LifeType Development Journal

LifeType 1.2.11 released

jondaley — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 18:25:17 -0500

New version 1.2.11 with a couple fixes was released in January 2011.

TinyMCE was upgraded, and a couple of important security fixes. See the release notes page for more details.

LifeType 1.2.10 released

jondaley — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 08:08:38 -0500

One significant security bug in 1.2.9 (and all previous versions) forced us to release yet another release in the 1.2.x series. Check out the Release notes for more details. Someday we'll kill off this 1.2 branch and get to the fun 2.0 stuff.

Update: 01/27/2010, 7PM EST: If you already grabbed the release, please see the release note on sourceforge regarding an updated file for a quick bug fix.

LifeType 1.2.9 released

jondaley — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 20:18:30 -0400

Lifetype 1.2.9 is primarily a security release, but also a large handful of smaller bugs that were fixed while waiting for 2.0 to be release.

Official release notes and download page

Important notes with this release:

If you (or one of your users) is using a login that is on the "forbidden_username" list, you should remove that username from the forbidden list, otherwise that user will not be able to upgrade after installing 1.2.9.

LifeType 1.2.8 released

reto — Sun, 04 May 2008 04:18:42 -0400

Lifetype 1.2.8 is another security release fixing an XSS vulnerability, a problem with category search in the admin interface and some more minor bugfixes (please have a look at the release notes for details).

Official release notes

Download

These are the links to the full Lifetype 1.2.7 packages:

Lifetype 1.2.8 (.tar.bz2)

Lifetype 1.2.8 (.tar.gz)

Lifetype 1.2.8 (.zip)

If upgrading from Lifetype 1.2.7, there are packages available which only include new or modified files and will allow you to upgrade from Lifetype 1.2.7 only. These packages can not be used to upgrade from 1.1.x or any other 1.2.x release:

Lifetype upgrade package from 1.2.7 (.tar.gz)

Lifetype upgrade package from 1.2.7 (.zip)

LifeType 1.2.7 released

jondaley — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 20:18:04 -0400

Lifetype 1.2.7 is primarily a security release, though a number of issues with resources have been fixed as well.

Official release notes

Download

These are the links to the full Lifetype 1.2.7 packages:

Lifetype 1.2.7 (.tar.bz2)

Lifetype 1.2.7 (.tar.gz)

Lifetype 1.2.7 (.zip)

If upgrading from Lifetype 1.2.6, there are packages available which only include new or modified files and will allow you to upgrade from Lifetype 1.2.6 only. These packages can not be used to upgrade from 1.1.x or any other 1.2 release:

Lifetype upgrade package from 1.2.6 (.tar.gz)

Lifetype upgrade package from 1.2.6 (.zip)

LifeType 1.2.6 released

jondaley — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 12:18:33 -0500

Lifetype 1.2.6 is the latest maintenance release of the 1.2 branch and though we said that 1.2.5 was "as rock-solid as it gets", there continued to be a number of improvements and at least one significant bug fix. There haven't been very many support requests on the forums and we attribute that to the success of the 1.2.5 release. This release just adds icing to the cake.

Official release notes

Download

These are the links to the full LifeType 1.2.6 packages:

Lifetype 1.2.6 (.tar.bz2)

Lifetype 1.2.6 (.tar.gz)

Lifetype 1.2.6 (.zip)

If upgrading from Lifetype 1.2.5, there are packages available which only include new or modified files and will allow you to upgrade from Lifetype 1.2.5 only. These packages can not be used to upgrade from 1.1.x or 1.2 to 1.2.6:

Lifetype upgrade package from 1.2.5 (.tar.gz)

Lifetype upgrade package from 1.2.5 (.zip)

Lifetype 1.2.5 released

oscar — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 14:47:17 -0400

Release notes for Lifetype 1.2.5

Description

Lifetype 1.2.5 is the latest maintenance release of the 1.2 branch and after five maintenance releases, this is as stable and rock-solid as it gets. Continuing with the trend started in the 1.2 branch, Lifetype 1.2.5 delivers a couple of minor new features and some polish under the hood, specially concerning the API. We have noticed that as of late, there has been a somewhat remarkable increase of support issues and bug reports related to the API, so it finally seems like users and developers have started to realize the potential of the fully-featured and documented API that you get with Lifetype (and for free!) We're happy to see such trend and we'll continue to support and encourage enterprising users to make the best out of Lifetype classes and libraries.

Download

These are the links to the full Lifetype 1.2.5 packages:

Lifetype 1.2.5 (.tar.bz2)

Lifetype 1.2.5 (.tar.gz)

Lifetype 1.2.5 (.zip)

If upgrading from Lifetype 1.2.4, there are packages available which only include new or modified files and will allow you to upgrade from Lifetype 1.2.4 only. These packages can not be used to upgrade from 1.1.x or 1.2 to 1.2.5:

Lifetype upgrade package from 1.2.4 (.tar.bz)

Lifetype upgrade package from 1.2.4 (.zip)

New features

The following features have been introduced in Lifetype 1.2.5.

"Bookmarkable" filters

Some screens in Lifetype support filtering based on certain conditions but so far there was no easy way to save those filters so that for example we could quickly access the list of users marked as disabled and whose username starts with "a". As of Lifetype 1.2.5, there is a small icon that looks like a link next to each group of filters. This icon is nothing but a link pointing to the current page with its filtered values, so all you need to do is bookmark this link in your browser for future usage.

Totally disable the data cache

So far there was no way to disable the data cache, the layer that is responsible of saving data loaded from the database to disk for faster access later, so we have added some additional code for the very few cases where disabling the data cache is needed.

In order to disable the cache, edit the file config/cache.properties.php and make the following change:

$config["cache_method"] = "null";

Setting cache_method to 'null' will effectively disable the data cache.

Notification of new blogs

When a new blog is registered via summary.php, administrators can now optionally receive a notification message informing them of the new regsitration regardless of the status of the blog.

Issues fixed

In addition to the API fixes mentioned above, there's two long standing issues that have been addressed in this release: Lifetype can finally handle backslashes comfortably and the size of thumbnails is correctly calculated when keeping the aspect ratio and using the GD backend. An important issue that was allowing spam comments to be saved to the database instead of being rejected as spam has also been fixed has also been fixed.

This is the full list of issues fixed in Lifetype 1.2.5, extracted from the project's bug tracking system:

1359: Fix for Blogs::getAllBlogs()
1366: Files uploaded to the wrong destination when using the API
1367: "Default article category" not working
1141: Backslashes getting filtered
1356: Font options greyed out after preview
1376: Joomla user data provider not working with Joomla older than 1.0.13
1382: In the edit categories menu, a 0 is shown incorrectly if there aren't any published articles in a category.
1380: Conditionally show categories on the main page is broken.
1386: Spammers are able to post comments even if comments are disabled for a particular post
1387: comments with article_id = 0 created by some spam bots
1392: PluginTemplatedView not using cache anyway
1395: BlogNameValidator() will cause add blog error even the Chinese blog name is valid
1396: Templates directory hardcoded in baserequestgenerator.class.php
1400: PDbResultSet::GetArray() missing
1409: Problems displaying article categories
1413: Dots as part of a category name do not work with custom URLs
1407: final_size_thumbnail is calculated wrong

Lifetype 1.2.5-beta available

oscar — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 16:22:13 -0400

We released a beta version of the newest bugfix release of the 1.2 branch, Lifetype 1.2.5.

We've upgraded TinyMCE to 2.1.2, worked out some annoying little issues related to using backslashes as part of post contents and fixed a few more minor issues, all to make Lifetype 1.2.5 an even more stable and fine release for our users.

A more detailed list of fixes and improvements will be provided when the final release is available, but in the meantime you can check the list in the project's bug tracker: go to the "view issues" section of our bug tracker and select "Fixed 1.2.5" as the filter.

Packages containing the full Lifetype 1.2.5-beta release are available by following the links below:

Lifetype 1.2.5-beta (.zip)

Lifetype 1.2.5-beta (.tar.gz)

Lifetype 1.2.5-beta (.tar.bz2)

If you're already running Lifetype 1.2.4, it is possible to upgrade using an incremental release:

Lifetype 1.2.5-beta upgrade package from Lifetype 1.2.4 (.zip)

Lifetype 1.2.5-beta upgrade package from Lifetype 1.2.4 (.tar.gz)

Please report any issues with this beta via the project's bug tracker, or feel free to discuss any topic in the project's forums.

If there are no major issues reported related to this release, a final release of Lifetype 1.2.5 will take place during the next few days.

Roadmap

oscar — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 05:13:16 -0400

Some of you have been wondering where Lifetype is headed, when the next version will be released or what we've got in the pipeline... so here you go.

Lifetype 1.2.x

The 1.2.x branch of Lifetype will go on as expected, there will be as many maintenance releases as needed as long as there are bugs to fix. If there is any interesting minor feature that can be implemented, it will be considered but otherwise there will be no major changes.

Lifetype 2.0

The next major release will be Lifetype 2.0. We had some plans to develop a small 1.3 release and then tackle most of the changes below in 2.0, but those plans have been scrapped and instead we'll go for a bigger 2.0 release. The major version bump is justified by two important changes that will happen with Lifetype 2.0:

UTF-8
PHP 5

First of all, we're moving Lifetype to work internally in UTF-8.While some of the current translations are already using UTF-8 and the core is able to work fine with it, we're going to have a close look at it and make sure that it all works as expected. Also most of the western languages (English, French, Spanish, etc) are still using ISO-8859-1 as the character encoding and while this means that the ugprade process from the previous version will be a bit more challenging than usual, it also means one single encoding will be able to support all current and future translations.

With full support for PHP 5, Lifetype is finally entering the 21st century as far as programming languages are concerned. While old code will not be rewritten unless strictly necessary, developers are now free to utilize any of the new language features provided by PHP 5. The minimum required version for which we are developing is PHP 5.1, as that is considered by the development team the first truly usable version of PHP 5.

The two features outlined above have little or no effect on end users, so this is what we have planned for them in Lifetype 2.0:

Integrated friends list and private messaging.
Integration with Google Maps.
Ajaxification and clean-up of the user interface.

The integrated friends list will allow users to keep a list of their "friends" within a Lifetype community, much like LiveJournal does. Additionally, users will be able to exchange private messages with each other, and we're hoping that these features will increase the interactions between users and help grow the feeling of community.

Also, thanks to the integration with Google Maps users will be able to tag their posts, blogs and files with geographical information (known as geotagging) All you need to do is get a Google Maps API key and Lifetype will take care of the rest.

Last but not least, we're also working on creating a more dynamic and friendly user interface. For the first part we're using Javascript and the Ajax approach, and we've already got some things working, like dynamic paging of data without reloading the page, dynamic validation of forms, etc. For the second part (i.e. a more friendly interface) we're trying to reduce the number of options, buttons, links and gadgets in general used in the user interface to make it feel less daunting and more appealing to new users. Sometimes in our quest to provide the biggest amount of features we forget about usability and user friendliness and no we're trying to make up for that.

Now about the estimated release date... We usually don't commit to any release date(s) and we're not going to do it this time either. Our estimations are that Lifetype 2.0 should be in a usable state at some point in late 2007 and ready for mass consumption in early 2008. [Update 03/2008: this date has not been accurate for quite a while, but I hadn't realized we had published a date. 2.0 is currently in alpha stage, and I don't think anyone is using it for their own blog. I think historically the final release has been about 6 months after the developers start using it for their own blog] We've made good progress lately in the development area and things are already looking pretty good, but there's still a lot to do and we're in no hurry anyway: Lifetype 1.2.x is now rock solid, offers a pretty good amount of functionality and we're committed to provide as many maintenance releases of the 1.2.x branch as needed.

In the meantime if you'd like to help us develop Lifetype 2.0, we've created a Lifetype 2.0 TODO list in the wiki including most of the open items so far. Have a look at it and if you think you can help us, let us know. Otherwise in case you're just interested to see how things are coming along, the code in trunk in our Subversion repository is perfectly usable at the moment and things like the friends list, the Google Maps integration and about 50% of the interface has already been ajaxified.

After Lifetype 2.0

It's still early to say what will happen after Lifetype 2.0 and to provide a list of potential features would be foolish. We have a bunch of things in our roadmap that would be good to have but that have not been assigned to any release, so some or all of those could potentially end up being implemented in Lifetype 2.1.

We'd also like to hear feedback from our users because after all we're doing this for you guys, so please make sure that you use any of the suitable channels to send us your feedback!

Problems with TinyMCE in Lifetype 1.2.3, hotfix and updated packages available

oscar — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 17:03:22 -0400

Those who upgraded to Lifetype 1.2.3 and who use Internet Explorer for their browsing needs, will have probably noticed by now that the TinyMCE editor used in the "New Post" and "Edit Post" page is... gone. Unfortunately a bug slipped in the code during the 1.2.3 development cycle, the bug went unnoticed during our testing and it was part of the final release. This issue also affected Safari but not Firefox.

Those who downloaded Lifetype 1.2.3 before the June, 11th at 22:00 GMT need the following hotfix. The hotfix has been tested and verified to work:

lifetype-1.2.3-visual-editor-hotfix-20070611.zip

Just unzip the file into the root folder of your Lifetype installation, it should overwrite a bunch of .js files in the js/tinymce/plugins/ folder. Just to make sure, please reset your browser's cache before testing if it works.

If you downloaded Lifetype 1.2.3 after 22:00 GMT on the 11th of June, you do not need the hotfix above. The download packages have been patched and uploaded again to Sourceforge.net with the same version number:

LifeType 1.2.3 (.tar.bz2)

LifeType 1.2.3 (.tar.gz)

LifeType 1.2.3 (.zip)

The ugprade packages from Lifetype 1.2.2 have also been upgraded:

LifeType upgrade package from 1.2.2 (.tar.gz)

LifeType upgrade package from 1.2.2 (.zip)

We apologize for any problems this may have caused to you and your users. We will do our best to improve our pre-release testing processes from now on.

Lifetype 1.2.3 released

oscar — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 16:49:40 -0400

Lifetype 1.2.3 is the third maintenance release from the 1.2 branch and in addition to bringing in even more new features, it also provides fixes for a cross-site scripting vulnerability detected in summary.php as well as other stability related issues. Please read on for the download links and information about issues addressed in this release, and report any issues or bugs via our bug tracking system and the project's support forums.

From now on, release notes can also be found in the wiki in the Release Notes section. The release notes of Lifetype 1.2.3 can be found here.

Download

These are the links to the full LifeType 1.2.3 packages:

LifeType 1.2.3 (.tar.bz2)

LifeType 1.2.3 (.tar.gz)

LifeType 1.2.3 (.zip)

If upgrading from Lifetype 1.2.2, there are packages available which only include new or modified files and will allow you to upgrade to LifeType 1.2.2 only. These packages can not be used to upgrade from 1.1.x or 1.2 to 1.2.2:

LifeType upgrade package from 1.2.2 (.tar.gz)

LifeType upgrade package from 1.2.2 (.zip)

New features

The following features have been introduced in Lifetype 1.2.3:

Improvements to the Flash player

The Flash player introduced in Lifetype 1.2.2 is now being used even more:

When uploading Flash videos (in FLV format), it is possible to get them easily embedded via the Flash player that was introduced in Lifetype 1.2.2 in posts. The size of the video will be calculated based on the information extracted form it so all that is needed is to click the "Insert video" link that will appear in the resources pop-up window.

A new plugin for the TinyMCE editor allows to leverage the Flash player to play MP3 files stored in other servers, in addition to embedding MP3 files from our own resources.

Javascript in posts

A new global configuration parameter has been added to allow to embed Javascript code in our posts. The parameter is called allow_javascript_blocks_in_posts, can be found under Administration->Settings->Security, and is disabled by default.

File integrity checks

Administrator users will now have access to a new functionality called "Versions" in the "Administration" area. This feature will first of all report the current version of Lifetype installed (available from version.php) but more interestingly, it will perform an integrity check on the core Lifetype files installed in the system to make sure that the current available version matches the expected version. The expected version of the files is claculated based on the contents of the file install/files.properties.php and is automatically provided by the development team in each new release. For users who have made customizations to the core code this will of course return differences (which can also be used to track down which files have been modified) but for the rest of users will be useful to know if all files were uploaded correctly (which was a cause of many issues in the support forums)

Other improvements

Dailymotion is now available in the TinyMCE plugin that allows to insert videos from sources such as YouTube and Google Video.

Issues fixed

Extracted from the project's bug tracking system, this is the full list of issues fixed in this release:

1324: EVENT_POST_PREVIEW is now correctly thrown when generating post previews.
1318: CSS class error in TinyMCE insertresource plugin.
1322: Font error after install hotfix for XSS.
1323: mms:// URLs are filtered.
1279: Add dailymotion in the video plugin.
1314: XSS in user registration page.
1316: Link to blog from blog list panel.
1312: Error posting comments if mail notification is active.
1311: MP3 player doesn't appear on IE.
1310: can't load class.smtp.php in 1.2.2.
1309: French adin local changes.
1307: getModificationTimestamp method not working as expected.
1303: Allowing Javascript in posts.

Hotfixes for LifeType 1.2.2

oscar — Wed, 23 May 2007 13:46:04 -0400

Unfortunately, LifeType 1.2.2 was released with two minor but very annoying issues. Since LifeType 1.2.3 will still take a while, we have released two hotfixes that should help remedy these issues for the time being.

The first issue is related to the new Flash MP3 player that can be used to embed podcasts in posts. It works fine in Firefox but unfortunately not in Internet Explorer. Please download the hotfix below and unpack it in the root folder of your LifeType 1.2.2 installation. It should overwrite and add a few files in the js/tinymce/ folder:

flashplayer-hotfix-lifetype-1.2.2-20070523.zip

The second issue affects those users using SMTP as the email sending method (rather than PHP's mail() function) This issue will usually manifest itself with an error message when receiving new comments, as the notification message is being sent to the post author. If you have not noticed anything unusual and you are receiving email notifications as normally, you do not need this fix. Otherwise please download and unpack the following hotfix in the root folder of your LifeType 1.2.2 installation:

smtp-hotfix-lifetype-1.2.2-20070523.zip

In the meantime, stay tuned for LifeType 1.2.3!

LifeType 1.2.2 released

oscar — Fri, 18 May 2007 03:42:33 -0400

LifeType 1.2.2 has officially been released and it's available from the project page at SourceForge.net.

LifeType 1.2.2 provides a fix for the problems with data providers, so it is now safe to upgrade and run LifeType sites that rely on this functionality. Additionally, LifeType 1.2.2 provides three new features: a Flash MP3 player so that users can embed their podcasts in their blogs (in addition to offering the downloadable version),the possibility for blog owners to change the author of a post, and the possibility to sort posts in a blog in reverse chronological order (oldest first)

These are the links to the full LifeType 1.2.2 packages:

LifeType 1.2.2 (.tar.bz2)
LifeType 1.2.2 (.tar.gz)
LifeType 1.2.2 (.zip)

If upgrading from LifeType 1.2.1, there are packages available which only include new or modified files and will allow you to upgrade to LifeType 1.2.2 only. These packages can not be used to upgrade from 1.1.x or 1.2 to 1.2.2:

lifetype-1.2.1-upgrade-1.2.2.tar.gz
lifetype-1.2.1-upgrade-1.2.2.zip

This is the full list of issues fixed in LifeType 1.2.2:

1299:problems with custom fields
1286:$authuser not being set correctly in the front page of the blog
1247:wizard.php not working correctly when using a user data provider
1287:More MySQL 5 "strict mode" problems
1278:When MySQL full text search is enabled, quotes are not escaped
1271:Users don't get login permission

Please use the forums to let us know of any problems with LifeType 1.2.2 and our bug tracking system to report any issues you might find.

The ransom has been paid, the 'ads' plugin is now free

oscar — Sun, 13 May 2007 15:34:40 -0400

It didn't take long to collect the ransom for the 'ads' plugin so according to our own rules, the plugin is now free licensed under the GPL. Future releases of the plugin will also be released for free, in case you were wondering.

This is the link to the plugin package, available through Sourceforge.net as always:

Plugin 'ads' for LifeType 1.2.

And of course, a big thank you to those of you who participated in the ransom!

We're holding a new (and useful) plugin ransom!

oscar — Sat, 12 May 2007 13:39:50 -0400

Holding code "ransom" is a way of releasing software, in which software developers write some code that is held ransom (i.e. "not released") until a certain amount of money is reached during a specified period of time. Other open source projects have used this approach successfully and we figured that we could give it a try.

First of all, the rules:

The total amount to be collected before the plugin can be released is 100€. This is a very small fee compared to the amount of work we've put into the plugin and LifeType in general, but we'll start small and see how it goes.
You've got until the 16th of June at 23:59 GMT to reach the amount.
Please make the donations via the project's PayPal account:
Users who contribute towards the total amount will not be provided the plugin immediately and will have to wait until the total amount is reached. Otherwise there'd be no incentive to provide no more than 1€ and run away with the code.
Once the amount has been reached, the plugin will be released under the GPL like all other components of LifeType.
The plugin will be supported as any other plugin once it has become free, and further updates will also be provided for free.
This post will be updated with further information regarding this topic (like the total amount of money received so far)

Now, about the plugin... The development team has implemented a plugin that will allow site owners to define 'blocks' of content that will be dynamically inserted into blog content before it is sent to the browser. One of the most direct applications of this plugin is to insert common headers or footers in blog pages (a feature that many blog communities have requested) The plugin comes with some predefined locations where the content can be placed (header, footer, etc) so that it can be quickly integrated into running sites. Additionally, custom content placing logic can be implemented to provide even more flexibility.

Additionally, different blocks of content can be applied to different blogs so for example all blogs get the common header with a block of ads except those in a specified list, which presumably would be those that paid a certain fee to become 'pro' blogs.

Documentation detailing all the features of the plugin is already available in the wiki so that you can get an idea of what the plugin does. We've also set up a couple of demo blogs here, where you can see how out of four blogs, three of them have a block with Google ads at the top and one of them doesn't (this one)

As stated at the beginning of this post, we're just testing alternative ways to release software. We truly believe in free software but we also believe that there are ways in which the development team can be compensated for their work... But don't be afraid, we are not planning to releasing all future plugins following the same approach.