Flux CMS DevBlog

Some people seem to have problems with writing new posts since we updated the Blog editor, especially after the upgrade to FCKeditor 2.1.1. We fixed some little things today, but are not sure, if we caught all the bugs, as we couldn't reproduce everything. So here's the question to all of you:

Who has still problems posting/editing/saving blog posts? (please clear the browser cache, if you didn't do that already since this afternoon before testing :) ) And if yes:

- Which browser are you using? Which version? Which operating system?
- What was the error?
- Did the Blog editor not start up at all (no buttons)? Or did it not save properly?
- What exactly did you do? Just wrote some text? Added links? Images? Etc..
- If you are using Firefox/Mozilla, do you have any error-messages on the JavaScript Console,
- Anything else?

We really want to solve this issues as soon as possible and making it work perfectly. There's nothing more annoying than a not working blog editor, therefore we need your feedback. Just add your notes to the comments (you can also add, if you don't/didn't have any problems lately :) )

Update: We found one additional error, FCKeditor seemed to add   under some circumstances... We try to convert them now on the serverside, so that it should work correctly again... (and if it still goes wrong, it at least displays a more meaningfull errormessage now). Hope this removes most of the recent errors...

We had an issue on Windows Internetexplorer, where you had a white screen after login. That's fixed now.

Technical reason: we forgot to add a whitespace between opening and closing script tags....

... you have to set the following conf/config.xml option:

<allowHTTPAuthentication>false</allowHTTPAuthentication>

Otherwise your site won't work.

You need that, because the blog plugin tries to do HTTP Authentication by itself to allow RSS aggregator to see password protected posts. With the above setting, this is not possible anymore, but the whole site will be password protected anyway, therefore this is something we can live for the time being

The other option is to have the same username/password combo for .htaccess based protection and the users within Flux CMS. Then it should work, as well.

We will maybe find a better solution some day, but for now, this has to do it :)

I just committed a patch, which makes it now possible to also post extended posts over the XML-RPC interface, for example from ecto. We use the MoveableType API for that (mt_text_more).

You can do extended posts from the webinterface since the last big blog-editor update. An extended post is basically a two part post, where the extended part is only shown on the permalink, and not in the overview or the RSS feed. Useful for really long postings :)

We upgraded the FCKEditor from 2.1.0 to 2.1.1. This fixes a problem with removed spaces after editing an entry.

We (the Bitflux Blog) are currently hit by trackback spam once again. It's especially hard to take appropriate countermeasures, as the usual antispam techniques (captchas, hidden fields, etc) don't work here. So what do we do:

The usual comment modes also apply to trackbacks, meaning if you turn off comments, you can't trackback either anymore. Also trackbacks - as with comments - are only allowed for one month by default. You can change that behavior for each post or globally in the settings.

Furthermore trackbacks are moderated by default. Currently you can't change that, it's hardcoded. But in my experience, it's not worth automatically publishing trackbacks. There are much more spam trackbacks, which fall trhough our spam-detection than legitimate ones. It may be irritating to legitimate trackbackers, that their trackback doesn't show up immediatly, therefore I added now a little text to the default templates about that.

We also check the IP sender against xbl.spamhaus.org (catches about 50% of spam trackbacks) and against surbl.org (less than 50%). We also have our own blacklist, where we add spam-urls as soon as they hit us (and we find the time and internet connection to add it :) ). For this reason, I always allow comments on Bitflux Blog, so that we get as much spam urls as possible.

By the way, you won't get email notification for rejected comments/trackbacks by default, therefore you may sometimes not know, how much spam you get :) You can change that in the settings, too. But we never had false positives and you can check the rejected comments/trackbacks also in the webadmin (but they are deleted automatically after 3 days).

If anyone has any idea, how we can further improve trackback spam detection, let us know.

People who comment, can now also add their Homepage URL to the comment, which will be displayed together with the comment.

This should not interfere with our antispam measures and if someone comments something useful, (s)he deserves a back link anyway :)

If you really want to add a rel="nofollow" to it, you have to add that in the blog.xsl.

I just updated Freeflux.net (the features are in subversion since quite some time)

Here some of the new features (when I find some time, I'll blog more details about them)

- A complete new Blog Editor: You can now do almost everything from there. Upload Pictures/Files, create new categories, etc.. And we use now FCKeditor instead of Kupu. And that works now also in IE (Kupu would have worked in IE as well, but we were to lazy to fix some of our faults)

- Extended Entries: It's now possible to write extended entries, the extended text only shows up, if you go to the permalink of the post and not in the overview and the RSS (some may have to update their templates and CSS to make it look nice)

- Newly added archive links in Blog Plugin:
- archive/tag/foo to see all posts assigned to a tag
- archive/author/chregu to see all posts from an author
- archive/id/333 permalink via id of a post

- For mails from the blog plugin, we use now the blogname, resp. sitename as prefix and not [flux cms] anymore

- Aggregator Plugin: you can now have your own Planet. See Alain's Post for some details.

There's certainly more, but I can't remember right now :)