Archive for May, 2010
Along with our revamped Nooku.org site, we also opened the new Nooku Blog. This way we can keep things nicely separated. So if you want to stay up to date with both DOCman and Nooku, subscribe to both http://feeds.nooku.org/blog and http://feeds.joomlatools.eu/site/blog.
You’ll amaze your friends and enemies with your knowledge of Joomla, and you’ll read about our ideas and thoughts for the Joomlasphere. And if you think we’re wrong, feel free to tell us so in the comments!
We are officially advising all our users and customers to NOT upgrade to Joomla 1.5.16/1.5.17. The new Joomla release includes a auto-plugin disable feature which can lead to a site experiencing unexpected behavior or worst case the site could go down.
The auto-plugin disable feature was introduced to quote :
I’d like to try to write a patch to Joomla core so it doesn’t die with fatal error when it can’t include a plugin file (in other words: plugin exists in DB but filesystem entry is deleted).
Source : Graceful handling of missing plugins
The introduced solution for this problem is that Joomla 1.5.16 and 1.5.17 now disables any plugin that triggers an error during initialisation.
The behavior assumes that a plugin would always throw an error, being a missing file, however the error could be conditional and only thrown under certain circumstances. Depending on how the plugin works the conditions could be rare. Instead of throwing an error the plugin is disabled and prevented from executing under normal conditions. This can lead to a site visitor experiencing unexpected behavior or worse the site could go down.
We have requested the change in 1.5.17 to be rolled-back.(See Tracker #19859).
In the mean time we strongly advise you to not upgrade to Joomla 1.5.16/1.5.17.
If you are using 1.5.16/1.5.17 and you are experiencing problem with plugins magically disabling themselves please let us know.
With the DOCman 1.5.x series running pretty smoothly, we focused all efforts for the latest maintenance release on these area’s:
This feature was taken out due to some issues, and didn’t make it back in the previous releases. It turned out some of you really depended on it, so I’m happy to say the feature is back from the hospital and feeling all better!
People run DOCman on on all possible combinations of server stacks, based on Windows & *nix, with Apache, nginx, IIS, etc, and, unfortunately, not all of them on good hosts. Some of the combinations produce the weirdest of bugs: downloading from an Apache install using IE7 and IE8 for example. Fixing weird bugs sometimes result in other weird bugs: immediately after the release of 1.5.6, we discovered a regression.
But not to worry: it proves our workflow for forum support, bug tracking and fixing, and releasing, is in top condition. We managed to release 1.5.7 within 24 hours of 1.5.6. A new record! (Also, it turns out that release numbers ending in ‘6’ have bad mojo.)
If you are using Joomla’s FTP layer, you’ll be happy to know our installer and upgrader now have better support for it. Still, if you don’t need the FTP layer, turn it off. It will improve your site’s performance.
You all know them: little bugs in software that are almost too small to spot, affect only few people, but can kill your mood if you run into them and you’re on a deadline to deliver a site. With the more important bugs out of the way, we now had the time to fix those leftovers.
We hope you enjoy this release as much as we enjoyed making it. If you have any problems, make sure you have a look at our DOCman Support Portal, which has over 125 FAQ items, and a couple of video’s as well. If you are still running DOCman 1.4, now is an excellent time to get the 1.5 upgrade from the Joomlatools Store.
