Typo 4.0 plans

Posted by Scott Laird Wed, 01 Mar 2006 14:54:22 GMT

We’ve been talking about releasing a new stable version of Typo since October, with no real success. Frankly, I’ve only spent a few hours per month on Typo since I started working for Google in late November, and that’s not enough to get a major release out. Fortunately, most of the weirdness in my personal schedule seems to be over, now that I’m done commuting back and forth between Seattle and Silicon Valley once or twice per month. I still don’t have as much free time as I used to (Google keeps me busy), but I’m not spending every minute preparing to travel and dealing with the consequences of life on the road.

So, now that I’m back on a normal schedule, it’s time to get serious about releasing a stable version of the current Typo trunk. I’d like to release Typo 4.0.0 before April 1st. Frankly, 95% of the features that we want for Typo 4.0 are already in the tree, so mostly we just need bug fixing and testing. There are a few features that need some finishing work, and one feature that still needs to be implemented, but late March should be workable, if people can pitch in and help a bit.

As I see it, here are the areas that we really need to work on:

  • Trackbacks (they’re still utterly broken)
  • Podcasting (cleanup and testing)
  • Notifications
  • Threaded comment support (optional)
  • Migration cleanups
  • Merge one or two theme contest themes.
  • Bugs, bugs, bugs

I should probably explain the “threaded comments” bit–months and months ago, I wrote some threaded comment code for Typo. Tobi didn’t want it in Typo, so he (correctly) refused to merge it. I’m still using my threaded comment code here, maintaining it in parallel with the Typo trunk. The problem is that there’s no easy way to merge the old threaded comment code with Piers’s big STI patchset, so I’m stuck running an older version of Typo here. I can’t upgrade without either losing all of the threading information that I’ve accumulated or spending some time adding minimal threaded comment support to Typo. I’ve discussed my Big Plan for comments in Typo, but I don’t think I’ll have time to implement everything in the next month; instead I want to concentrate on getting something released, and then we’ll spend some more time enhancing comments for Typo 4.1.

There’s one big thing that I need from people if we’re going to be able to make this schedule: help getting back on top of all of the bugs in Typo’s Trac. We were trying to keep the number of open tickets below 50 for most of last year, but now we’re up to 165, and that’s too many for me to easily manage. So, I need to start applying patches and closing them. If there’s a patch that’s ready to apply, or a simple ticket that doesn’t need more then 5 minutes worth of work, can you please leave a comment here? Thanks.

Finally, to answer the inevitable question: where is Typo 3.0, you ask? Months ago, we decided to skip version 3.0, to avoid confusion with Typo3. So we’re going from Typo 2.x to Typo 4.x. That’s it.

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Comments

  1. Tom Moertel said about 2 hours later:

    bq. If there’s a patch that’s ready to apply, or a simple ticket that doesn’t need more then 5 minutes worth of work, can you please leave a comment here?

    Sure thing: “Patch #657”:http://www.typosphere.org/trac/ticket/657

    The patch gives Typo’s existing spam protection a good tune-up. It changes only 27 lines and applies cleanly to the current trunk (rev. 865).

    –Tom

  2. Phil said about 3 hours later:

    Heh; I thought version 3 was something like Liesure Suit Larry IV.

    (In Space Quest IV you travel forward in time to Space Quest XII and delete Larry IV. They never released Larry IV.)

  3. Magnus Hult said about 4 hours later:

    I submitted a trackback and pingback patch for head in ticket http://typosphere.org/trac/ticket/526 a few weeks ago. It solves many of the problems with Typo’s trackback system, most notably by treating weblogUpdates.pings, pingbacks, and trackbacks.

    It’s not perfect, but it’s a start.

  4. Magnus Hult said about 4 hours later:

    My comment above should read “…treating weblogUpdates.pings, pingbacks, and trackbacks in different ways”.

  5. Scott Laird said about 12 hours later:

    Thanks. Applied.

  6. Bob Aman said about 12 hours later:

    Regarding TrackBacks, just a heads-up, the TrackBack spec looks like it’s going to change. Most notably, at the moment, it looks like RDF autodiscovery is going away and getting replaced with normal header link autodiscovery like virtually every other system out there. (Yay!)

    Rational TrackBack autodiscovery can’t come soon enough.

  7. Bob Aman said about 13 hours later:

    Oh yeah, and definitely, I’m glad Tobi rejected threaded comments. Unless you’re SlashDot scale, they just get in the way.

  8. pdcawley@bofh.org.uk said 2 days later:

    Personally, I have to disagree. I can live without threaded comments, but I prefer to have them (even if they’re only used for sort order without any indentation…)

  9. pdcawley@bofh.org.uk said 2 days later:

    I’m sure it will change. Magnus’s patch is a much better place to start from when that change comes than what was there before I applied it.

  10. pdcawley@bofh.org.uk said 2 days later:

    And a very good start it is too. After a certain amount of cursing it got applied to the trunk and appears to be working well. However, on a point of principle, debugging could be a pain because the catch all exception handlers meant that the error dumps from testing were positively misleading. When I finally thought to look in test.log, things got a good deal easier to debug.

  11. Rodger Donaldson said 3 days later:

    Threads generally make comments much clearer, even at the blod/LiveJournal level.

  12. Karthik said 5 days later:

    threaded comments are much cleaner, and I think a better way to go long term.

  13. Karthik said 5 days later:

    A suggestion I would have is the addition of a rich text control for adding articles? One that would allow for numbered/unnumbered bullets,easy links, and easy images. Similar to the way wordpress does it. I see this as a pretty basic feature that should be fairly easy to add.

    If someone can help me with this I would love to contribute. E-mail me at kar@webgambit.com. Thanks.

  14. kevin ashley said 5 days later:

    Hey. I think i chatted you a few times on the IRC, asking to review/submit the patch. My podcasting patch http://www.typosphere.org/trac/ticket/649 (with feeds managements in Admin, Google Earth KML feed, iTunes feed etc) has been there for months. It’s been also in prod on my podcast for about the same time: http://www.northeastskipodcast.com. I’ll probably go for the Silicon Valley Ruby Conf on April 22. If you’re there we can talk about it. I really do want to be able to commit to repository.

  15. Lanfeust said 6 days later:

    would it be nice to have a localized version of typo. i ‘m working to adapt the work have done on customized version of typo to show a fully localized version of typo svn 876 in french and dutch. (Except the cache system) based on a modified version of the madrobby plug-in Localization

  16. Ajay said 10 days later:

    I agree that threading is useful. This blog isn’t particularly highly commented on but threading makes it much easier to read.

  17. Piers Cawley said 11 days later:

    Where are the tests? I don’t know about Scott, but I’m not happy about adding a large patch like that which doesn’t come with a similarly large addition to the test suite.

  18. kevin said 22 days later:

    ok, i’ll add the test cases :-) it’s about time.

  19. Ajay said about 1 month later:

    I recommend ticket #768 as a quick patch that is necessary. I added it to my typo install and it fixed the problem for me.

  20. Watts said 2 months later:

    So how are these plans for Typo 4.0 coming? I’ve been playing around with a very recent build (rev 1055) and have it running, but I’ve noticed that the dispatch.fcgi process is taking up 50M just sitting there, without any page hits at all. In light of the post a few months back about the memory leaks relating to the components, should this worry me? It does seem a little high.

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