Dev411 Blog

A new major version of the Catalyst framework has just been released. Read about it on Digg; here are the latest results I've seen:

It actually got to 91 diggs at the top of the Digg homepage before a new article came along (I took screen shots in KDE too but the layout wasn't as nice as XP). From Jezmo's Digg comment, I learned that SomethingAwful (6th largest forum on the Internet) is using Catalyst to build Titan, a schema-compatible vBulletin replacement. Catalyst is also used by Dresdner Bank, IUseThis and EditGrid.

Marcus has an announcement on his blog and the change log is available, but I'll summarize the changes here:

• "ActionClass templates" which allow you to make extensible actions. The first of which is Catalyst::Action::RenderView, a more flexible replacement for the DefaultEnd plugin. Read more about this in Catalyst::Manual::Actions.
• "Chained actions" which allow you to have parent and child actions on a uri. For example in a uri like /page/43/revision/23/edit you could have one action handle /page/43 and another handle revision/23/edit with captures for 43, 23 and edit.

• Major documentation improvements including the Tutorial and Introduction parts of the Catalyst manual, reference API documentation and the Cookbook.
• More concise log info and new colors for the debug screen.
• Switch from Module::Pluggable::Fast to Module::Pluggable for more fine grain control over setup_components.

• The Catalyst distribution has been split into Catalyst::Runtime and Catalyst::Devel. Runtime contains the minimal parts for deployment while Devel includes helpers and tools. Thankfully install Catalyst in CPAN will install Catalyst::Runtime and there's no need to change the use Catalyst; lines in your App Classes.

• Catalyst::Engine::Apache FIRSTKEY error: I just upgraded from Catalyst 5.6902 and Catalyst::Engine::Apache 1.06. I didn't have a problem running 5.6902 and 1.06 but others had the generic problem below and previously upgraded to 1.07. The problem only appeared with 5.7000 and 1.06 for me. In any event, make sure you're running Catalyst::Engine::Apache 1.07.

  [error] Caught exception in engine "Can't locate
    object method "FIRSTKEY" via package "APR::Table" at
    /path/to/site_perl/5.8.7/Catalyst/Engine/Apache.pm 
    line 65."

Typo will automatically turn something like http://www.dev411.com in a comment into a link, however this is undesirable when you're using a dummy uri such as http://your.domain.com. To get around this, I use the HTML symbol for 'h' in http so I type:

http://your.domain.com

This is just a one-off solution in that it requires some manual checking of whether the uri is a real one or not. I use it when posting on other people's Typo blogs. I suppose this can be automated by checking if the uri returns a valid response but that may be overkill.

BTW, here's a HTML symbol table for reference.

I've been experimenting with Typo at the new Dev411 blog primarily to get around the serious performance problems I (and many others) have experienced on Blogger. I know they are working on this and I hope they get it under control soon, however I didn't want to wait for something that may or may not happen so I've moved everything over to http://www.dev411.com/blog/. Typo has some nice features include categories/tags and Live Search which shows you search results as you type. Of course, I may switch back to Blogger (or to another engine) at some point but I'm hoping I won't have to change again.

I'm running 2.6.0 which is the current stable version according to the website though many people are running code directly from the SVN trunk. I'll probably wait for 4.0 before upgrading which I've heard should be coming out soon. In the mean time I've made some changes from the default configuration:

• added table of contents to pages with multiple articles (index, category/tag, archives and search) described previously.
• renamed categories to tags. The trunk supports both categories and tags but 2.6.0 only has categories. I simply renamed categories to tags by editing routes.rb and content.rhtml for the category plugin. When 4.0 comes out, I'll use the separate categories and tags and the tag uris will stay the same.
• moved categories/tags from bottom of each post to top by editing articles_helper.rb and templates.
• removed articles from uri by editing routes.rb.
• added number of comments to Live Search AJAX results by editing views/live/search.rhtml.
• added blog name to HTML title for individual article pages by editing articles_controller.rb.
• added Blog Roll sidebar which is just a copy of the static sidebar plugin. It would be nice if you could use the same static plugin multiple times but copy/rename is easy enough.

Features I'd like to add:

• Navigation breadcrumbs
• More specific HTML page titles
• The anchor slider from the Modernist theme
• A logarithmic tag cloud; the trunk version is linear
• Ability to categorize tags similar to del.icio.us tag bundles; this is supposed to be doable now with acts_as_taggable
• A tag list that also has links to tags you use at del.icio.us and possibly other places

I updated the Typo Themes Viewer with the following features:

• Lucid theme: No longer a drab gray :) The theme viewer currently uses a fluid layout for non-IE browsers and a fixed layout for IE since I ran into some issues using the fluid layout on IE. Even with the wider left and right margins, I can still get 6 thumbnails across on my 1400x1050 screen for easy viewing.
• Lightbox image viewer: The Scriptaculous Sortable effect has been removed and replaced with Lightbox (which relies on Scriptaculous). When you click on the thumbnail now a medium sized graphic will appear. Let me know how it works for you.

As before, I'm more than happy to add new themes as they become available. Just post a comment here with the uri(s).

The new look:

Using Lightbox:

On a final note, Lightbox 1.x allowed you to close the lightboxed image by clicking on it. In Lightbox 2.x, this has been disbled to allow the group feature to function. If you are only using single images or run separate copies of lightbox.js for singles and groups you can make the following mod to allow closing by clicking on the single lightboxed image:

// look for the following line:
objImageContainer.appendChild(objLightboxImage);
// then add this after:
objImageContainer.onclick
  = function() { myLightbox.end(); return false; };

Thanks to Tyler Mulligan for this solution.