• I had to install a ridiculous amount of dependencies, sometimes to go from version 1.1.1 to 1.1.3 of some module. I really wonder if Typo 5.2 really needs those versions.
• When trying to upgrade, it seemed to hang in this line: Backing up to /var/www/virtual/hcoder.org/db/backup/backup-20090223-1843.yml. It turns out, it didn’t really hang, it just takes a good while (and yeah, the file stays at 0 bytes for a long time too)
• I had some permission issues that I had to fix (when upgrading, it tried to modify/copy some files, and it couldn’t)
• When applying the migrations, it died with a really strange error message. It turns out, my version of Rubygems was too old ????

While writing this first post, I see some improvements in the admin interface, although I still can’t see any kind of “preview”. I hope it helps me with my struggle with spam, at least :-/

I investigated a bit, and it turns out that there’s some bug (apparently related to saving a post as draft, then publishing) that makes the post have an empty “permalink”. When this happens, the link to the blog post looks exactly like the view of the posts for that particular day (say, http://hcoder.org/2008/11/23/ instead of http://hcoder.org/2008/11/23/why-i-hate-rubygems), so Typo decides that it shouldn’t show the comment form.

The bad news is that many posts are fucked now (although I have fixed some of the most recent ones). The good news is that it’s more or less easy to fix. You just have to connect to a “Rails terminal” with the production configuration (with ./script/console production) and do something like this for each post you want to fix:

>> a = Article.find(:first, :conditions => [“title LIKE ?”, “GPG%”])
=> #<Article id: 41, type: “Article”, yadda, yadda, yadda, …>
>> a.title
=> “GPG confusion”
>> a.permalink = a.stripped_title
=> “gpg-confusion”
>> a.save
=> true

Lesson learned: don’t save as draft for now (maybe I should upgrade to 5.1.3, it seems fixed there). Instead, untick the “Online” under “Post settings”, and hit “Publish”. That will assign a default, sane permalink value.

First, the good old editor is not there anymore: the Typo editor used to be really good, because on the left hand side you had a very reliable and easy to use textarea with Wiki syntax (you can choose which exact syntax you want), and on the right hand side you had a “live preview” of your post, automatically updated with Ajax, that showed you how the post was going to look like. Well, that’s gone. Now there are two options: some retarded WYSIWYG box, that I tried to use and failed, and some good old textarea… without the damn live preview. That sucks big time, because there is no other preview (that I have seen: please enlighten me if there is indeed one), so I just blindly write things in a Wiki format, and hope that it’s going to look OK when I press “Publish”.

Second, I was playing with the Wiki format for the articles, and I changed it to “Markdown” (I always mix “Textile” with “Markdown”, and never remember which is which; the one I prefer is Textile). After I hit “Save”, not only the next article was parsed in Markdown format by default, but every single blog post. It’s like, you select the parser the system is going to use to interpret your whole blog. How retarded is that? Once you have written posts, it doesn’t make sense to change their syntax (unless you do it manually editing the post itself). Clearly the format is a property of each blog post, not of the whole blog installation.

Not everything is bad though: it seems that now you finally have a “Draft” concept, so I can start writing a blog post and just save as a draft, instead of unticking the “Online” property and saving as a normal post. Also, the drafts are saved automatically, so I don’t have to remember to hit “Save” from time to time just in case the browser crashes or I hit something stupid and erase the contents of the post. Yay for that.

I have just upgraded Typo. It was slightly traumatic, because at first the blog broke horribly and I couldn’t see anything other than errors 500. To be fair, the change was quite big, because it included also an upgrade to Rails 2 (I was using some older Typo that used Rails 1.2.x), so everything worked better than expected.

I could login as admin, and change preferences and whatnot, and the only thing that was broken was the public view of the blog. I had a look at the logs, and it complained about not being able to find some template for the sidebars. I was very confused, and didn’t know where to starting looking for this. So, obviously, I asked “Señor Google”. He didn’t tell me that much, but someone left me the following hint: if you comment out the call to the helper `render_sidebars` (in the active theme code) solved the problem…. at the price of not having sidebars of course.

So I decided to connect a Ruby/Rails console to the production database, and have a look at the Sidebar model. The summary of what I did is this:

>> Sidebar.find(:all, :order => ‘active_position ASC’).
map {|s| s.active_position}
=> [0, 0, 1, 1, 2, 2, 3, 4]
>> Sidebar.find(:all, :order => ‘active_position ASC’).
map {|s| s.type}
=> [nil, “CategorySidebar”, nil, “ArchivesSidebar”, nil,
“TagSidebar”, “StaticSidebar”, “XmlSidebar”]
>> Sidebar.find(:all, :order => ‘active_position ASC’).
find_all {|s| s.type.nil?}.size
=> 3
>> Sidebar.find(:all, :order => ‘active_position ASC’).
find_all {|s| s.type.nil?}.each {|s| s.destroy}
=> [#<Sidebar id: 1, active_position: 0, config: {"empty"=>false, “count”=>true}, staged_position: nil, type: nil>,
#<Sidebar id: 2, active_position: 1, config: {"title"=>"Links", “body”=>"…"}, staged_position: nil, type: nil>,
#<Sidebar id: 3, active_position: 2, config: {"format"=>"rss20", “trackbacks”=>true, “comments”=>true, “articles”=>true}, staged_position: nil, type: nil>]
>> Sidebar.find(:all, :order => ‘active_position ASC’).find_all {|s| s.type.nil?}.size
=> 0

So, the problem is that there were some (severely broken) leftovers of the upgrade. I just removed them, and everything started working again. Phew!