Working on ImpressCMS - micro-blog

Hi,

I'm starting this thread to give you an idea about what I'm currently working on, without needing to fire up another module or another external service to do so. No guarantees about the frequency though.

No guarantees about the content either, except that it will be ImpressCMS-related, but I might ot limit my contributions here to pure development aspects.

I've installed the Chromium-based Edge browser on my machine, and it works like a charm. I know people will look at me sideways when I say that I didn't have any problem with the Edge that was included in Windows 10, I'm generally not such a plugin user so their initial lack didn't pose a problem to me. The chromium-based Edge feels faster and more responsive, and it remains very much Edge. The fact that there's a Google-sponsored Chromium engine underneath hasn't changed that much.

I mention this because I tested our site (of course) with Chromium Edge, and noticed that Edge now also suffers from ticket #100 in ImpressCMS 1.3. Time to get that sorted out.

David L asked how he could test out or current state of ImpressCMS 2.0, and it turns out that the documentation for that is severely lacking and/or out-of-date. I've given him a short roadmap on how to get a ImpressCMS 2.0 alpha 7 site up and running on his shared hosting, but it's time I wrote some documentation.

I discovered this morning when I was on the train going to Brussels that my work on the composer integration was more or less useless because I was re-inventing the wheel. Composer has a class 'installer' that takes care of most things for me. 

I'm looking into resurrecting the API documentation for 1.3 and 2.0, and I've looked into Fabien Potencier's SAMI to do so. I know, it's been discontinued, but I still have to find a tool that allows me to do a command-line crawl directly in my Github repository. I have some issues with git telling me that my repository is not clean in the 1.3 branches, so I'll need to do some spring cleaning before that can be published.

Easter holidays, so work has been a bit more slow. I did manage to finish the German translation in transifex this evening, I'll upload a complete translation pack tomorrow.

I did start to rework my solution to plugin to the composer library, but I got lost in the complexity of what I'm trying to get. I think I'm aiming too high, certainly for a first version Work continues on that, because it is one of the remaining new funtionalities that needs to go in before we can start looking into producing beta versions of the 2.0 branch - feature complete, but perhaps more bugfixing needed. My new approach is to let the design patterns on the side for the moment, and just get something working first. We can refactor the hell out of it afterwards.

Because nobody understood why we work in the 'retro' branch, and because those reasons date way back, Mekdrop has taken on the task of migrating our working branch for ImpressCMS 2.0 to the 'master' branch.

I've had some interference by Life (tm) recently : either it was scorching hot, which didn't really tempt me to sit in front of a computer and sweat just because of the temperature, either we were having heat thunderstorms, and I was battling a leak in our roof. all of those aren't conductive to development sadly

That period seems to be over now (the leak is fixed, and the sun seems to be burning elsewhere), so now I can start finishing the 1.4 release.

ImpressCMS 1.4

As a matter of fact, the only thing that still needs to be done (and that is holding up that release of course) is the update procedure. The 1.4 release removes the banners functionality in the core, and replaces it with the banners module. That is a migration script that needs to be tested.

We're celebrating Pentecost tomorrow, and that means that we have a holiday on monday. Normally, I should have the 1.4.0 beta release out by monday evening to test the migration routine.

ImpressCMS 2

Not much progress on the composer integration until now. I really want to get this up and running, but composer is not easy to understand nor to debug.

In my previous post, I was too optimistic about what needed to be done in order to get ImpressCMS 1.4 finished for global consumption. Because we want to be compatible with as many PHP 7 versions as possible, some PHP libraries will need to be updated as well.

One of the libraries that has been particularly problematic every time we touched it, is Smarty. We're still using Smarty 2, but the implementation we inherited from previous ImpressCMS versions is very much intertwined with the core. Combine that with the fact that a problem in Smarty usually takes us to a totally blank screen, and you have a hard to debug library upgrade on your hands.

Combined with holiday and heatwave periods, pace has been slow for now. I expect this to continue a for another few weeks, but I will try to finalise some tasks every few days.

I just returned from Laracon EU in Amsterdam after 2 days of inspirational talks and exchanges with members from the Laravel community. Several talks in the unconference caught my attention: How did they organize in Github to manage ideas, development and bugs, and another one was about how to take on a legacy program and move it over to Laravel.

Although one of my projects in the near future will be to work on a laravel-based instance of ImpressCMS, something more directly actionable came from the talk by fellow-countryman Dries Vints, who works at Laravel. In order to keep focused, they have an entry repository in Github where ideas are posted, and where discussion around those ideas is done. From time to time, they go over these ideas and decide to implement some of them.

That means that their base repository only contains tickets that are ready to be worked on, and the list isn't 'polluted' by wild discussions that go nowhere.

As a result, I created a new repository this morning for ideas (https://www.github.com/impresscms/ideas/issues), and I am currently transferring as many tickets that aren't yet fully worked out towards that repository.

It has been very quiet on the forums these last months/years. The main reason for that was because of the rising use of Slack by the development team. In the beginning, Slack giving us realtime chat capabilities was very much appreciated, but after a while the novelty of that became less and we used it more and more as a forum, but (sadly) a forum within the walled garden of Slack.

If you are a Slack user (there are quite a few around it seems) you will have received the notification that the free version of Slack will only let you keep the last 90 days of posts, which we find too restrictive. We started looking out for alternatives again.

It turns out that our good old forums were one of those alternatives, but only if they receive a major overhaul and become more realtime-oriented. The technical overhaul was something I have been considering on and off a few times now, so that was good news. I'm currently working on rewriting iForum based on the latest IPF framework, and you can expect quite regular updates on that.

That also means that these forums will start picking up in activity, which is always a good thing . Feel free to submit your questions, frustrations, offers for help or other things you would like to share with the rest of us. We're here to help and listen.

Work on ImpressCMS 1.5.0 is advancing, with 2 major cleanups this last week : we got rid of a decidedly ancient version of TinyMCE, and we sunset the old OpenID login system.

Bye bye TinyMCE

The removal of TinyMCE looks important, because it removed hundreds of files from the repository (yay), but in essence it was fairly self-contained within its own folder. We decided to remove it primarily because it was really old, and nobody has stepped up to propose an update to a newer version. That old version represented also a security risk because it was no longer supported with security updates.

While we removed TinyMCE from the core at this time, that doesn't mean a recent version can't be added as an addon. It would definitely be a welcome addition to the addons list, and give site owners more choices in which type of editor they want on their site.

OpenID

If removing TinyMCE was fairly simple, OpenID was a totally different affair. The tightly coupled way in which OpenID had been integrated at the time meant that all the places in the code that access the user needed to be checked and adapted. That also meant quite a few tests needed to be done to make sure everything kept working. For instance, the first iteration of the Pull Request totally broke the creation of a new user, something you definitely want to avoid when running a live site.

We removed support for the very first OpenID protocol. Because of some terrible naming decisions a few years ago, there can be confusion between OpenID (which we removed for 1.5.0) and OpenID Connect, which is part of the OAuth 2. At the moment, ImpressCMS does not support OAuth.

What's next

1.5.0 will support PHP versions starting with PHP 7.4. those restrictions still need to be enforced. Next to that, we will introduce support for MySQL 8, which introduced new reserved words that can clash with column names in SQL when they are not quoted properly. PHP 8.0 support could be feasible as well.

When will 1.5.0 be out?

The plan is to have 1.5.0 out by the end of september 2022.

I have been very quiet these last months on the ImpressCMS side of things. 

@skenow has taken over the release of the newly-minted 2.0, as he has most requirements for supporting legacy sites and sites coming from old versions of ImpressCMS. It sometimes looks like lowering the version requirement from PHP 7.4 has opened up quite a few issues, which means the 2.0 release is advancing slower than I had anticipated when it was still called 1.5.

Personally I took a break from the development side of things these last few months. A heavily charged family calender reduced my available time to such an extent that I couldn't spend a minimum amount of development time per week required to see any significant progress, so I changed my focus to working on some base themes for ImpressCMS.

I am currently working on basic start themes based on both Bootstrap 5 and Bulma, 2 design frameworks that I have been using elsewhere. The idea is to have a base theme ready as soon as possible, in order to redevelop the standard ImpressCMS theme based on the bootstrap5 base theme. 

Working with themes requires smaller chunks of available time to come up with something, so it is more motivating for me to work on that currently.

I'm now working out the different templates for multiple pages in the standard CMS setup. The goal is to have templates for as many modules as possible