Initial impressions : Great, but a couple of minor bugs

[Jonathan Street]

Hello Everyone

Although I've been watching the project for a while I installed habari
for the first time on my server just yesterday. First impressions are
very positive. It has a nice clean interface and seems to be a
terrific starting point. It's missing some functionality that I'll
want but I know not everyone will need these features and I can see
why it's better to put those things in plugins. Most of the extra
features I'll want are already available as plugins (I think) and for
those that aren't it looks like it should be fairly straightforward to
make my own plugins.

Having said all that I did run into some issues which I hope it is
worth sharing. I'm going to throw these up in the order in which I
came across them.

1) I got some errors while running the installation script - ajax
jumping the gun and attempting to access the database before I had
finished typing, same with the password 'not matching' while I was
typing. This seems to be a known issue: https://trac.habariproject.org/habari/ticket/891

2) Log message thrown up for habari content silo being unable to
create needed folders - easily solved but would be good if steps
needed to fix the problem could be listed. I needed to change the
permissions but do I need to re-install the plugin? Apparently yes,
and it was easy, but actionable points in response to a probably
frequent error would be useful.

3) Where are all the plugins and themes? I went back to download,
then to community, then getting involved, then trac, then wiki, then
using plugins and finally got to available plugins. After a while I
also discovered /explore/plugins and then later still /dist/plugins.
From what I've seen there are already plans to make this much better
but while that work is ongoing I think it would help new users greatly
if links to those three pages were somewhere more obvious. My
suggestion would be the downloads page and/or within the habari
software itself on the themes/plugins pages.

4) Some of the links on /explore/plugins just redirect to the
homepage for example:
http://habariproject.org/en/explore/plugins/technorati
http://habariproject.org/en/explore/plugins/typogrify
http://habariproject.org/en/explore/plugins/autopinger

5) Some of the plugins are not available tagged as being 0.6
compatible. Is there a page listing what functionality is changed in
0.6.x? I'm happy to take a plugin from trunk or 0.5-x.x and check
whether it's compatible with 0.6 but it would be good to have some
pointers.

Finally I'm looking forward to using habari on my site. I'm currently
looking for/to make a template I'm happy with and learning a little
more about putting together plugins.

All the best,
Jonathan Street

[mikelietz]

Welcome! Glad to see your impressions are positive. I'll reply inline
below.

> 2)  Log message thrown up for habari content silo being unable to
> create needed folders - easily solved but would be good if steps
> needed to fix the problem could be listed.  I needed to change the
> permissions but do I need to re-install the plugin?  Apparently yes,
> and it was easy, but actionable points in response to a probably
> frequent error would be useful.

You mean you had to deactivate and reactivate it? Yes, that should
probably be handled a little better.

> 3)  Where are all the plugins and themes?  I went back to download,
> then to community, then getting involved, then trac, then wiki, then
> using plugins and finally got to available plugins.  After a while I
> also discovered /explore/plugins and then later still /dist/plugins.
> From what I've seen there are already plans to make this much better
> but while that work is ongoing I think it would help new users greatly
> if links to those three pages were somewhere more obvious.  My
> suggestion would be the downloads page and/or within the habari
> software itself on the themes/plugins pages.

/dist/plugins and /dist/themes are probably the place for you to go
until the addons directory is completed. /explore/plugins is no longer
up to date (while the info may be correct, the downloads aren't).

> 5)  Some of the plugins are not available tagged as being 0.6
> compatible.  Is there a page listing what functionality is changed in
> 0.6.x?  I'm happy to take a plugin from trunk or 0.5-x.x and check
> whether it's compatible with 0.6 but it would be good to have some
> pointers.

There's a shared spreadsheet at
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AnsMFzzpMTLDdG41RmJXT3ROekFOOUpzRXBhNVpKV1E&hl=en
that shows which plugins and themes have been updated. If you update
one, to change the cell from red to green you need only add a single
space or other character in it.

-mikelietz

[Rich Bowen]

On Nov 19, 2009, at 13:02 , mikelietz wrote:

>> 2) Log message thrown up for habari content silo being unable to
>> create needed folders - easily solved but would be good if steps
>> needed to fix the problem could be listed. I needed to change the
>> permissions but do I need to re-install the plugin? Apparently yes,
>> and it was easy, but actionable points in response to a probably
>> frequent error would be useful.
>
> You mean you had to deactivate and reactivate it? Yes, that should
> probably be handled a little better.

I feel like the silo could use a lot of love and documentation. I've
been using Habari for about three years now, and have never gotten the
silo working consistently. I had it working for a brief time, but some
update along the way broke it. That's happened several times - I
thought I had it working, but then it stopped. Eventually I gave up
and used the Flickr silo, which is now also not working. Clearly
telling me what directory to create, and what permissions need to be
on it, would be a big improvement.

--
Rich Bowen
rbo...@rcbowen.com

[Philip Olson]

Is there an official place for plugin documentation? There is help(),
and an <url> inside the XML file that points to hb.o or a different
external location (like, an authors blog post about said plugin).

And FWIW, the Habari silo appears to be working now or at least I
installed it, added a photo and linked it within a post via slimbox2.
However, another form of missing documentation is how it handles
thumbnails but they apparently follow the following format:

- image: user/files/foo.jpg
- thumbnail: user/files/.deriv/foo.jpg.thumbnail.jpg

With a potential difference being custom directories living within
user/files/.

Regards,
Philip

[rick c]

On Nov 20, 10:54 am, Philip Olson <phi...@roshambo.org> wrote:
> On Nov 20, 2009, at 6:13 AM, Rich Bowen wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > On Nov 19, 2009, at 13:02 , mikelietz wrote:
>
> >>> 2)  Log message thrown up for habari content silo being unable to
> >>> create needed folders - easily solved but would be good if steps
> >>> needed to fix the problem could be listed.  I needed to change the
> >>> permissions but do I need to re-install the plugin?  Apparently yes,
> >>> and it was easy, but actionable points in response to a probably
> >>> frequent error would be useful.
>
> >> You mean you had to deactivate and reactivate it? Yes, that should
> >> probably be handled a little better.
>
> > I feel like the silo could use a lot of love and documentation. I've
> > been using Habari for about three years now, and have never gotten the
> > silo working consistently. I had it working for a brief time, but some
> > update along the way broke it. That's happened several times - I
> > thought I had it working, but then it stopped. Eventually I gave up
> > and used the Flickr silo, which is now also not working. Clearly
> > telling me what directory to create, and what permissions need to be
> > on it, would be a big improvement.
>
> Is there an official place for plugin documentation? There is help(),  
> and an <url> inside the XML file that points to hb.o or a different  
> external location (like, an authors blog post about said plugin).
>

There's no official place for individual plugin documentation. what
show's up in help, or the readme file if the author includes it, is
all there is right now.

> And FWIW, the Habari silo appears to be working now or at least I  
> installed it, added a photo and linked it within a post via slimbox2.  

Unfortunately, how well the Habari silo works seems to differ from
server to server. For some people, it works out of the box and they
never have a problem with it. For others, much fiddling around with
permissions seems to be necessary.

Rick

[Jonathan Street]

Thanks for the replies.

Regarding my point #2, if I remember correctly I didn't need to deactivate it, simply correct the permissions, navigate to the plugins page in admin and then click the activate button alongside the hibari content silo entry.  The process for correcting it really was very simple.  The problem was I didn't know I was doing to correct thing until it was working.

Following my brief tests both the habari and flickr silos seem to work for me but these are superficial tests.

2009/11/20 Philip Olson <phi...@roshambo.org>

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