Revision as of 17:31, 10 August 2009

Follow-up Issues and Actions

I have included the list of open issues in alphabetic order below. For closed issues see Closed Issues and Actions. My current intent is now to defer any further work to the phpBB3.0.5 Migration

Automated Unactivated Users Prune

This is another batch script that I have still in development. It automates a tedious twice weekly task. Low priority until the issues which are impacting the NL Administrators are sorted.

Forum Permissions and Access

I am an admin on all forums and should therefore have edit access to all forums. If I go into the ACP->Manage Groups->Group Forum Permissions and check, the Admin group has full permission on all forums. However in some forums, e.g. es and fr, I don't have edit edit access to topics but I do on some such as en. I haven't bottomed out what the difference is yet. The relevant code fragment from viewtopic.php (prettied for readability) is:

  'U_EDIT'       => (!$user->data['is_registered']) ?  : 
                       ( ( ( $user->data['user_id'] == $poster_id && 
                             $auth->acl_get('f_edit', $forum_id) && 
                             ( $row['post_time'] > time() - ( $config['edit_time'] * 60 ) || 
                               !$config['edit_time']
                             )
                           ) || $auth->acl_get('m_edit', $forum_id)
                         ) ? append_sid("{$phpbb_root_path}posting.$phpEx", 
                                        "mode=edit&f=$forum_id&p={$row['post_id']}") :
                             ),

that is for other than the O/P, acl_get must return the m_edit privilege for that forum.

Until I can work this one out the work around is to pick a moderator and test his permissions. Alternatively you need to be explicitly placed in a Moderator Group. Admins by default don't seem to inherit all moderator rights.

Language Localisation

The out-of-the-box language packs contain some mistranslations, A number of the NL Administrators have posted changes asking me to correct various miswordings in their translations. It's a little error-prone for me to do as I usually don't understand the nuances of the text and its context. There is a feature (now working) whereby the administrators can now do these changes themselves through the ACP if that have founding administrator rights in you forum, but as most of you don't have this on your own database:

• You log onto /forum/test database as TestFounder (pwd see closed post) and then through the ACP through the link at the foot of the page which is visible when you are logged in as an administrator.
• You navigate to ACP->System->Language Packs. This lists the Language packs installed in your NL Forum. Each of the named packs is a URI; click on the pack you want to edit.
• Under the Language entries there is a drop down allowing you to pick the file that you want to review / change. There are Language Files which relate 1-1 with the page URIs (e.g. posting.php is all of the NL strings specific to the posting form) and a common one for NL strings that are used on multiple forums. There are also templates for emails and registration. Make the changes that you need. One great advantage of doing it this way is that the encoding is UTF.
• Unfortunately, you need to be a Founding Administrator to have these right, and the NL admins do'nt have this, so I have added an account to the /test/forum instance (name and password provided on our private forum). Go into this test forum to do this work. Since all the NL instances use the same code and language packs, you can do this work here.
• When you are done click the "submit and download" button. This saves a copy on the server and downloads a copy to your PC which you can then review and edit (in a UTF8 enabled editor) at your leisure or pass to colleagues for them to update. For all but the simplest edits it is safe to do this download, because if you leave and back to the form you will start again with the installed version. (In fact you may just prefer to use an editor rather than the form interface in which case you select the file and click submit and download straight-away.)
• When you are happy with the changes then email the files to me (TerryE at the mail domain OpenOffice.org) and I will install them for you pretty much as soon as I pick up the email.

As an aside, I had real troubles getting this to work  :crazy: It was a bastard to debug. (See phpBB — (ACP) Unable to submit large forms).

Given that I am the resource bottleneck at the moment, can I ask all NL administrators which outstanding translation change requests to use this mechanism.

Language Pack Inconsistencies

Even though the Langauge packs are shared, the corresponding language tables in the forums were brought across from the old databases and are therefore inconsistent. This doesn't impact phpBB at an applications level, but it would make sense to standardise these as a one off. (The only difference should be whether the individual packs are enabled for a given forum.)

RSS Feed

A number of the power users on the fr forum used the previous RSS feed. This functionality has been temporarily dropped and needs reinstituted. The current implementation adopts the Simple RSS mod for phpBB3. However, this mod has significant limitations that I can't ignore. Most importantly it bypasses the phpBB access control system, allowing unregistered users to browse closed forums.

I need to discuss this further with the fr proponents of this mod.