Typo 4
Yay! Not only have we released Typo 4.0.0 at last (big news: massively improved feedback spam protection and much, much easier installation), but I’ve brought this blog back to the bleeding edge (complete with further improved feedback management).
I was about to say that most of the changes are only visible to the blog administrator, but that’s probably because I’ve been developing it; you don’t really notice the changes when you’re making them in fairly small steps. There are reader visible changes, mostly in the sidebars over on the right, all sorts of goodies there compared to the last release.
Bulking up
One change which can’t really be said to be for the better, is that our memory footprint has shot up. We’re no longer the lean, mean, aggressively caching machine we were I’m afraid. However, my fellow maintainers and I are keen to get the footprint back down in order to play nicely with everyone’s hosting service. (There have been revisions on the trunk that were, unusable on several hosting services because of a memory leak that we took far too long to track down.)
Still, you live and learn.
Architectural changes
4.0.0 caught us halfway through a change in the way the state of articles, comments and trackbacks are managed. In the old days, content was either published, or it wasn’t. The trouble with that idea is that it’s hard/impossible to ensure that notifications and pings only get sent when content is first published. So just before 4.0.0 I switched to using the State Pattern, so now content could be either New, Draft, JustPublished, PendingPublication or Withdrawn.
Which was okay so far as it went, but it didn’t play that nicely with the new feedback spam protection. So the Typo head has a new set of states for feedback – Unclassified, PresumedHam, PresumedSpam, Ham and Spam – and the feedback administration pages are starting to reflect it. My current goal is to rejig the feedback admin page to take advantage of these changes and stop it overwhelming the administrator with information.
