for the navbar, rather than copy-pasting the HTML code. Same reason: less files to change when something is added/removed.