Forum OpenACS Q&A: calendar and newbie comments

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Posted by Kevin Murphy on
Hi all,

New user here.  I've dabbled in the distant past, but I'm going to have a serious go at openacs this time. Please bear with my suggestions and questions. I am only making suggestions because I want to see openacs succeed.

*) I made the mistake of installing PG 7.2.3 with OACS 4.5.  I found that the calendar package did not work with it.  When I reinstalled 7.1.3 and rebuilt everything, the calendar package worked.

*) It is not clear to me where to report problems.  The calendar package description page (i.e. at http://192.168.123.1:8000/acs-admin/apm/version-view?version_id=2824)
has broken links to arsdigita, so I'm not sure if I should trust the owner email given on the same page.

*) Is there a system for automatically detecting broken links on openacs sites so such problems would be caught quickly?

*) The documentation is much better but still needs more work for newbies.

*) Backing up a bit to the beginning of my installation experience: when I clicked on "unleash openacs now" and downloaded the distribution, I looked at readme.txt, which referred me to www.openacs.org/4/.  Naturally, I was looking for the words "install" and "how to" or "documentation" or something like that.  I found it eventually, but you have to make it easier on the newbie.  Why not point the user directly to the installation instructions from within the readme.txt file?

*) Initially I somehow skipped the postgres install/prep.  Maybe there could be a progress bar at the top of the install pages to show you which step you're on.

*) As I mentioned in an email to Vinod, it would be good if some of the manual installation steps were encoded in a makefile-driven suite of scripts.  Most new users, i.e. people who are taking openacs for a testdrive, will not care to deviate from defaults.

*) On https://openacs.org/doc/openacs-4/openacs.html, it is confusing to the newbie that different boot-time startup methods for aolserver and postgres are suggested.

*) In https://openacs.org/doc/openacs-4/nextsteps.html, why not have the backup feature be a built-in "feature" of openacs, to be turned on and configure as desired?

*) The sitemap doesn't list the unmounted applications when I click on "Unmounted applications".  The only way to see them is to create a url and choose "new application".

*) I was confused that the "mount" link doesn't seem to do anything, whereas the "new application" link mounts an application.

*) When you add a new application to the sitemap, the lefthand text box is of unclear purpose.  I can guess, but I shouldn't have to.

*) Is there somebody who is charged with reading the forums and farming out the suggestions and bug reports to the appropriate authors?

*) It would be good if every package had a development status page.  I'm sure that somebody knew that Calendar in 4.5 wouldn't work with postgres, but searching the forums didn't tell me.

*) I am a little depressed at the sluggishness of some openacs operations.  There's an awful lot of tcl code being executed, isn't there?

*) As a newbie taking openacs for a spin, my initial interest is in porting a small static site to openacs and then injecting a few features like Calendar, Comments, and Forums. There should be a tutorial for how to do this (and maybe my own experiences will form the basis of one).  Secondarily, I will be interested in adding my own database-backed functionality to some of the pages.  The Notes tutorial in the documentation functions along these lines, but it is too discursive, and for all its erudition, it doesn't cover some details.

Kevin Murphy

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Posted by Lachlan Myers on
Some ill-informed and similarly newbie comments on your posting (corrections please!).

1 I didn't experience the postgres 7.2.3 /Open ACS 4.5 calendar problem you mention. I am also using 7.2.3 with a 4.6 system and calendar works fine. The only issue I had was with OpenFTS which was hard-wired to OpenFTS 2.1/Postgres 7.1.3 and needed some fiddling (thanks to Dan Wickstrom) to get it working. I beleive these are now fixed in CVS.

2 Arsdigita is no more. Some of the forums are are kept at RedHat. Reporting bugs should perhaps be better documented in the docs, but this is open source (read unpaid) and resources are always an issue. That said, I think Roberto and Vinod are progressing things rapidly.
OpenACS.org is the best place to report things.

5 I have found that the daemontools start-up a revelation, easy, reliable, and controllable. Is it possible to get the postgres start up with daemontools, or does it have to be in the usual boot formats?

7,8 It took me a little while to understand the "mount" thing, too. Installing OpenFTS as per the "Next Steps" doc, gave me some better understanding. In most cases, a new application sets up a new instance of the module, while mount/unmount will allow locating/ un-attaching/ relocating of an existing instance. So, if you have a calendar at a url, you can unmount it from there, then remount it at a different url witout losing any data.

13 I think that this would be good, too. I'm going to work out how to add general-comments, and if successful, will post it.

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Posted by Jun Yamog on
Hi Kevin,

1. I think 4.5 has some compat problems with PG 7.2.x, OpenACS 4.6 should be fine with PG 7.2.x.

2. You can use this to report bugs

http://sdm.openacs.org/sdm/one-package.tcl?package_id=9

The sluggishness if there is one is normally caused by a unoptimized query.  Although normally this does not happen on relatively small sites.  The tcl code should not be an issue.

Notes tutorial is a bit out of date, and we are trying to see if we can make something a bit more dated and appropriate.  Anyway we are all volunteers and much help is needed.

BTW, welcome to OpenACS.

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Posted by Lachlan Myers on
I have been moderately successful in adding general-comments to  a photo-album instance - without any sophistication, though. All images get the link.

I just looked at the code in a couple of the packages that use general-comments (news, photo-album-lite (not ported to PG yet))

This adds a "Add a Comment" line to each photo in photo-album.
---------------------------------------------
I stole code from photo-album-lite and added

    <p>@general_comments_link@
    <p>
    <if @the_comments@ not eq "">
    <strong>Comments</strong>
    <ul>
    @the_comments@
    </ul>
    </if>

to package/photo-album/www/photo.adp just before "@photo_nav_html@"

and added

    # try to set comments
    set the_comments [general_comments_get_comments $photo_id]
    set general_comments_link [general_comments_create_link $photo_id [ns_conn url]?[ns_conn query]]

to package/photo-album/www/photo.tcl

This works OK for the admin, but I now have to work out how to give permission to other users to add comments!

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Posted by Bart Teeuwisse on
Lachlan,

grant 'Registered users' general_comments_create on the photo-album instance. Or if you like to enable other packages too, grant this permission on the 'Main Site'.

You might want to first check if 'Registered users' already have general_comments_create premission on the 'Main Site'. As far as I know, the general comments package automatically installs this permission when loaded.

/Bart

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Posted by Tilmann Singer on
Please do not use sdm anymore to report bugs. There is an instance of bugtracker on the new site that should be used instead to report bugs on openacs: https://openacs.org/bugtracker/openacs/.

The old sdm has only been left active so that its open bugs are not lost. As soon as a group of volunteers finds the time to weed through them and either close them all or copy them over to the new bugtracker it can be removed.

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Posted by Lachlan Myers on
Bart,
    Thanks
Yes, the main site has the general-comments-create permissions granted to registered users, and I made it a direct permission on the photo album ... but no success with a non-admin registered user (security violation). I'll look into it, as I think its something I've missed in inserting the borrowed code.
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Posted by Vinod Kurup on
Thanks again for the comments 😊 I'll try to answer what I can - hope it doesn't seem too jumbled.

Like others mentioned, I would recommend using 4.6 with PG 7.2.3 if you can. Though 4.6 is not officially released yet, there is a test tarball here.

Report bugs on the bugtracker as Til noted and report the fact that package email addresses are not up-to-date as bugs!

You're right, the tarball README should point to better instructions. Jeff fixed this in the 4.6 release.

A progress bar in the docs is a nice idea. Proper patches always accepted 😉 And as I mentioned in your other thread, a more automated install script is something that a lot of people are interested in.

I would also like to make 'backup' builtin to OpenACS, likely using Tom Jackson's cronjob package. Unfortunately, I haven't had the time to make this a reality.

Lachlan explained the use of the mount link. I'm not sure why unmounted applications don't appear on your setup. That seems like a bug. It works on my 4.6 setup.

No one is in charge of reading forums and farming out instructions to authors. It's expected that authors are following the forums and responding the best they can. Probably not the best system, I admit.

I think one of the plans for the new (wonderful!!!) openacs.org website was to have package-centric pages/portals. I'm not sure if this is still in the works.

Specifically which operations are sluggish? Perhaps a bug report is in order if it is reproducible.

Kevin: There should be a tutorial for how to do this (and maybe my own experiences will form the basis of one)

Now you're in for it. By standard #openacs (IRC) rules, you've officially volunteered for this task 😊

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Posted by Vinod Kurup on
I should also mention that Joel Aufrecht has built a set of install instructions which are much closer to an 'install-script' than the docs are.