gl Labs Stories

glPopMail is ready for testing and feedback

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 20:39:01 -0500

Some of you might have noticed the plugin called glPopMail in the subversion repository for glLabs, under http://gllabs.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/gllabs/glPopMail This plugin is currently under development, and when finished will be a full fledged email client for use with glFusion, and Geeklog. I am pleased to announce that the plugin is now in an installable state. I am looking for people to grab a copy from the subversion repository and give it a try and send us feed back via the glLabs tacker. This plugin needs a lot of work so the more input I get the better it will be. Click the read more link for current feature information, and what works or does not work. Download glPopMail ALPHA now and give it a test.

What should work

Basic pop3 email functionality
composing email msgs
sending new mail
checking and reading mail
replying to mail
CC and BCC
viewing headers
sending and receiving attachments
text and HTML emails
APOP servers login support

What DOES NOT WORK!!

geeklog security not implemented
no ssl/tls support (yes its coming)
Address Book dosen't work at all
No user configurable setting between login sessions.
No sent mail container (not sure if this is a good thing to have)
No spell check functionality
No filtering of HTML messages for nasty scripts and such

What PHP Version do you use?

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 22:00:03 -0500

I am curious to see what version of PHP folks are using to drive their glFusion or Geeklog sites. As most of you probably know, the PHP Foundation officially dropped support for PHP4 on December 31, 2007. I know several hosting providers have started the migration to PHP5, but I don't have a good feel for how many have actually implemented a PHP5 solution. The reason why this is such an important question is that PHP5 offers many new features and capabilities that we would like to use, but we need to understand if a PHP5 only version of glFusion would prevent many people from running it. There is a poll on the right where you can select which version you are running. I would appreciate everyone answering the question, the more responses we get the better informed we'll be. Don't panic if you are running PHP4 right now, nothing is going to change immediately, but you might want to check with your hosting provider to find out their plans for moving to PHP5.

glFusion v1.0.0 Released

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 10:10:18 -0500

The gl Labs Community is pleased to announce that glFusion v1.0.0 is now available for download. glFusion is built on the foundation of Geeklog v1.5.0, and brings new style and functionality to your new or existing Geeklog-based site. Pre-installed plugins include: CAPTCHA, Bad Behavior2, Media Gallery, Forum, and FileMgmt. glFusion doesn't stop at just packaging things together, there are several enhancements under the hood that bring improved performance, scalability, and usability.

Additional features of glFusion are:

Template Caching Library - Significantly improves the performance of your site.
Instance Caching - This caches items such as What's New and the Forum Centerblock, which greatly reduce the number of SQL queries needed to load a web page. This allows your site to render faster and provides a much smaller server load.
Integrated MooTools JavaScript Library – Powering new Web 2.0 features in glFusion.
Improved FCKeditor Integration - Now your theme's styles are available in the editor giving you a true WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) editor.
Improved HTML Filtering - You no longer need to define each and every HTML attribute that is allowed, instead you can use the pre-packaged 'use_safe_html' which provides all the necessary vulnerability removal without the hassle of defining all the allowed HTML styles.
Full XHTML Compliant Site - This includes all the pre-installed plugins too!
Improved Upgrade Experience - glFusion reads the old config.php to pre-populate site name, slogan, DB, etc.
Calendar and Links plugins integrated with CAPTCHA – You asked for it, we listened!
New Site Tailor Customization Plugin - Exclusive to glFusion, Site Tailor allows you to edit and customize your navigation menu items and colors. You can also manage your header logo with the online logo management screen, reducing the need to edit .thtml and .css files manually.

For more information on installing or upgrading Geeklog v1.5.0 and below to glFusion, please Read More...

Installation

glFusion deviates from the standard Geeklog installation process by packaging the release in two distinct directories, private/ and public_html/. This helps clarify what files should be placed in the web root and what should be placed outside of the web root.

glFusion only includes skeleton db-config.php, siteconfig.php and lib-custom.php files, these are packaged with a .dist extension to ensure your customizations are never overwritten during an upgrade. It also means that you must manually rename db-config.php.dist to db-config.php the first time you install glFusion.

Upgrading

Upgrading to glFusion is a very simple and straight forward process. Simply upload the distribution files to your site, rename the db-config.php.dist to db-config.php and run the automated installer. But, before you upgrade, make sure you check the Pre-Upgrade Checklist to ensure your site meets the necessary requirements. Also, if you have made any customizations to your site's core Geeklog files, be sure to save a copy.

Always make a full backup of your existing site, including the database tables before performing an upgrade!

glFusion includes several bundled plugins, if your site is already running some of these plugins, they will automatically be upgraded to the latest versions during the glFusion upgrade process. If your site did not already have these plugins installed, they will not automatically be installed during the upgrade. Instead, the files will be copied to your server, but you must go into the Plugin Manager to install them.

The Site Tailor plugin is an exception to this rule, it will be automatically installed during the upgrade process.

Will My Theme work with glFusion?

Probably not. Geeklog v1.5.0 made several changes that will break all the existing themes. gl Labs has documented all of the necessary template changes in our wiki, so you can quickly update your custom theme to work with glFusion.

Will all my existing plugins work with glFusion?

At this time, we are only aware of a few plugins that have issues with the underlying Geeklog v1.5.0 code base in glFusion.

glMenu v2.6 and 3.0
GL-Utils
FAQ v1.0.3
AutoTags

glMenu has integration hooks to the Links plugin which has changed significantly in Geeklog v1.5.0. glMenu v3.1 has been released for Geeklog v1.5.0, you should ugrade to this version before upgrading your site to glFusion.

GL-Util, FAQ, and AutoTags need to be updated to address some of the API changes in Geeklog v1.5.0. You should disable these plugins before upgrading.

Can I change back to Geeklog after loading glFusion?

Absolutely! One of the main design goals of glFusion is to maintain 100% database compatibility with Geeklog. This ensures that you can change back to Geeklog at any time with no risk of data loss. You will lose all the value-added features that glFusion provides, but your site will still be 100% functional.

I found a bug, what should I do?

If you find a bug in glFusion, please visit the support forums at gl Labs for assistance. You can also file bug reports in the gl Labs Issue Tracker too. Please do not use the Issue tracker for general support requests.

Is there any documentation?

Yes! The gl Labs wiki is the home of the glFusion Documentation. At this time, the wiki documentation is complete, but some areas need additional clarification. We will be enhancing the documentation over time and hope that the gl Labs community will continue to contribute.

Additional Enhancements in glFusion

Installation / Upgrade

The installation and upgrade process has been enhanced to have both a better look and feel, and provide additional permission checks. When upgrading, the site name, slogan, and other data are migrated.

User Contributed Stories

User contributed stories present both the intro text field and the body text field when using the advanced editor.

Safe Theme Customizations

glFusion allows you to place your template modifications in special custom/ directories. This ensures that your customizations will survive future upgrades.

Why glFusion?

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 10:09:15 -0500

This question has come up several times over the past few weeks as glFusion has emerged. We think the best way to sum up why glFusion exists is philosophy. We believe the gl Labs philosophy is different than the Geeklog philosophy. Using this definition for philosophy: a system of principles for guidance in practical affairs, we believe our principles for guidance are different than those of the Geeklog team. Notice we didn’t say better, just different. Let’s see if we can explain this in more detail.

For some reason, folks from the gl Labs community have not had much luck in getting new features into the core Geeklog release. The Caching Template Library (CTL) was submitted and rejected. The Nouveau theme was submitted and rejected. Both of these enhancements directly addressed two major areas in Geeklog that we feel are good opportunities for improvement. When these two additions were rejected, the idea of a gl Labs value added release was born.

Once we decided that a value added release was a good idea and bundling CTL and Nouveau were the ‘value’ part of the equation, we began to look at other areas where we felt we could offer improvement. Bundling of some of the more popular plugins seemed like a very good idea. This expanded to including two key security related plugins; CAPTCHA and Bad Behavior2. Both of these plugins add to the layered security model and in our opinion are must-have add-ons. Forum, FileMgmt, and Media Gallery are all very popular plugins that we felt would also bring value. Our goal is to provide a single installation that will immediately allow folks to get a site up and running securely.

Two other areas where we feel improvement was warranted are site customization and upgrading. These two items are generally in direct conflict with each other. If you customize your site, upgrading becomes much more difficult. We’ve seen several posts in the forums stating that folks have not upgraded because they had heavily modified their sites.

To address the site customization problem, we developed Site Tailor. Site Tailor is a plugin that allows you to easily modify the navigation menu and header area of your site. We understand this is not a complete customization solution, but it is the foundation we will continue to build upon in upcoming releases.

The second area of customization is dealing with themes. As you modify the theme, you risk loosing your modifications each time you upgrade. glFusion gives you the ability to store all your theme modifications in special custom/ directories so they will always survive an upgrade. Other areas we felt caused problems during an upgrade was that the distribution archive contained new copies of lib-custom.php and config.php (now db-config.php and siteconfig.php). glFusion bundles .dist versions of these files to ensure your copies are never overwritten during an upgrade. We realize that we have added another step to the install process, renaming the db-config.php.dist file to db-config.php, but felt that adding a new step initially to have a smoother upgrade process was well justified.

Another side effect of the upgrading issue was the fact that upgrade documentation was generally sparse and incomplete. For example, Geeklog v1.5.0 made significant changes to the templates used in the Professional theme, but there is no detailed documentation to show what exactly changed. This led us to the realization that the overall Geeklog documentation was largely non-existent or difficult to find. We decided that we needed to create a new wiki that provided complete and up-to-date documentation on all the features of glFusion, as well as, what changed between releases. In other words, documentation became a very high priority for us here at gl Labs.

We are very focused on producing good code and good markup. We have committed to the XHTML standard and are working hard to make all aspects of a glFusion site XHTML compliant. One key variable in having an XHTML compliant site is user contributed markup. Every story, comment and forum post must also be well-formed markup. We decided to replace the old, no longer maintained, KSES HTML filtering module with a more modern, actively supported filtering system that also provides some markup enforcement. This doesn’t mean it will automatically fix every HTML error submitted, but at least it is a design goal of the project. Given the recent disclosure of KSES vulnerabilities, we believe replacing KSES was a very smart decision.

Another area where the gl Labs community differed in approach from the Geeklog team is release schedules and roadmaps. We feel it is important to document what is coming in the next release, and as best we can, provide reasonable estimates on when the features will be available. Fully realizing this is a hobby for everyone involved and personal time commitments can change without notice, we still felt it important to target more frequent releases and provide as much up-front information about the releases as possible.

Our plan is to provide releases approximately every 3 to 4 months and keep up-to-date development roadmaps. With the release cycles of Geeklog getting longer and longer (almost 18 months for the last release), we feel it is important to get bug fixes and incremental feature enhancements out to the users as soon as possible.

We also hope to better communicate with those who develop themes and plugins for glFusion and include them in the overall communication plan for glFusion. Our belief is through proactive communication we can avoid problems of incompatible themes and plugins during the release cycles. This does not mean everyone will get their stuff updated, but we should be able to know exactly what will work and won’t work with each major release of glFusion.

The main reason why glFusion exists is because we have a different set of goals (or at least we perceive ourselves as having a different set of goals) than the Geeklog team. From our perspective, the Geeklog team is driven by new technology and improving some of the dated components in Geeklog. gl labs wants to try and remove the ‘geek’ from Geeklog and provide a system that is usable, functional, secure, pleasing to the eye, and well documented. Fortunately, for the Geeklog community, these two different goals compliment each other very well. What the future holds for Geeklog and glFusion, we don’t know, but we are very excited about the possibilities.

glFusion Release Candidate 2 Available

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 23:30:11 -0500

The gl Labs Team is pleased to annouce glFusion v1.0.0 Release Candidate 2, the second release candidate. Thanks to some great feedback we have made several small bug fixes and a few more key enhancements.

Distribution Packaging

Installing Geeklog has always been a difficult thing to explain, stuff goes in the web root, stuff goes outside the web root. To make it clearer what files go where, we have broken the glFusion distribution into two directories; private/ and public_html/. All the files in the private/ directory should be placed outside the web directory. All the files in the public_html/ directory go in the web directory.

Safe Template Customization

Another challenge with running a Geeklog site is that each time an upgrade comes along, for either the core distribution, or your theme of choice, you end up overwriting your customizations with the new templates from the release. glFusion now supports createing a custom/ directory under each of the theme directories where you can copy and customize your templates. This protects them from being overwritten during an upgrade and also gives you an excellent inventory of exactly what templates you have modified.

For example; if you wanted to insert a Ad Block between the story body and the story footer, you would edit storybodytext.thtml. Now, you will create a custom/ directory under public_html/layout/nouveau/, copy the storybodytext.thtml there and then customize it. glFusion will always look in the custom/ directories first and use that template instead of the stock templates.

There have been several bug fixes as well, for more details....Read More...

ChangeLog for glFusion Release Candidate 2

[General] Added a JavaScript date picker to the story publishing screen. [mark]
[Style] Commented out the style for <hr> it was breaking the calendar display [mark]
[Plugin] Calendar - I broke CAPTCHA support with the previous core sync [mark]
[Plugin] Calendar - Add personal event submission broken [mark]
[Plugin] Media Gallery - Fixed error where an album would get dropped from the main index if the columns set to 4 [mark]
[Genera] Enhanced the What's New caching, now Media Gallery, Links, Comments, and Trackbacks will force a cache rebuild upon save [mark]
[Plugin] Forum quote background image and text [eric]
[General] Cache Timeout should be configurable for What's New Block [mark]
[Install] Added a permission check on install to ensure FileMgmt config directory is writable.[mark]
[Plugin] Media Gallery: Fixed bug in main album index where an album would disappear from the display. [mark]
[Plugin] Site Tailor: Now accepts quotes in label. [mark]
[General] Footer RSS feed was hard coded to glfusion.rss, now uses the filename from the configuration [mark]
[General] Implemented a method to have custom/ template themes. [mark]
[General] RSS feed was not updating properly. [mark]
[General] Nouveua has a old copy of style.css in the css/ directory, removed it. [mark]
[General] Forum plugin uses id=fileattachlist multiple times when displaying topic, removed the <div> [mark]
[Theme] Noveau's style.css has references to professional theme's images. [mark]
[General] Site Tailor - sitetailor.png missing alt="" [mark]
[Install] Link in default featured story to change password not resolving properly, removed link. [mark]
[General] Noveau's functions.php still requires the professional theme be installed [mark]
[Theme] When Advanced Editor is used, there was a 'ghost' box at bottom of page [mark]
[Install] Modifed distribution to use private/ and public_html/ folders. [mark]

To upgrade from the first release candidate, simply copy the glFusion files over your previous installation. No database updates were made and there is no need to run an upgrade utility.

To upgrade from an existing Geeklog installation, you will need to follow the upgrade instructions in glFusion v1.0.0 Release Candidate 1.

glFusion v1.0.0 Release Candidate 1

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 17:26:32 -0500

The glLabs Team is pleased to annouce the first Release Candidate of glFusion v1.0.0 is now available for download. glFusion v1.0.0 is built on the foundation of Geeklog v1.5.0 (RC2). glFusion brings news style and functionality, using Noveau as the default theme and including several pre-installed plugins. Pre-installed plugins include; CAPTCHA, Bad Behavior2, Media Gallery, Forum, and FileMgmt. glFusion doesn't just stop at packaging things together, there are several enhancements under the hood that bring improved performance, scalability, and usability.

Additional features of glFusion are:

Template Caching Library - significantly improves the performance of your site.
Instance Caching - This caches items such as What's New and the Forum Centerblock, greatly reducing the number of SQL queries needed to load a web page which allows your pages to load faster and provides a much smaller server load.
Integrated MooTools JavaScript library, bringing new Web 2.0 features to glFusion.
Improved FCKeditor integration, now your theme's styles are available in the editor giving you a true what you see is what you get editor.
Improved HTML filtering - You no longer need to define each and every HTML attribute that is allowed, instead you can use the pre-packaged 'use_safe_html' which provides all the necessary vulnerability removal without the hassle of defining all the allowed HTML styles.
Full XHTML compliant site - This includes all the pre-installed plugins too!
Improved upgrade experience, reading the old config.php to pre-populate site name, slogan, DB, etc.
Calendar and Links plugins integrated with CAPTCHA.
Site Tailor Customization Plugin - Exclusive to glFusion, Site Tailor allows you to edit and customize your navigation menu, including colors. You can also manage your header logo with the online logo management screen.

For more information on installing or upgrading to glFusion, please Read More...

Installation

glFusion deviates from the Geeklog standard of including configuration files in the distribution. Instead, glFusion includes copies with a .dist extension. This ensures that you will not overwrite your existing configuration and customization files during an upgrade. It also means that you must manually rename db-config.php.dist to db-config.php the first time you install glFusion.

Upgrading

Always make a full backup of your existing site, including the database tables before performing an upgrade!

The Site Tailor is an exception to this rule, it will be automatically installed during the upgrade process.

Will My Theme work with glFusion?

Probably not. Geeklog v1.5.0 made several changes that will break all the existing themes. gl Labs will be publishing a complete guide to these changes when the final version of glFusion ships. For now, your choices are to stick with the bundled Professional or Nouveau theme.

Will all my existing plugins work with glFusion?

Probably. There are only two plugins that we are aware of that have issues with the underlying Geeklog 1.5.0 base; GL-Utils and glMenu 2.6. GL-Utils' administration screen is broken with Geeklog v1.5.0. glMenu v2.6 integrates with the Links plugin and due to changes in the Links plugin database structure, glMenu v2.6 is not compatible and will cause SQL errors if your site uses the Links plugin integration (display's any links from the plugin). You should disable glMenu v2.6 prior to upgrading to Geeklog v1.5.0 or glFusion 1.0.0.

Can I change back to Geeklog after loading glFusion?

Absolutely! One of the main design goals of glFusion is to maintain 100% database compatibility with Geeklog. This ensures that you can change back to Geeklog at any time with no risk of data loss. You will loose all the value added features that glFusion provides, but your site will still be 100% functional.

I found a bug, what should I do?

Is there any documentation?

Yes! The gl Labs wiki is the home of the glFusion Documentation. During the Release Candidate phase the documentation will be completed. We are close, but there is a little more work to do.

DokuWiki Integration Plugin v1.4.1 Released

Mon, 05 May 2008 09:30:00 -0500

I am please to announce the release of DokuWiki Integration v1.4.1. v1.4.1 upgrades the DokuWiki core code from the latest release candidate to the 2008-05-04 production release. Enhancements to the 2008-05-04 version include:

Improved RSS syndication, now supports diff views and full HTML, search results are available as RSS
Added AJAX to the index view
Show diffs between arbitrary page revisions
Improved search and result highlighting
Better plugin support for modifying DokuWiki forms removes *FORM_INJECTION events
Separation of TOC from content for more template flexibility
Security measurements against CSRF attacks
X-Sendfile support for supporting Webservers
XMLRPC API
Use of UniversalWikiEditButton in default template
Complete rewrite of the ACL manager
Moved spell checker from core to plugin
Support for deep namespace templates
Popularity plugin added by default – please help us to improve DokuWiki with your data
Using locale aware strftime instead of date Plugin authors may need to fix their plugins
Use fulltext index for media file usage scan for better scalability
Introduction of a temp folder upgraders should make sure data/tmp exists and is writable
Many bugfixes, smaller features and performance improvements

Enjoy! Mark

Media Gallery & DokuWiki Plugins Updated

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 23:52:00 -0500

gl Labs is pleased to announce the release of Media Gallery v1.6.1 (ZIP version) and DokuWiki Integration v1.4.1. Both plugins have been updated to work with the new Nouveau theme and also set the ground work for future gl Labs integrations.

Media Gallery v1.6.1 is primarily a bug fix release, solving all the issues that have been identified since v1.6.0. For a full list of the changes, please see the Media Gallery Wiki.

DokuWiki v1.4.0 upgrades the core DokuWiki release to version 2008-04-11 and also improves on the integration with Geeklog. For full details on the changes in DokuWiki 2008-04-11, please see the DokuWiki web site.

If you plan on installing the Nouveau theme, you should upgrade both Media Gallery and DokuWiki to the latest versions.

Nouveau v1.0 Released

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 20:41:00 -0500

We are pleased to announce the release of a new theme for Geeklog called Nouveau! Nouveau is a fixed / fluid width, blue & grey neutral theme intended to be a suppliment to the Professional theme that is included in a default Geeklog v1.4.1 install.

We have tested it in Firefox 2, IE 6/7, Opera 9, and Safari beta 3 on Windows. In other browsers, your mileage may vary. Check out a working demo at http://nouveau.gllabs.org, download it here.

Nouveau features:

Small size and faster page loads thanks to using Joe Mucchiello's Caching Template Library. This speeds up the rendering of your site by compiling templates for faster page loads. Additionally, only .thtml files that differ from the stock Professional theme that ships with Geeklog are needed to complete this theme. CTL version 2.3.1 or higher is required.

Tableless markup. All appropriate markup is created with <div> tags and css elements.

SEO friendly where content comes first in the code, followed by the left and right blocks.

Both Fluid and Fixed width versions of the theme, one line configurable in header.thtml.

Validates to HTML 4.01 Transitional (for GL v1.4.1 version, GL v1.5 to be HTML 4.01 Strict or XHTML Transitional 1.0 via a switch in the theme's functions.php)

Support for a 4 level cascading menu in the header.

MooTools Javascript Library v1.11 integration, including some javascript widgets.

Additional typography elements with quote and code styling, multiple list styling options, and more.

Extra block styling options for both left and right blocks.

Yahoo User Interface reset-fonts-grids.css, and base-min.css support.

See the complete documentation for detailed information. If you have any issues, please post them in the themes support forum.

Bad Behavior 2.0.13 Released

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 19:41:00 -0500

I have just released Bad Behavior 2.0.13. This release is a small bug fix release. It also adds the Response Code to the detail view so you can see exactly what the spammers are trying to post to your site.

Fixes include:

Upgraded core Bad Behavior release to v2.0.13
Added the IP address of digg.com services to the whitelist.
Fixed a bug in the blacklist user-agent code that caused the matches to be case insensitive when they should have been case sensitive.

Some users have reported a site slowdown each time there is a form POST. I've also experienced the same issue on some of my sites. This upgrade will not fix this issue, but you can fix it on your sites. Read More for details....

To resolve a site slowdown issue whenever there is a form POST (logging in, post stories, forums, etc.), you can edit the following file:

public_html/bad_behavior2/bad-behavior/blackhole.inc.php

Near the top you will see the following:


function bb2_blackhole($package) {
	// Only conservative lists
	$bb2_blackhole_lists = array(
		"sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org",	// All around nasties
//		"dnsbl.sorbs.net",	// Old useless data.
//		"list.dsbl.org",	// Old useless data.
//		"dnsbl.ioerror.us",	// Bad Behavior Blackhole
	);

The problem is caused by the lookup to sbl-xbl.spamhaus.org. You can comment out this check and it will disable the blackhole checking. I have disabled blackhole checking for all my sites and it hasn't diminished Bad Behavior's effectiveness.