Month: June 2005

Comment problems

Posted on by david

After the upgrade my comments stopped working correctly. The comment form didn’t showing the Name, Email, and Website fields and would accept a comment without enforcing the mandatory Name and Email entries.

It seems that the $User_ID constant is always returning a value, even when there is no one logged in. I’ve applied a temporary hack to work around the problem (see below), but I’m going to have to look deeper to identify what is causing it.

Temporary hack follows:

File: /WP-HOME/wp-content/themes/YourTheme/comments.php
(assuming it’s based on the default theme)

Change line 74 from: <?php if ( $user_ID ) : ?>
to: <?php if ( FALSE ) : ?>

File: /WP-HOME/wp-comments-post.php

Change line 26 from: if ( $user_ID ) :
to: if ( FALSE ) :

Change line 37 from:
if ( get_settings('require_name_email') && !$user_ID ) {
to: if ( get_settings('require_name_email') && TRUE ) {

As I said, this just masks the fact that WP thinks that there is a user logged in when there isn’t. I’ll have to look deeper to identify the root cause… don’t wait up.

WordPress Upgrade

Posted on by david

I’ve been running WordPress 1.2 for a while now, and was beginning to get annoyed by an increase in comment/trackback spam so I’ve upgraded to version 1.5.1.2.

This gives me access to some bug fixes, and more importantly, more powerful anti-spam tools. I won’t be able to get anyone to check comment posting until tomorrow, so I’ll apologize now in case you encounter any problems.

Standard no more!

Posted on by david

Karl said: You should change your blog search field to use the new <input type=”search” /> attribute in Safari

So I did. If you are using Safari 1.3 or later the search field should look like this:

search.jpg

It will store your 10 most recent searches (accessible by clicking on the little disclosure triangle beside the magnifying glass). Nothing to fear for other browser users though, it’ll degrade nicely to a plain textfield on any browser that doesn’t recognize the type="search" attribute.

Karl also says:

You can add it to a WOTextField in WebObjects too, just add these bindings:

  • autosave = “autosave-name”; // the name under which to save the previous searches in defaults
  • results = 10; // the number of previous searches to save
  • type = “search”; // the input type (required)
  • placeholder = “my placeholder”; // the grey text in the box when it’s empty and doesn’t have focus.

Xyle Scope

Posted on by david

Xyle Scope is a very cool piece of software. It is a browser for analyzing websites, particularly those built with a heavy reliance on CSS. It offers three views:

  • Web browser – based on WebKit.
  • Hierarchical navigator – a column view widget for browsing the HTML hierarchy.
  • HTML pane – showing a properly formed view of the HTML
  • CSS pane – shows the css styles that apply to the selected element in any of the other views.

Xyle Scope is very sweet. I’m sending in my box tops now.

WebObjects 5.3 Licensing

Posted on by david

With the release of WebObjects 5.3, Apple has significantly changed the licensing of the product. I’m not at WWDC, which is frustrating, but I’ve been following the posts on the WebObjects dev list pretty closely and this is a summary of my current understanding.

  • WebObjects if free for development on Mac OS X. It is now a part of the mainstream Xcode (as of version 2.1) developer tools and, according to Cliff Tuel, should receive the attention from Apple it deserves.
  • Development is no longer supported on any other platform.
  • Deployment licenses are included with Mac OS X Server. It is unclear whether you will be able to buy WebObjects 5.2.3 licenses separately going forward, but according to Bill Bumgarner, the WebObjects 5.3 license is not tied to hardware.
  • Deployment on any platform other than Mac OS X is no longer supported. It is not clear whether anyone will be able to hack a native deployment with WebObjects 5.3 on Windows or Linux, but Tomcat or JBoss deployment should be possible. Either way you are completely on your own. According to one report Apple isn’t going to come after you, they just won’t support you.

So, what does this all mean?

  • The Good: WebObjects just got a major upgrade, the tools are getting updated, development is free, deployment just got cheeper (free if you’re purchasing an Xserve anyway, US$499 for a 10 client version of OS X Server otherwise), and (maybe most importantly) WebObjects is now a fully supported member of the mainstream developer tools.
  • The Bad: No official support for development or deployment on any platform other than OS X, and the future of development using tools other than Xcode looks dicey as well.

My take? Well, this is my blog (so it’s all about me :-)) but I’m pretty pleased actually. Obviously getting a new version is cool, but getting Apple to actually articulate some kind of roadmap is amazing.

I know these changes will negatively affect a good number of existing developers, and I appreciate how that must feel. Luckily I’m going to benefit from all of the “plusses” whithout much impact from the “minuses” (other than maybe losing the ability to develop with Eclipse/WOLips – we’ll have to see on that one).