Forum OpenACS Q&A: dev.openacs.org - please test/review

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Posted by Dave Bauer on

Any members of the community that have a chance, please check out the almost finished new openacs.org web site at http://dev.openacs.org. Please check to see if you can find everything you are looking for.

We would like to get this new site operational soon, so any testing, suggestiongs, etc would be greatly appreciated.

If you have any problems, ideas, suggestions, or would like to volunteer to work on the site, please post in this thread.

Thank you.

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Posted by Torben Brosten on
Dave, are http 404's being tracked so that we don't need to respond about them individually (when discovered)?

Apparently 4.5 and 3.2.5 documentation is not found at http://dev.openacs.org/doc/openacs-4/ (and openacs-3) linked from http://dev.openacs.org/doc/

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Posted by Talli Somekh on
this might help you Torben:

http://dev.openacs.org/bugtracker/openacs/

talli

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Posted by Torben Brosten on
Thank you, Talli. I'll post site bugs there.
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Posted by David Kuczek on
I can't log into the new site, although I remember being able to some time ago...

I once made the suggestion to restructure the starting page of dev.openacs.org, because the existing text doesn't lead you quickly enough to the most important sections of the site. See:

https://openacs.org/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=0005hK&topic_id=OpenACS&topic=11

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Posted by Jeff Davis on
I can log in but I cannot post bugs (no link to bug-add and
when I enter it directly I get a permission denied).
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Posted by Torben Brosten on
For the record, I also don't see any "bug-add" link.
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Posted by Dave Bauer on
Thanks for the feedback. I have granted "create" permission on the bugtracker to registered users.

David, I am not sure why you can't log in. The users were migrated over. Some new users in the last couple of weeks are not migrated yet. Does the site offer to email you your password? Or does it ask you to register again?

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Posted by David Kuczek on
Dave,

whenever I log in with my correct password, I get redirected to the same page without getting logged in. Whenever I enter the wrong password, I am being redirected to the "send me my passwort" page.

Funny I just let the server send me an email to change my password. I changed my password and it works again.

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Posted by David Kuczek on
Even funnier:

I can log in via:

http://208.184.248.90/register/

but not via:

http://dev.openacs.org/register/

This looks like a cookie error that I had with a framed site some weeks ago. Same behaviour. Maybe it is a problem of my IE 5.5 at work, which is behind a firewall.

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Posted by David Kuczek on
I tested some more:

Whenever I delete all cookies, I can log in via

http://dev.openacs.org/register/

again...

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Posted by Andrew Piskorski on
I know this has been brought up in other threads, but it sure would be nice if your community-member page on the new site actually listed all your BBoard posts, like the old site does. I know I often use that feature to find an old article I'm looking for, and I assume others do as well, so I'd say this is an important enough feature to put in a special purpose hack for, if necessary...
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Posted by Andrew Piskorski on
Ah, a simple link from the /shared/community-member page to /forums/user-history (iff forums is installed) would do the trick. E.g., here's my mostly useless public page and then the much more usefull list of my BBoard posts.
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Posted by Andrew Piskorski on
The sort order of BBoard posts on Dev is messed up. For example, in this xmlrpc thread on Dev, all the July posts are first, then the Jun posts, but within a given month, the sort is chronological. Looks like someone did an order by on the pretty string representation of the date, rather than the actual date...
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Posted by Andrew Piskorski on
Also, in that same xmlrpc thread on Dev, some of the posts display as one enormous line that never wraps at all (I'm using Netscape 4.77 on Linux). In the same thread on openacs.org, the same posts wrap properly.
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Posted by Dave Bauer on
I added the link to forums posts from the community page, and removed the useless clutter. We need to be a little selective about which objects we list there.

On the forums post. That is your fault Andrew :) There is a very long line in the <pre>formatted text you entered. Apparetnly being in a table is screwing that up. Luckily, posts can be edited for formatting afterwards with forums, so I edited it to look nicer.

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Posted by Dave Bauer on
Ok, i was wrong. There are many wide posts in that thread.

On the current bboard, the posts that are wide scroll of the edge, but do not affect the formatting of the other posts. With everything in a table, that causes a problem.

I think this will happen often on openacs.org, so we need a solution that will look good, but support the occaisional code listing that is wide.

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Posted by Andrew Piskorski on
Dave, then I believe the only solution is to either use a separate table for each post, or to not use any tables at all. AFAIK there is no way to prevent wide posts from messing up the rest of the page, if all the posts are within one large table.

Why the heck does anyone want to format BBoard posts inside an HTML table anyway? I mean, if the post has really wide content, then I want the important date and links at the top to also be shoved all the way over to the right where I can't see our use them without scrolling sideways? No way, that sucks.

If you really want the pretty table background colors, then wrapping the body of each post in its own table, but leaving the header and links for each post out, or in their own separate table immediately above, would fix the UI while still preserving pretty colors. I suspect simply leaving the title and links out of the table would look better than putting them in their own table.

But frankly, having the new BBoard be at least as easy to use and read as the old BBoard is much more important to me than pretty colors... I don't see any compelling advantage of using HTML tables with pretty colors at all, vs. the traditional "separate each post with an <hr>" look of the BBoard.

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Posted by Dave Bauer on
Andrew,

The no-table idea might be fine for openacs.org, but remember forums is a general use package. Not just for the developers at openacs.org. The colors and table, I think, are helpful design elements. Also, pretty much every other bboard software I have seen uses this design :) People seem to like it.

What we really need is pluggable display templates so that we can have an option in forums instead of making everyone hack the templates.

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Posted by Jeff Davis on
you could try setting a max-width on the p tag via css
(which will work in mozilla but I have not tried it anywhere else).

It won't help the <pre>'d thing but will make the plain text stuff
wrap at 60em (or whatever you set maxwidth to).

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21: Same problem Logging in (response to 1)
Posted by Walter Smith on
I had the same problem logging in described by David, above.  I did the same thing, let the server send me a link to reset my password, and it works fine now.
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Posted by Torben Brosten on

Putting each message in its own table should minimize or localize the problem, and present more reading during page load of long threads, since tables on some browsers don't display until fully loaded.

Hmm... too bad there couldn't be some sort of user preferences to choose board presentation style, defaulting with a pretty tables one, but also having a more general non-tables option for those who consider practical function priority.

I think the long dotLRN Governance thread http://208.184.248.90/forums/message-view?message_id=45344 is another good example to test against any presentation style.

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Posted by Jade Rubick on
I'd like to reiterate what Dave said -- I really think we need to change the text
on the main page.

I wouldn't be particularly interested in OpenACS with the current wording. It's
description, but it doesn't really describe what OpenACS is best at.

I love this blurb:

http:// www.acornhosting.net/whyoacs

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Posted by Bart Teeuwisse on
I've got a few bugs to report in addition to the ones found by other community members:
  1. The link to the ACS 3.2.5 project from the OpenACS project page is broken.
  2. Signing up for the CVS commit forum while not yet logged in doesn't work. Haven't tested it with the other forums.
  3. I've signed about a week ago up to receive immediate e-mails notifications of CVS commits but haven't received any so far. When I check the web site it does show that I'm registered to receive the notifications.

/Bart

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Posted by Torben Brosten on
3 thoughts refining previous suggestions for the bboard presentation format:

1. Fragment each message to 3 tables: header, content, footer

Instead of containing each message by a table, further fragment each message, so that message headers/footers and content are separate tables. Only the body/content of messages using long lines in pre-tags will extend off the screen to the right. The headers/footers of each message, which contains the author-link, date etc, will remain within the screen limits according to the table attributes applied.

This seems to be the most durable compromise of using tables while maintaining practical viewing --according to previous presentation styles and html usage within messages.

2. Left or center justify tables/messages

If tables are left or center justified, there will be more visible flex-space available for any variations in table width caused by long-lines in pre tags etc. This reduces any nuisance for users/browsers using computers with small chip-cache's, bus rates etc when needing to scroll entire threads horizontally.

3. Offset the first message without using margins.

Is it important for responses to first messages to have larger margins (a narrower text area) than the initial thread posts?

It seems more spatially practical to narrow the first message, and expand the replies... But then why not keep the messages consistent altogether? If offsetting the first post is important (flexing OpenACS' templating capabilities for example), perhaps another technique could be used, such as a light yellow background (as in highlighting) or a bolder table border?

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Posted by Andrei Popov on
Sorry for being a bit of a pest, but -- how about renaming "Main Site" (shows up as title of from dev.openacs.org page) to something more descriptive?
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Posted by Andrei Popov on

On a subject of long messages -- if boxed presentation is what the design is trying to achieve, then maybe using <div>s could help? Wrapping post itself in one, then header/body/footer into a sub-<div>s?.. Something along these lines:

Folks, for those of you more familiar with xmlrpc, soap, and their various implementations for AOLserver or Tcl, I have a question for you:

Say I have AOLserver or tclsh process A, and an entirely seperate AOLserver process B. Is there any way for me to have process A call a Tcl function running in process B?

Security issues and the like aside, it would be very cool if I could have process A make an arbitrary Tcl function call to B, and have it all work pretty much the way any normal Tcl function call would work, so that most of my code in A wouldn't even have to know that it's doing a remote rather than local function call.

Would XMLRPC or SOAP let me doing something like that? Or is there any any other tool that would make this feasible? And what would I have to do to make it work? Thanks!

Also a large post with many comments may become a very big rendering burden if presented asa single monolithic table.

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Posted by Andrei Popov on
As a reply to self -- div's aren't the answer, judging by the ugly black and green look of my suggestion in IE5
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Posted by Vadim Makarov on
I honestly don't know why most people out there prefer table layout. Maybe because the messages themselves on most forums are bland, so they need to add some filler to make it look pretty.

The new forum has a lot of visual clutter. Maybe a package parameter to use old style posting displays is not such a bad idea, after all. Look at this forum: there is just the bare minimum that needs be displayed. It's clean (credit goes to Philip Greenspun). Also, if the posting title differs from the thread title only by Response by clause, there is no need to display it at all. It's just another redundant clutter.

When I saw the forum in 4.x distribution, my forst thought was "sigh, this is the first thing to hack".

A harder problem is that there seems to be no way to view new answers like in this forum, or sort the threads by latest answers. I can hardly believe this functionality is gone. Why should the package become worse?

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Posted by Vadim Makarov on
If you really want to bring the bboard package to the industry standard, consider displaying twenty animated GIFs with smiles by default, backed with one-click javascript to insert them into message body. I can swear most forums nowadays have this functionality. Why lag behind. </soapbox>
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Posted by Dave Bauer on
I just want to make sure that the interface is clear to everyone. Suggestions for improvements are appreciated. The ideal would be to allow templates to configured for different parts of the forums package so that the site admin could pick one. That is not going to happen right away, but it is a good goal.

If anyone feels that forums needs improvement please submit a patch or ask for CVS access to the pacakge.

The entire dev.openacs.org code can be checked out from the openacs CVS repository using opeancs.org-dev as the module name. Anyone who has time and thinks they can contribute to fixing up the code, let us know.

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Posted by Andrew Piskorski on
Dave, I may well have just missed it, but how do you guys go about maintaining the new dev.openacs.org site, and just who is "you guys"? For example, now I know how to get the site code out of cvs, but what are your procedures for making changes? Is there a pointer to this sort of info anywhere?

E.g. Do you ssh to dev.openacs.org in order to edit stuff, and cvs commit from there? Or do you each have your own dev copy on you desktops, and do all edits and cvs commits from there? And if the later, who is responsible for updating dev.openacs.org to be current?

Once the new OpenACS 4.x site on dev.openacs.org goes live, do you plan to continue to use dev.openacs.org as a permanent shared "Dev" copy of the site, and periodically push new changes from Dev to Production? Or? (Note that I've no idea how Don and others have handled this with the old 3.x site...)

Btw, I do volunteer some of my time to help with coding on the new website. I guess I'll email you about that, but I figured the rest of this was of general interest...

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Posted by Andrew Piskorski on
I just wanted to point out that if you go to http://dev.openacs.org/ and then paste in an old /bboard/ URL, it automatically redirects to the correct new /forums/ URL for that particular thread. This is good, and very important!
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Posted by Lars Pind on
However, if you visit http://dev.openacs.org/bboard/ without the full URL, you get a Not Found page. :)

/Lars

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Posted by Tilmann Singer on
Good point Lars - I added the direct mapping and will commit it as soon as I get the CVS rights.
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Posted by Dave Bauer on
Andrew, and anyone else. I know that Roberto Mello, Ola Hansson, and myself have CVS access. I don't remember if anyone else has worked on it. We don't have any formal process, we have been coordinating mostly in the #openacs IRC channel at irc.freenode.net.

We will have to come up with something a little more strict once the site goes live.

I have been managing the project, so if you want to volunteer, contacting me is best.