Date:
February 14, 2011

Rendered Clean

 

You probably know that release numbers (1.0, 2.0, etc) are as much of a communications decision as a technical one; Wagn 1.5.2 is a prime example. This new release involves some hugely important refactoring -- and lots of it. There have been 3.5 times as many code commits since version 1.5.1 (564) as there were between 1.4.0 and 1.5.0 (158). 

 

So, you ask, why not call this wonderful overhaul Wagn 1.6? Because big releases are about new features, and this release is about refactoring -- getting things ready for new features to come. There's very little in this release that will change your end-user experience right away -- it's a little faster, we've knocked out some obscure bugs, and there are a few new behaviors for special file extensions (like .css and .txt) -- but nothing to plaster on a billboard.

 

It's a release that will excite developers and tease avid Wagneers and bore pretty much everyone else. But if you're reading this, odds are than you're in one of the first two camps. 

 

So, for you, here are some of the new features that version 1.5.2 does NOT introduce but gets us much closer to releasing:

  1. A simple Ruby API for custom views modules (more on that in a coming blog post)
  2. A simple REST API for all card transactions
  3. Extensive handling for mobile devices: smart phones, tablets, etc.
  4. Rich export of any Wagn query to formats like csv, xsl, etc

There are a few minor Wagneering features that may interest you (and that 1.5.2 actually DOES introduce):
  • Raw Content -- You can now add .txt to a card name to view the raw content (in text/plain format) for any card that you have permission to view. For example, here's the Classic Layout on wagn.org, which "Anyone" can see but not anyone can edit: http://www.wagn.org/wagn/Default_Layout.txt  learn more
  • CSS handling -- Similarly, you can go to /*css.css and have it return CSS in the correct MIME type. You can also make your own CSS cards without special names if, for example, you want different CSS cards on different layouts, or if you want special css for different media (print, mobile, etc). 
  • WQL Counts — You can now use "return":"count" in a WQL query to have it return just the number of cards.

If you're interested to see details about the bugfixes and refactoring work, check the Wagn 1.5.2 card.

 

It should be noted that the core work on this release was unfunded, and its success has depended entirely on volunteer contributions. Gerry Gleason deserves special thanks for his work conceiving and implementing a major refactor of our rendering system, as does John Abbe for tireless organizing, testing, documentation, synthesis, and creativity. We're also grateful for the rich and growing body of feedback from our user community.

 

+tickets by status

open

in progress

coded

testing

closed

 

 

Notes

Script and Ruby cards are broken for now (in some cases?), as a result of the inclusion refactoring. They'll be fixed when we add nuanced control of content rendering.

 

refactor inclusion processing also resulted in headers in inclusions showing up in tables of contents, which we may want from content/titled/open inclusions, but the ones from closed view inclusions were really messing up ToCs. The solution for now was to default ToCs to being off everywhere (by changing *all+*table of contents to 0), but you may have custom table of contents settings that you need to adjust. We're still designing a better solution - see have ToCs reflect only some headers in inclusions.

 

Slash-star as markup to generate HTML code /code tags has been removed as a feature (in order to continue allowing slash-star to be used to make comments on *css as we switch to a simple url for text pages like css). You can get add "pre" to the Format menu of the editing toolbar's by adding it to theme_advanced_blockformats on *tinyMCE (we've done it here on wagn.org so you can look at that link to see how it's done). "Code" doesn't work, but it's probably less desirable anyway.

 

When you run migrations for this release we will adjust permissions for *css so that it is readable by Anyone. You can change that if you like, but it is necessary for that CSS to be applied for people who are not signed in. (This is also a consequence of us moving CSS from style tags on every page to a separate http request which accesses *css - which is why we made a simple url for text pages like css.)

 

If you have cards with Unicode characters in their names, you may see them appear in Recent Changes occasionally as part of migrate existing card keys for Unicode fix. (You shouldn't have to do anything about it, this note is just to point you to why it's happening.)

 

Table of contents now picks up h1 and h2 tags inside inclusions and generated by titled view. This can make for a messy table of contents in many cases, so we defaulted them to off on all cards. We'll improve on this when we refactor table of contents.