b2evolution 0.8.2 sneak preview :)

b2evolution version 0.8.2 is on its way...

You can get a sneak preview here: http://b2evolution.net/demo/

There are 42 enhancements over the last public release. Can you find them all ?

PS: this is Release Candidate 1, so expect one or two little bugs... but they should be even harder to find than the last 2 enhancements... at least I hope so :P

Update: some kid must have found it funny to change the password for the demouser allowing you to access the backoffice... Bleh! :-/ It's back now... with a lock so it doesn't get changed again... This is sooo lame...

IE, CSS & TEXTAREA hell !

We used to have an article here about styling textareas with CSS in IE. It was one more post on the web about one more bug in Internet Explorer 6. It has been fixed in between.

In case you still need this, we had a workaround which consisted of applying width:100% on a div around the form, like this:

<div style="width:100%">
  <form>
    <label for="t1">Try to type in here:</label>
    <textarea id="t1" style="width:100%">Try to type here!</textarea>
  </form>
</div>

Towards a new syndication format

Looks like the Echo Project Roadmap is getting a pretty wide acceptance in what we probably could call the ~`blogging industry'~ by now.

I definitely plan to support Echo in b2evolution... RSS has been such a mess for such a long time... something really has to change...

(I hope they'll move this project to some decent place though... the project is still small be the Wiki that hosts it is already a headache to navigate... :>> but I won't say more on this... since it's been up for 3 weeks now I think and I still haven't moved on with the new b2evo website :. )

Web application caching

Blogs, as most current web applications, need to address the server-side caching issue in order to reduce webserver load.

It looks like most people are quite happy with caching static versions of their pages for some defined amount of time. This method has often been called something like "half-baked/half-fried" in reference to the long running baked (static) versus fried (dynamic) discussion.

I'd actually call it "baked on demand"... but regardless of what name we use, I would not be satisfied with this.

I have actually done some experiments caching my blog homepages which is enough to significantly reduce load, but this really makes them too static for me. I do want to log some stuff in realtime, I do want new user comments to show up instantly, and most of all: I do want the page to be customized for each user: display new posts since last visit, display his personal choice of categories, etc... Caching a whole page for every possible combination seems plain stupid. (And it is! :>> )

Actually, the only smart caching mechanism one can be satisfied with in high-end web-applications is block-caching. As a matter of fact, a web page can actually almost always be considered as an assembly of different blocks. Some are static, some are dynamically updated several times a day, some are related to the user himself and some are so dynamic they change everytime the page is displayed, no matter what! By caching each of these blocks individually when it makes sense and rebuilding only those necessary at a given time, you can then reconstruct your whole page dynamically significantly faster than if you had to reconstruct all blocks from scratch every time.

And there you have it: performance and functionality. Yeah, Okay, I know... it's also much more complex to implement than any other caching mechanism... ;D

PHP unpure...

"[...] as I have said so many times, PHP is not about purity in CS principles or architecture, it is about solving the ugly web problem with an admittedly ugly, but extremely functional and convenient solution. If you are looking for purity you are in the wrong boat. Get out now before you get hit by a wet cat!"

-Rasmus Lerdorf, creator of PHP

Makes sense... but just one thing: why is the web problem supposed to be ugly ?