Serendipitous altruism

Since my migration to PHP 5 revealed a problem with the ancient Lilina 0.7 my interest in Lilina has been rekindled. As I said, I am quite hopeful because I would like to keep using Lilina for small aggregations and avoid deploying the more complex Gregarius where its better scalability is not needed. What first attracted me toward Lilina still holds true.

I started by checking out the development version from Google Code and I deployed it on a handful of small aggregations such as my personal feed. I then immediately started gently pestering the project lead about a few bugs, first by mail and then using the nice Google Code Lilina issue tracker. Ryan Mc Cue has been very responsive and very nice. I look forward making my small contributions in helping him bring Lilina toward 1.0

A year has passed since Ryan announced his intentions. He has already done a lot but his roadmap for Lilina 1.0 is very ambitious so there is still a lot of work remaining. At the current pace it may take a few more months, but this is a journey I am eager to follow : I like Lilina and since I am a novice PHP coder I am quite happy whenever I find a project I like and to which I can give a little help. I am actually quite proud of being mentioned in the credits for having brought RSS output to Lilina : it was the first time I had some of my code included in a significant project.

A few old friends and I often hang together on our usual IRC channel, and while discussing we like to share links. I thought it might be a good idea to use a web tool for that so that we can also share our favorite links with the rest of the world. I thought a private Digg clone could play that role, and I needed an excuse for more PHP development. After some research I found that Pligg was the best candidate. I downloaded Beta 9.7 and I have been quite amazed how fast I got a smooth Pligg site up and running – it seems like much work went into this code.

The first bug that arose was mangled accents in some URLs. I solved it by adding a few cases to a character substitution matrix. This matrix is used to sanitize strings before using them for URLs. The problem is that this method requires each accented character to be treated individually. Maybe a more general solution exists. Anyway I am surprised that no other user noticed that problem with French accents before.

Since I wanted to use Pligg in a way closely associated with our IRC habit, I thought it might be a good idea to make Pligg capable of notifying an IRC channel of an upcoming story. Rumaging through PHP libraries capable of speaking IRC I ended up using Net_SmartIRC which is available in Debian as php-net-smartirc. The examples packaged with the class are quite good at teaching its use so I soon wrote a small proof-of-concept of notifying an IRC channel from PHP.

Some more hacking later I figured how to splice that IRC notification functionality into Pligg. This is a prototype : it works fine for me but you need to overwrite a file from the standard Pligg and edit it with your parameters, and it probably ignores any convention used by those who are familiar with working on Pligg. To reach release quality this functionality should probably be architectured as a proper configurable Pligg plugin. To use it, you need to install Net_SmartIRC which is available in Debian as php-net-smartirc. Make sure that the path of that library as declared in my submit.php is correct.Then you need to edit my submit.php to set connect parameters, login parameters, and the channel. Make a backup of your original submit.php and replace it with mine. That is all !

With IRC notification in place I found that I did not want just anyone spamming our favorite IRC channel. Pligg has three hardcoded user levels : “user”, “admin” and “god”. By default the users can submit posts. I decided to restrict posting to the “admin” and “god” levels. That way we keep control of posting, our friends can vote and comment as “user” and the rest of the anonymous world can read the site.

With the beginning of a familiarity with the Pligg code it did not take me too much grepping to understand the conditional access system and wedge a typical implementation where it should work. And work it did, just as advertised ! I am not sure that the core Pligg developers intended this previously clean switch statement to be hacked like that, but it works for me. A further step would be to make this restriction code conditional and to make the condition a user-configurable parameter in /admin_config.php so that god can choose at which user level submissions are allowed. I am sure that many site operators would appreciate this feature.

So as a summary and conclusion, here is the patch that modifies Pligg’s 9.7 submit.php to provide post submission restriction by user level and IRC notification of posts :

• The original submit.php from Pligg 9.7
• submit.php from Pligg 9.7 patched to provide post restriction by user level and IRC notification of post
• diff between the above files.

Have fun with Pligg ! I’m done with it for now but who knows what other functions I’ll feel like hacking into it in the future…

After migrating an host to PHP5 I found that Lilina 0.7 no longer works and instead produces the following error :

PHP Fatal error: Cannot redeclare class soapclient in /your-lilina-directory/inc/nusoap.php on line 4096

Happily, Robert Mao at “Inmates are Running the Asylum” had already stumbled on this and found a solution.

Robert found a report of the Nusoap library conflicting with PHP5’s built in SOAP functions. The only use of Nusoap in Lilina is the Google API. So Robert found that by disabling the peripheral functionality dependant on the Google API Lilina no longer produced the error.

It works but it is a quick and dirty fix. Enters Ryan Mc Cue who took over Lilina’s development last year. Ryan soon mentioned that the aforementioned functionality is completely disabled in the current development version of Lilina which therefore works fine with PHP5.

There has not been a release of Lilina in quite a while but indeed Ryan and his friends have not been idle and on top of a Brand new web site there have been many commits to the Lilina Subversion repository on Google Code.

So Lilina 1.0 is in development and I’m going to take look at it. I am quite hopeful because I would like to keep using Lilina for small aggregations and avoid deploying the more complex Gregarius where its better scalability is not needed.

So long CIPDTF ! For three years I have offered the CIPDTF free anonymous hosting in the name of the freedom of speech. There have been fun moments and wild ones – it has been quite an experience working with such an unusual partner. I deplore that the CIPDTF has chronically adopted an attitude of prickly ignorance of many of the conditions we set for our collaboration. Compartimentalization of activities, operational security and demarcation of responsibilities have all remained appalling in spite of my insistent advice. Six weeks ago after many warnings I set a deadline for some improvements, and that deadline has consequently been arrogantly dismissed. Time is up, I am fed up and I believe it is time to move on. So good bye and good luck with another host (and good luck for finding one as patient as me). And to those who believe that the CIPDTF has been vindicated, think again : the CIPDTF really is as crazy as its prose suggests and I would be surprised if it did not resurface somewhere else.