Karma's Nucleus DevBlog

Lately, Moraes and others have been doing a lot of work on a new & improved admin area. In the CVS repository, a new branch has been created for this. Quoting Moraes:

Ok, the Branch-NewAdminArea was created. These files and the libs directory were branched:

/nucleus/nucleus/bookmarklet.php
/nucleus/nucleus/index.php
/nucleus/nucleus/media.php
/nucleus/nucleus/libs/

For information on previous tags and branches, see the archive for the CVS category.

A new tag has been added to the CVS repository, to indicate the fies for Nucleus v3.22:

• Nucleus-3-22-p0 tag, which points to the released version of Nucleus v3.22

For information on previous tags and branches, see the archive for the CVS category.

A new tag has been added to the CVS repository, to indicate the fies for Nucleus v3.21:

• Nucleus-3-21-p0 tag, which points to the released version of Nucleus v3.21

For information on previous tags and branches, see the archive for the CVS category.

A new branch has been added to the CVS repository, as well as a tag on the final Nucleus v3.2 files:

• Nucleus-3-2 branch, which will contain bugfix versions for v3.2. New stuff should go in the main branch.
• Nucleus-3-2-p0 tag, which points to the released version of Nucleus v3.2

For information on previous tags and branches, see the CVS Tags & Branches.

Yet another addition in CVS: when on the admin area as a super-admin, the Nucleus version number in the top-right corner is now clickable, and points to a version check page.

The code for account activation has been committed to CVS. I need to do some more testing and tweaking, but it's starting to look fine.

If you're tracking CVS, you'll notice the addition of an upgrade3.2.php file. This does not mean that the next Nucleus version will be v3.2. I just needed something larger than v3.1. The actual version number will be decided based on the number of changes made. The reason for including an upgrade script now, is that you'll need it to create the new nucleus_activation table.

I've been able to move the captcha functionality into a plugin, NP_Captcha. It's not complete yet. It needs some more work, but it's in the plugins project CVS repository as of now.

Captchas are now also present on the member info pages, when non-members are allowed to send e-mail messages to members.

The changes to the core are now also in CVS. I'll highlight the changes in this post.

Learned something new today: When $Id$ is present in a file, CVS replaces it by Aa standard header containing the name, revision number and date (UTC) of the file. I've added it in most of the Nucleus core files.

I've been moving some hardcoded string over to the language files. The changes are only in english.php. In order to avoid partially updated language files, I don't think it's wise to start updating other language files right away. New constants might still be added.

Some weeks before the final release of the next version, we'll mark the language file version as final and let the translators do their magic. Ideally, updated versions for all language files would then be able at the time of release.

If you come across hardcoded text, feel free to let one of the developers know. I know some pages like the bookmarklet page are entirely hardcoded in english. Didn't quite know what to do with that...

For your reference (and for my own), here's an overview of the branches and tags applied to the CVS repository:

I'm planning to release a Nucleus v3.1 version in the next few days. One of the reasons is another vulerability has been discovered (SQL insertion this time). After looking at the changes between the CVS version and 3.0, I feel like it's safe to base the v3.1 release on the most recent CVS code.

This time, I've created a special Nucleus-3-1 branch, which will be used for the 3.1 release and any critical fixes that might follow (v3.11 etc). I had some more luck creating the branch this time (read about my previous attempt on a Nucleus-3-0-1 branch). For help on selecting the 3.1 branch, see the WinCvs Daily Use Guide (provided you use the WinCvs software). A nice way to see branches & labels visualized is the 'graph selection' option in WinCVS.

Yesterday, I fixed a problem with skin import/export when CDATA sections were involved. A CDATA section is a way to include just about any "character data" in an XML file, without having to worry about the well-formedness of the XML. It's used like this: <![CDATA[...contents...]]>

Since the only way a parser can tell if such a section is finished, nested CDATA sections are a big no-no. The sequence ]]> can not occur inside a CDATA section.

Nucleus exports its skins/templates as such a section (it's the safest way, since we don't know if its valid XML), so problems arise when the skin/template itself is using a CDATA section. The skinbackup.xml file is no longer well-formed. Although only RSS/Atom/... skins are affected, and import still worked fine, the problem had to be taken care of.

I've switched to PHP 5 RC3 / Apache 2 on my local test-environment. A first discovered (and fixed) bug: [ 972115 ] PHP5: install.php fails to discover install path. I haven't seen any other problems yet. Radek has had some Blog:CMS users running into problems, however. I'll keep running PHP5 for now, and see what other problems arise.

I've claimed bug 967580 - Class variables not explicitly defined. In the next few days, I'll be taking care of one or more classes each day.

Update 2004-06-13: The commit from yesterday contained an error which caused nested ifs not to work correctly. Now fixed.

Today, I committed a small improvement to the PARSER.php class into CVS. It greatly improves performance on sites with complex if-else structures.