You probably got used to read about me updating Typo at this point — the last update I wrote about was almost an year ago when I updated to Typo 6, using Rails 3 instead of 2. Then you probably remember my rant about what I would like of my blog …
Well, yesterday I was finally able to get rid of the last Rails 2.3 application that was running on my server, as a nuisance of a customer’s contract finally expired, and since I was finally able to get to update Typo without having to worry about the Ruby 1.8 compatibility that was dropped upstream. Indeed since the other two Ruby applications running on this server are Harvester for Planet Multimedia and a custom application I wrote for a customer, the first not using Rails at all, and the second written to work on both 1.8 and 1.9 alike, I was able to move from having three separate Rails slot installed (2.3, 3.0 and 3.1), to having only the latest 3.2, which means that security issues are no longer a problem for the short term either.
The new Typo version solves some of the smaller issues I’ve got with it before — starting from the way it uses Rails (now no longer requiring a single micro-version, but accepting any version after 3.2.11), and the correct dependency on the new addressable. At the same time it does not solve some of the most long-standing issues, as it insists on using the obsolete coderay 0.9 instead of the new 1.0 series.
So let’s go in order: the new version of Typo brings in another bunch of gems — which means I have to package a few more. One of them is fog which includes a long list of dependencies, most of which from the same author, and reminds me of how bad the dependencies issue is with Ruby packages. Luckily for me, even though the dependency is declared mandatory, a quick hacking around got rid of it just fine — okay hacking might be too much, it really is just a matter of removing it from the Gemfile and then removing the require statement for it, done.
For the moment I used the gem command to install the required packages — some of them are actually available on Hans’s overlay and I’ll be reviewing them soon (I was supposed to do that tonight, but my job got in the way) to add them to main tree. A few more requires me to write them from scratch so I’ll spend a few days on that soon. I have other things in my TODO pipeline but I’ll try to cover as many bases as I can.
While I’m not sure if this update finally solves the issue of posts being randomly marked as password-protected, at least this version solves the header in the content admin view, which means that I can finally see what drafts I have pending — and the default view also changed to show me the available drafts to finish, which is great for my workflow. I haven’t looked yet if the planning for future-published posts work, but I’ll wait for that.
My idea of forking Typo is still on, even though it might be more like a set of changes over it instead of being a full-on fork.. we’ll see.
