Modern Vespa

I've just made a major back-end update of the software that runs the forum. Nothing visible, no new features this time, but it was still a fairly invasive change: I swapped one set of sources from an older lineage to a newer, theoretically identical set of sources. The only major upshot of this change is that more of the site is now under svn control. If that doesn't mean anything to you, then don't sweat it. It's a boring detail.

In any case, this involved moving lots of major pieces of the site around. If you see something wrong, such as an image that won't load, or a link that seems broken, please let me know.

Thanks for everything you do. This site had the cleanest interface of any of the forum I frequent. I appreciate all the hard work it must take to keep it up and running. PhilipG

If I could leave well enough alone, the site would probably be fairly easy to maintain. In fact, phpBB runs pretty well when left to itself. The problem comes in when I start screwing with things in an attempt to extend the functionality or otherwise make "improvements".

In that regard, it's just like a scooter. When you start messing with it, putting your own mark on it, it starts becoming less reliable and needs more maintenance.

Yes, BUT, then it really is YOURS!

Exactly.

Thanks for all you do to keep the site running smoothly! All your hard work is pretty transparent to us regular uses (which is the way it should be!)

well, at least this place doesn't look like everyone else's off the showrrom floor stock php board.

Thanks Jess.

Paul

Thanks for all your work. I love the iPhone interface too!

What is svn (if it's not too hard to explain)?

Just wait until I get around to the butterfly sticker upgrade.

source control, baby.
What svn client are you using? I liked tortise back in the day.

Subversion. I love that word, and that's actually what svn stands for.

I should explain, though: subversion is a source code control system, and is one of the major players in the source code control landscape, especially for open source software. Subversion (and others like cvs and git) keeps a set of sources in a repository and tracks each change to each file in the repository. It is most useful when multiple programmers are working on the same set of source code at the same time, but it is quite handy even in solo coding ventures like this one. For any given file, I can see the entire history of changes to that file, and even go back in time to get an older version of the file when I screw something up.

I'm using the svn command-line client for the most part, since most of the editing is done right on the server and most of the checking in and checking out is done through ssh.

When I'm working offline, I typically use the svn client built into XCode, which is really geared around the basics of checking in, checking out, tagging, and branching. No fancy charts of branch trees or anything like that, though.

+ 1

thanks Jess!

see, I was wondering about that. You're not working in a local environment then pushing / deploying... I guess that's kind of a benefit of php... You can edit and 'deploy' in basically the same step.

But I was thinking if you were running local, having a dev environment would be easier. Do you have an instance running that doesn't have DNS configured for it to test new code before mucking with your production instance?

Funny, we are talking at my co about implementing release / build tagging - something I mentioned, oh, a year ago an everyone ignored. Love it.

When I logged in, I got an error message that says "PC LOAD LETTER".

... And by that I mean for our clients, not for our devs. That'd be ludicrous if we had no tagging on builds. Haaaaa.

Nice. You're on your own on that one.

I'm doing variants on all of the above, depending on circumstances. For large changes that involve multiple files or major amounts of development, I'm working in an alternate version of the forum, using a copy of the forum database. Once I'm happy with the results, I commit the changes to svn and then do an svn update on the production side. All the editing is still done on the server, just not in a place where anyone sees what I'm up to.

For small changes, I'll often edit the file in the production environment directly. If it's only a line or two of code, and if I'm pretty confident the change will work as intended, I'll just go for it and then svn commit later. This usually works, but I've been known to screw up.

Both of the above work flows generally involve Transmit for accessing the files and BBEdit for the editing, with a side of Terminal for ssh-based check in / check out.

I've been creating a new workflow of late, though, and todays change was part of that. I have a Mac Mini set up here at home with php and MySQL and (or course) Apache running on it. I'm going to try to move to doing editing "locally" on that server (local even though I'm using AFP to get to the files) and work more in XCode and less in BBEdit/Transmit. The Transmit / BBEdit combination doesn't allow me to do global search-and-replace across the whole set of sources, and that's a real bummer. Doing all the editing in XCode should allow for that and quite a bit more in terms of comfortable editing environment.

I suspected that was happening however didn't want to say anything.

Jess your site is amazing and the behind the scenes work you do to keep this community rolling is highly appreciated. You are a good man my friend.

Best,
SDG

Hmmm...I'm pretty sure that before the change I had over 10,000 posts, and 8 karma circles.

Did you switch from something else to SVN? Or were you flying by the seat of your pants before?

We use a mixed bag at work. We use RCS, CVS, and SVN, all within the same set of code. It makes life interesting Luckily, it is not my job to manage this. I am just an end user.

Many thanks for the effort. Just a word of appreciation from the other side of the world.

Jess, thanks for making easier for the rest of us!!

Thanks for the description, jess. That all sounds pretty reasonable given the circumstances

I never bothered to ask before since it never really came up, but you opened the door by mentioning svn

fascinating though.

We currenty use TortoiseSVN 1.6.5 Happy with it so far. http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/

son of a blank I knew I spelled it wrong

Man I was shafted with P4 at one job... Boooooo.

FYI Jess

Right after i submitted my last post i was sent to a page with this:

This post it would seem
Has been submitted before
IE treachery

Click Here to return to the forum

Being the sole engineer on this project, I managed the sources (for the first couple of years) the old fashioned way: copying source directories around, archiving previous versions, when necessary, just by copying.

After making some fairly large additions to the off-the-shelf phpBB installation, though, I decided to move the main forum software to svn to improve my workflow a bit. Now I can work in a sandbox, commit, and then svn update on the production side.

The change today was to move the entire site to svn -- the whole html directory, the .htaccess file, the favicon, everything. Not just the php code. Theoretically, I should be able to reconstitute the entire site (save for the uploads and attachments directories) on any machine.

That would be the error message you get for a double post.

If you double-click the submit button, or sometimes if you hit the back button on certain browsers, it will try to submit the message a second time. We detect this (with an md5 message hash, if anyone cares) and give you a haiku to reflect upon.

Why MD5 as opposed to any other hashes out there, just a convenient library?

It's not like it has to be secure (not that md5 is), you're just comparing values, right?

Yes. It's a convenient way to condense an entire message into something that can be compared.

ah. Just curious why a cryptohash, and why that one. Php has a bunch of MD5 libraries though so it's not a huge surprise that you'd pick that our of convenience to compare blobs.

Yes this is the best run forum I've been on. Bar none !

Thanks for the great job you're doing and the countless hours you've put into it.

Very cool, first time I ever saw it. :lol Damn DT's again.

I point the funny arrow thing at the goofy button thing and MV shows up.

Me like.

Thanks for bringing this thread back down to earth Lomunchi.
I was about to report the previous posts under at least five breaches of the MV General Guidelines......
- Racist or hate speech
- Discussion of politics or religion (Geekdom)
- Identifying your political party (IT Freeks of America)
- Discussion of helmet laws
- Divisive topics like abortion or the death penalty (Cryptohash V MD5)
- Personal attacks, even minor ones
- Denigrating or insulting another user (non-geeks are obviously the target here)
- Legal threats toward the admin, the moderators, or any user
- Argumentative behavior*
- Pornography** (If these posters haven't become aroused yet I'd be surprised)
- Commercial postings, solicitations, or promotions***
- Avatars or sig pictures that are off-color, NSFW, or in poor taste

.....but yes, thanks Jess for all that you do (I think)

Wow Boulty, then one of us should be locking this thread down then, no?

Trying to open an MV page by clicking on one of my open MV tabs (Firefox) from before your update, I get this:

phpBB : Critical Error

Could not connect to the database

Refreshing brought me back to where I wanted to be. All this just FYI.

Nice boulty. Nice.