Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Planet Atheism software upgrade

Planet Atheism has just been the "victim" of a software upgrade. It should mostly look the same, though the formatting problems should be rarer, and the Blogger bug where posts used the blog's name as the "author" instead of the actual author's name seems to be fixed. Yes, it was a bug here; a couple of members had asked me about it, and I thought it was a Blogger problem, and told them so... it turned out that it wasn't. My bad. It was a Simplepie bug.

For the technically inclined: what I did was update Simplepie to the latest development version, and alter a few things in Moonmoon to work with it (several functions changed names, and one now expects seconds instead of minutes, for instance). I also had to edit Simplepie itself so that it prefers the full content instead of the "description" field, which is a small excerpt of the post; the full version of PA is meant to have full posts, as long as the members provide them. If you do want excerpts, you can use Planet Atheism - short posts version instead. :)

Any problems, please let me know (just comment on this post, or email me at the address provided in the PA sidebar).

EDIT: thanks to gsnedders for telling me that Simplepie does have a function to get the entire post; it was just that Moonmoon was attempting to get the description instead. A simple change to Moonmoon (get_description() to get_contents()), and I was able to go back to the unaltered simplepie.inc.

2 comments:

gsnedders said...

Why the need to hack at simplepie.inc? Trunk does, if you even just look at the next method, have both SimplePie_Item::get_content() and SimplePie_Item::get_description().

Unknown said...

Oops... you're right. Moonmoon was using get_description(), and I didn't notice it, so I hacked it to provide the content instead... *blush*

I'll un-edit it, and edit Moonmoon instead. Thanks for the tip.