PmWeekly, August 07, 2017

August 07, 2017, at 10:46 PM by Petko in PmWiki core changes, PmWiki Cookbook changes, Tips about PmWiki (0 comments)

Update for PmWiki activity July 31 - August 7, 2017: a new release fixing a bug with long text variables, 38 recipes reviewed and/or updated, discussions about security, development and PHP 7 compatibility, cookbook bug reports and patches.

Version 2.2.102 was released (2017-08-05)

This version reverts the patterns for text variables changed in 2.2.99, because we found that a longer text variable content may cause a blank page or an internal server error. In the page SiteAdmin.AuthList an input box was added to allow filtering of the groups or pages.

Focus on...

In case your wiki has pages or sections open for editing, once in a while you'll have to deal with spambots or trolls. 10 days ago, someone defaced a number of pages, and edited our home page more than 60 times. Fortunately, only that person was able to see the changes, because we use the recipe Session PageStore which provides an ephemeral, temporary page storage mechanism, where the changes are not actually saved in the page but in a session variable unique to that visitor.

Another recipe we use on WikiSandbox and a few other pages is AutoRestore which keeps any changes for 15 minutes, then discards them and reverts the page to a previous version.

For other spam-fighting tools in the PmWiki core or provided by addons, see our Spam category.

Discussions

On the talk pages:

  • Passwords-Talk How to improve the messages that conditional markup shouldn't be used to hide secrets?

On the mailing list:

  • A thread about pagelists and searches no longer work after a server migration. The cause was incorrect permissions on the wikilib.d directory.
  • A request to update 3 addons for PHP 7 (they were updated, see below).

In the PITS: PmWiki Issue Tracking System (please comment, vote):

  • 01300 (Incomplete definition of page text variable halts the rendering) This entry was reopened because the previous solution broke when there was a text variable longer than 2699 characters.

  • 01412 (PmWiki.org integrated developer platform) More context in diffs will be nice, but may be complex to implement.

Cookbook (addons, modules, skins)

Recipes updated:

  • FixShortSessions (How to fix short sessions so you aren't prompted frequently for a password) by Petko : The configuration was modified, and a warning was added about security issues with the previous code.

  • Worse (is better) (Simple WYSIWYG editing for PmWiki) by Petko : 7 new versions released since the first release last week, with a large number of improvements and fixes.

Discussions:

  • BlockCrawler (Redirect web crawlers to different pages) by Petko : left a message that the script is missing.

  • EditHelp-Talk (Easier editing with automatic detection and insertion of some wiki markups) by SILVERMOUSE? : left a message that the recipe should be out of beta.

  • HorizontalVerticalMenu-Talk (Generate multilevel horizontal and vertical menus) by St : asked about a bug in a farm configuration with the pub path.

Recipes reviewed and/or updated and marked compatible with PHP 7.2

Cookbook:

(total: 38 pages)

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