Topic: News and Updates / Dev'il banished

Since I do not have time to devote to Dev’il, I’m officially announcing discontinuing my work on this.

I do have unrealistic desires to make a new Dev’il based on the updated Beast and providing Git, SVN, and Hg backing for Changes, as well as content-typed attachments for tickets. Alas, time is not my friend.

I’ll leave a page up with a link to the source, but I’ll be taking down this Dev’il instance in the near future.

Thanks for the interest and good luck with developing intelligent and user-friendly collaboration systems.

Topic: News and Updates / Do you intend to continue development of Devil?

This looks cool.

Yes, as with any opinions, they are most suited to a particular context.

Topic: News and Updates / Do you intend to continue development of Devil?

Yes, but probably not according to your time frame. ;) Feel free to use the code.

Topic: Development / Upcoming features

No development yet. My first project is Rubinius and that has taken a lot of time recently. I will be working on this again soon.

Topic: Development / why hidden operations links?

The hidden links for edits etc are from Beast. Dev’il extends Beast and tried to be consistent with it.

The hidden links aids readability and the clean appearance of the content. I have plans to make them more usable. I don’t agree that they are not good from a usability standpoint per se. The main issue with them is discovery (for new or infrequent users) and target. My plan is to make them appear on mouse movement over the page and fade with mouse inactivity.

Topic: Development / question about tickets.user_id

vitaly: user_id is intended to be the creator of the ticket, while owner_id is the user who “takes” the ticket, possibly indicating that she is working on it. I should audit the actual implementation, though.

Topic: Development / #2 Edit mode not working

I’d suspect Apache and something with URL rewrites, but that’s just a WAG.

Topic: Development / #2 Edit mode not working

Is it working for you in Safari at devil.brightredglow.com? It’s working for me.

Topic: Development / #2 Edit mode not working

Ok, just saw you added that it manifests with Safari. I’ll try that here (I generally use FF so that might explain why I didn’t notice it).

Topic: Development / #2 Edit mode not working

I must say, this stumps me. I’m assuming it’s working for you somewhere? If Apache is in the mix, have you checked that the URL is sane (e.g. no trailing / bug or something)?

Can you run the tests on that setup? Or development mode?

Topic: Installation / SVN Error

Ok, sounds good. I’ll migrate to change_type.

I don’t like MySQL because they don’t care about standards. Quick and dirty or whatever else works. Today I had to rewrite SQL because IS isn’t an operator until 5.0.1.

I like PostgreSQL because they have been very concerned about standards from the beginning. They are ACID compliant (I wouldn’t trust that about MySQL ever). They were concerned about correctness at the start and then optimized. Over the past 8 years I’ve had almost uniformly good experiences with PostgreSQL.

So, yeah, definitely check it out. I use it without pains on OS X and Ubuntu 6.06, but have also used it on Debian 3.1 and any number of Redhat distros.

Topic: Installation / SVN Error

Hmm, have I mentioned that I hate MySQL?

Perhaps change_type? If you assure me that’s not a MySQL reserved word, I’ll change alter fix it or whatever.

Topic: Installation / Can Access Be Restricted

The authentication comes from Beast. I don’t know that Beast allows no public view of the data. Options would be basic auth, or a intranet with something like VPN access.

It probably wouldn’t be hard to add a pre-filter to ApplicationController that always requires authentication for all content.

Topic: Installation / SVN Error

  has_many :changes, :order => 'change, id'

Topic: Installation / Admin

Yep, that’s in Beast, actually.

Topic: Development / What about Beast?

It’s not exactly modular, but not invasive either. I wanted to change as little as possible of Beast proper because I intended to merge upstream changes and I wanted to make my life easier. Also, I tried to stay consistent with Beast, so little of Beast needed changing.

I’m sure someone will come up with a much better name than Dev’il. :)

Topic: Development / Upcoming features

These are the 4 features that are currently cooking for Dev’il:

• Full-content search for all areas
• Tags for pages and tickets
• A new theme that will (hopefully) address readability issues for pages
• Caching for pages, tickets, and changes.

As always, feedback is appreciated.

Topic: Development / What about Beast?

Jamie, that’s a great question. I’ve been pretty lame about chatting up Rick on topics like this. I’ll do that. However, I think Beast should continue to be just a forum. It’s great for what it does and has been the launching pad for a number of specialized apps.

As great as Beast is, there are things that I may want to do differently, and that’s why I’m considering not trying to stay compatible with it. I modeled all of the interaction with pages and tickets off the existing forum features to attempt to create a more uniform experience. If I wish to diverge, I don’t want a cobbled-together user experience.

I don’t think this is a question that will be answered quickly. I’d like to get feedback from folks using Dev’il and see where that goes.

Topic: News and Updates / The Dev'il is loose

Dev’il is officially available. You’re welcome to use trunk (svn://brightredglow.com/devil/trunk) as I do my best to run tests and ensure they are passing before commiting changes. If you want to feel more official, I’ll be tagging releases as well. The most current one is svn://brightredglow.com/devil/tags/REL_0_9_2.

Topic: Development / What about Beast?

When I started Dev’il, I created an svk mirror of the Beast repository. I intended to continually merge changes from Beast but up till now I’ve been too busy implementing stuff. However, soon I will bite the bullet and merge recent Beast changes.

But that raises the question, How long to maintain compatibility with the Beast? I tried to remain as compatible with the Beast core as possible while implementing new features. For example, I continued to use unit tests despite that I always use RSpec in my apps. So, I’m considering breaking away from Beast after merging the most recent changes. I’m curious what folks think of this idea.