OPW : A beginning indeed

• Getting rid of the feature of having multiple pad per page needed a lot of work. I started going deep into the flow of the whole structure.  Spent a lot of time removing stuff from EtherEditorPad.php, ext.etherEdtior.js etc

•  Cleaned the database up and updated the changes to  EtherEditorHooks.php. Removed the fields admin_user and public pad from ethereditor_pads, EtherEditorHooks.php was updated accordingly. So, by the end of the third week, I was able to get rid of the two bugs that I was talking about – and a few more ( like, the preview feature was broken too.)  

• Alternative construction of the URLS: The shareURL did not need the padID in it anymore, as the feature of having multiple pad per page was removed. The padURL needed to be reconstructed too – Pad URLs need to be built on the server side because of the information involved. The important parts are the URL to the base of the pad directory and the group ID. We get the first from the configuration of the wiki (it’s part of the stuff you configure before you can use the extension), but the group ID is brought over from the Etherpad Lite instance. Groups are the only way we can implement any authentication, so we use them for everything. They also help us by solving the problem of special characters, since hashing the page name gets rid of anything Etherpad Lite might deem inappropriate for pad URLs. We just pass in the literal string “original” as the pad name and be done with it.   

EtherEditor – User can enable it manually by checking the collaborate check-box

• Updated the Client Library in EtherEditor : Forked the etherpad-lite-client from the git-repository and cloned it to core/extensions/EtherEditor/includes/ , well more specifically updated the EtherpadLiteClient.php file with the new php file from the cloned etherpad-lite-client followed by some unit testing.

• The issue with the Format Buttons bug was due to the client-side script in ep_ethereditor (the etherpad plugin we maintain that enables all of the formatting magic) has an incompatibility with the newest release of Etherpad Lite’s API – as we suspected. So a fix there.

Documentations:  

•  Installing phpunit in ubuntu-11.10 : On some problem I had faced. 

•  Updating client library in etherediter

•  Meet the Functions! :  While working with a few bugs and features, finally after quite a bit of struggle with the code, I had kind of felt that a brief introduction to the functions that I am dealing with would be good to be documented. 

• So far with EtherEditor: OPW Project Update : Of all the work I had done till February.

• Curious Case of Format Buttons in EtherEditor : A major bug I had faced while working – made my work blocked for a few days. Here’s why! 

•  User Preference to enable EtherEditor by default: Yay! A new Feature : On how we got the new feature working.

• EtherEditor – How it Works! : A very important documentation of almost all the how’s, you can come up with – related to this extension.

Feedback on Project: I loved it! I would not say I never got frustrated, demotivated or blocked. In fact there was something like that from February End – March Beginning. A very unfortunate and confusing bug, did block my ways. Which is why – although two of my  patches fixes the respective bugs and a few more right now, is yet to be merged – we were solving the issues with ep_ethereditor . But, I guess, this is also one of the many lessons I got to learn – to deal with situations like this and get going.