Standup Reports

As @fiammybe started in this thread, it's time for me to be transparent, accountable, and contribute more to the momentum of ImpressCMS than I have in recent times. This is my commitment to getting stuff done.

David (@fiammybe) and Raimondas (@MekDrop) have been the key contributors to maintaining our current releases and shaping our new major revamp of the core - and I want to thank them for stepping into this and getting a lot of the groundwork completed.

I can't speak for them, or even for you - only myself. I don't just do this for myself, though - it was always done to help the community of users. I have clients that depend on me to provide a solid website for them. However, they are not my primary source of income, so I divide my time.

I can't always control outcomes, but I do have a lot of influence over inputs and actions.

• What did I say I would do?
• What did I do?
• If I didn't meet my objectives, what adjustments are needed and what resources are needed?
• If I did meet my objectives, what is next?

Here's my first list of actions I will take:

1. Post here (at least) weekly - what I propose doing in the coming week, what I did do the previous week, and what obstacles I face.
2. Post when pull requests are ready and request reviews before merging. Code review is critical for us to maintain functionality and uphold security and performance practices of ImpressCMS.
3. Maintain a list of deliverables for the coming release
4. Outline steps necessary for an administrator to prepare their sites for the changes in the coming release.
5. Outline what is required of a module to be compatible with the coming release - some changes have been already shared through the Developer Dashboard under Deprecated, others will be identified because of changes necessary to run under PHP7 and PHP8.

As I mentioned above, I don't just do this for myself. I do have motivations to do this, regardless. Having feedback is definitely going to help me stay focused and provide some energy to get things done. Less feedback and participation will probably mean that it will only take a bit longer, that's all.

Thanks to all who have participated and contributed to getting ImpressCMS this far!

Remember when we were hosting our repositories on Assembla? They had a feature for standup reports, and I added recurring events to my calendar to update my standup reports twice a week - Wednesday evenings and Saturday mornings. Those reminders still come up. So - I will use those reminders to trigger updates for what I'm working on.

David also has a thread for what he's working on - we focus on different things, all of them are to keep some momentum going for ImpressCMS.

There's something I want to emphasize - the minimum PHP requirement for the upcoming 2.0 has been lowered to PHP 7.4. That does not mean it will not work on PHP 8. It just means we will not be introducing anything in this release that requires PHP 8 to function. I work with that in mind.

Because I do support sites with a variety of requirements, I do test a wide variety of actions and methods. So, the requirements have been expanded for functions provided and governed by the core, regardless of PHP version.  

I will be looking to have my  pending changes merged to the release branch by Wednesday, and adding an update for some external libraries (PHPMailer among them). Support for Google Analytics 4 will also be part of this release.

Onward and Upward!

Doing some testing before merging in changes and packaging everything up. Found something that needs to be addressed - a function call to a function that has been removed (icms_float). I should have something by the end of the day.

Once I can validate a fresh install, I'll check an upgrade before releasing.

My commitments were to get the release ready for review, and that has been completed, thanks to David and Raimondas.

All major hurdles have been cleared - complete install and upgrade (from 1.4.4) have been successful. There is an open pull request to merge in the update to PHPMailer. Once that is reviewed and merged, we can move ahead with the release.

I need to verify the GA4 changes have been merged - they aren't showing up in the branch yet

There are some things I would like to see added - a responsive theme, for one - but I'd rather get this out and work on some refinements afterwards.

As mentioned earlier, there are some updates to modules that will also need to be done to work with this release. I'll be posting PRs this week for the ones I have found.

For this week -

• Outline steps to upgrade: there are things that will need to be completed before uploading the upgrade files
• Updates to modules identified needing changes to work in this version
• Package release once it passes review

I'm working on a responsive theme in Bootstrap 5, but that is still some way of, certainly if you want it to work nicely on mobile devices (more than 50% of web trafic nowadays) AND be flexible with the standard layout in iTheme.

My initial tests were with PHP7.4. Testing with PHP8.0, there are some errors to overcome. I will be posting updates soon.

I've made some changes to be able to get things working - mostly - on PHP8.2. The latest issue is the version of HTMLPurifier. There is a version that is PHP8 compliant and I've begun testing with that. There are some changes to how things get loaded that are different, so it will take a bit of effort. If you disable HTMLPurifier (not recommended if users are allowed to post), the core appears fully functional on PHP 8.2.

HTMLPurifier has been updated successfully. Now on to WideImage. Viewing, adding, duplicating, and deleting are all working as expected. Editing (resize, crop, filter) all need some work. I’m not sure if it’s WideImage or the image-editor library. 

I continued to test WideImage and the image editor.

Basis for further testing -

• Used the latest release from github/smottt/WideImage (1.1.4)
• Since it uses PSR-0, the icms autoloader works, and no specific includes or preloads are necessary

Initially I found that everything worked with the new WideImage library on ICMS 1.4.4 (max PHP is 7.4), but not in ICMS 2.0 with PHP 7.4. As it turns out, it was a preload method that was empty (icms_BootstrapEventHandler::backwardCompatibility). Adding a return value got it working on the 2.0.0RC branch (1.5.x) and PHP 7.4.

End result - all the functions work when using PHP 7.4. Switching to PHP 8.x results in failures when using the editor, whether it's crop, resize, or filter. Now, to figure out the PHP 8 issues.

It may, or may not, be something with the WideImage library. It may, or may not, be something with the image editor library. It may, or may not, be something with the core (the last issue was).

Another colleague has been helping me with this, as he now has some additional discretionary time. Hopefully, we'll figure this out soon.

Would this be an appropriate time to release another RC?

Just about. If our goal is for this release to run on PHP8, there are a few things that need to be addressed. If PHP7.4 is acceptable, then we are ready for another RC release.

The PR to update HTMLPurifier to work with PHP8 is waiting for review. Once that is merged, there aren't any fatal errors that I know of (one that I cannot reproduce during install, but occurs for another tester on Windows. We have a fix for that).

There is one thing that does not work on PHP8 - the image editor is the one I am  struggling with. It does work on PHP7.4, though. Mozilla's debug console says there is a missing semicolon in the javascript. But, only in PHP8+. So, something is being passed as an argument to the js functions that isn't properly formatted.

I'll fix the few other things I know about and leave the image editor for another time. More testers and eyes on the issue will help.

PRs to the next release

• HTMLPurifier - waiting
• WideImage - ready to request PR (without complete image editor fix)
• Fatal errors in session handler (improper type returned) - fix known (method updates to return boolean)
• Fatal errors in Protector IP check (string v. integer)

PRs to the next release

• HTMLPurifier - waiting  merged
• WideImage - ready to request PR (without complete image editor fix) PR submitted
• Fatal errors in session handler (improper type returned) - fix known (method updates to return boolean) PR submitted and merged
• Fatal errors in Protector IP check (string v. integer) - merged

The Google Analytics update for GA4 is waiting on some minor changes, then it can be merged, too. We may even want to release a patch, since there are only days left before Google automatically changes

A patch was released for GA-4 for 1.4.4 and 1.3.11, as well as a new release - 1.4.5, specifically for the GA-4 update.

Things in progress -

• The PR for the WideImage update is still waiting for a review. The issue with the editor still persists. I don't think it's a show-stopper.
• The PR for the GA-4 update differs from the patch released and the 1.4.5 release. I propose we use what has been released. We could
  • merge the existing PR and then modify;
  • update the existing PR and then merge;
  • withdraw the existing PR and submit a new PR with the plugin from the 1.4.5 release
• There is a new PR to update the installer to be compliant with PHP8.1. Review has been started.

I've also been looking at the HackerOne reports and working on prioritizing those for upcoming releases.

Hi, 

• I updated the PR for the GA4 preload. I took the one from ImpressCMS 1.4.6 for consistency.
• I merged the approved PR for 8.1 compatibility.

I think we are ready for a 2.0 RC.

During my final tests, there were some things we needed to address before releasing.

A couple more merge requests - an update to the GA4 plugin because it used a legacy class name and has a fatal error in 2.0. And, a final fix to the image editor so the plugins work now! (crop, resize, and filter were broken when using PHP8+). The changes for the theme selector block have also been approved are are ready to merge.

Once these have been merged, we can package and release 2.0RC!

Those updates have been applied. Now, in testing on PHP8.1, I've discovered another update is needed - HTMLPurifier. Again. I'm not sure how this was missed. It looks as though I tested it locally and never pushed the proper files to github.

I'm encountering errors in PHP 8.1 with the 'count()' use in some IPF instances. I'll create tickets and see what I can come up with.

I think we've cleared all the known issues with this release. We had an open issue for MySQL 8 compatibility and I've done a fresh install and navigated through all the core functions without any errors. Time to bundle everything up and get some more hands on it.

If you want to include iTheme2 to this version, that would be great. I have been trying different modules and fixing stuff here and there, but I think we are not too far away from a first release of the theme. Getting feedback from different points of view and use cases would be great.

https://github.com/fiammybe/impresscms-itheme2

We could bundle it the the release like we do with certain modules. At some point, we can make it the core theme.