Tonight I secured webpad a little more heavily, standardised some more of the operations across different sections and generally tidied things up. I also added ‘delete post’ functionality to the currently supported blog systems (blosxom, Blogger.com, TypePad and LiveJournal), and that’s looking pretty slick.
Part of add the delete functionality required me to write out the (very, very simple) plugin API for adding and removing tools to the toolbar. I may be a little biased (and not at all modest), but I think it’s pretty cool 
More about plugins later – but basically webpad 3.0 supports plugins through a “My Plugins” section, so hopefully people might even write some new features for it, allowing access to more external sources of text to edit!
So, I can hear you asking; what’s left? Well:
MovableType Support (open, edit, create, delete)WordPress Support (ditto)Update a few interface niceties (like the ‘About webpad’ dialog)Write the new Help Manual, which is a lot different to the last version, and will be a lot bigger- Update the webpad project page
Fix a scrolling bug in Mozilla (fixed on PC, needs a tweak for Mac)- Pretty up some of the error messages
- Thorough system testing before release
- Packaging up with some instructions on installation
Oh yeah, and of course, I’m doing the whole dog-food eating thing and as usual, this is posted with the very latest version of webpad (from FireFox), using a couple of the tools and bits and pieces and it’s all looking good.
Seriously, this time I actually mean it webpad 3.0 Personal Edition is really close to being available for beta download. I’m really excited about this version, I think it has some awesome features and is an excellent upgrade from webpad 2.0 (it feels like a whole new product is has so much new stuff!).
Keep an eye on the project page and sign up to the mailing list to hear as soon as it’s available!
Thanks to Rafael for pointing out an error on the auto-install link for AvantBlog. There was a problem which made the ‘Depth’ field show up with weird characters when trying to install the channel on AvantGo.
All fixed now
Don’t get excited, just testing some webpad blog posting.
After a very long wait, a downloadable version of XooMLe is now available!
This means that you can now download XooMLe and install it on your own PHP-enabled server so that you can use it locally for integrating Google search results (and cache and spelling suggestion power) into your web-based applications.
In the near future, a ‘XooMLe In Action’ page will also be added to the site, showcasing some of the ways that people are making use of XooMLe and Google.
I’ve modified the namespace being used by XooMLe because it was conflicting with some XSLs and making them not work. The top-level namespace now looks like this;
xmlns:xoomle="http://dentedreality.com.au/xoomle/docs/"
Please let me know if this causes any problems for anyone.
Well, it’s official. webpad 3.0 will now use integrated, session-based authentication for users, rather than HTTP Authentication. I’ve changed to this in large part to allow me to use it in CGI mode (which, incidentally, works wonderfully), so webpad is even more portable now. In fact, if you have PHP running in CGI mode, I will be reccommending that you run webpad under that mode.
With the new integrated authentication, when you hit webpad you are presented with a log in screen, where you enter a username/password as normal, then continue to the actual application.
I’m also currently looking at templating (thanks to a previous hack that Brad Choate made to webpad 2.0 which allowed it to selectively edit the contents of a file, only within certain regions (denoted by webpad tags of some sort). I will have this functionality included in the official release of webpad 3.0 Personal Edition, and it will definitely be a part of the Professional release.
Things may have been quiet, but they’re not completely dead!
As I have previously experienced, creating files on the server using webpad can sometimes cause problems with permissions, because the resultant files are owned (on a *NIX box) by the user that Apache was running as. Since that’s not normally the same as your shell user, you can have some problems managing those files later on.
Ideally, I’d have webpad create files, then change them so that a specified user account owns/controls them, but that the Apache user would have access to them. Since I’m yet to get this working (or figure out exactly how I can do it on DreamHost), in the meantime I am just creating files or directories and immediately chmod’ing them to 777 (I know, I know, not secure etc, but the only way I can do it so that I can work with the files later.)
Anyone know a better way of doing it?
I am also considering switching away from HTTP Authentication, and using a form to log in to webpad, which might just allow me to run webpad in CGI mode on DreamHost, and thus solve user problems, because it would run as my user… will keep you posted on that though.
I’ve finally figured out a bug in the current development version of webpad that meant once in a while I’d somehow overwrite a file I had previously been working on with a blank file.
Turns out that it was because I was reloading webpad in a window which I had previously used it, so the session (containing filenames etc) was still active. When webpad loaded, it was triggering the ‘save’ operation, and saving the now-empty main window as the file I was previously working on. All I’ve done is make it so that you can’t write a blank file now — if you want to delete something, you should be using the delete operation in the file dialog anyway.
One step closer to release! Blogs are still a sticking point tho… how/what to support on Blogger.com/MovableType is the thing holding me up. Complete blosxom support is already in there, and works wonderfully – I’m using it to maintain my blogs and website. The Blogger Atom API sounds really ugly and excessively complex, but I’ll let it stabilise a little more and then have a proper look at it I think…
Thanks to a suggestion from Bill, I found the problem that AvantBlog has been having when attempting to authenticate with the Blogger.com servers… basically they moved their servers!.
As Robert discovered in this post, the server that responds to API requests moved from plant.blogger.com to www.blogger.com, so basically I was posting authentication requests to a server that didn’t exist. This has been rectified now and it appears to be operating properly.
Enjoy your blogging folks
