Introduction

Firedrop2 is Open Source software. This page has lists of all known bugs, as well as the todo list.

Feel free to join in and make changes, these should be discussed on the Mailing List.

This is the right place for :

• Bug reports
• Feature Requests
• Patches
• Questions
• Suggestions

You can also file bug reports on the Firedrop Trac site To see the old Firedrop2 todo list, see OLD_HISTORY.txt. This is in the firedrop2 directory of your distribution (along with the source code).

BUGS

This is a list of all known bugs and issues with Firedrop2.

1. Unicode support.

   Entering non-ASCII characters with the unicode version of wxPython is causing intermittent errors.

2. FTP Bug with new directories.

   There is a bug in the FTP upload code when creating new directories.

3. Starting plugins from a menu.

   Plugins can be started from the plugin toolbar, but not from a menu entry, so it has been suppressed (unless you enter testing mode, by setting testing=1 in firedrop2manager.py).

4. PNG images in blogs under Mac OS X.

   Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.2 for Mac OS X is unable to handle PNG images, and hangs when it tries to display a web page containing this type of image. There are a couple of third-party plugins to provide that functionality, but a better choice is to simply avoid using that buggy and no-longer-supported browser. Choose Safari, Camino, or best of all, Firefox, for your Mac OS X browsing.

TODO

This is the full TODO list for Firedrop2, including future directions that development could take it. See also the Roadmap on the Trac site.

These aren't in order of priority, and might not all be done. Some are just possibilities, others would need a champion in order to make them happen.

1. Add tag support.

   Add support for arbitrary tags as well as categories.

2. Support podcasts.

   Allow the simple inclusion of podcast information within blog entries and RSS feeds.

3. Error messages.

   Helpful error messages for common problems, instead of Python tracebacks. A number of these have already been addressed, and some are recorded in a log file.

4. RSS for Categories.

   Generate separate RSS feeds for individual categories.

5. Page Caching.

   Store an MD5 hash of pages that we only re-generate pages that have changed. That would be faster than the current method which generates and compares.

6. Menuhistory in HOME directory.

   The file which saves menu history -.menufile.txt is currently saved in the installation directory. This prevents multiple users from using a single install.

   This file (and firedrop.ini possibly) ought to be (optionally) stored in the user's home directory.

7. Blog Templates.

   More themes, and their respective page templates, would be helpful. These could probably be 'borrowed and sufficiently adapted' from other blog tools or other websites.

8. localisation (l10n) and internationalization (i18n)

   Currently a lot of the strings used by Firedrop2 (e.g. categories) are hard-coded in the source.

9. Complete the default build.ini.

   Currently some of the optional options aren't in the default one created with a new blog.

10. rest2web GUI.

    With the addition of a tree widget to represent sites, Firedrop2 would make an excellent front end to rest2web the site builder.

11. Entry details widget.

    Currently the details for each entry (categories, created and modified time) are stored textually in the entry. This means the user can mess up the entry by munging the start of it.

    A separate widget could present the entry for modification, including a checkbox for publish.

    This widget already exists for creating the entry, but is not used (yet) for editing the entry.

12. Multiple Authors.

    Firedrop2 could support multiple authors (with a default author and a value in the entry to set alternative authors). This would allow multiple authors to work on the same blog.

    A further extension would be to allow blog entries to be stored on a remote server, allowing multiple authors to work on a single blog from different machines/locations.

13. Special Characters.

    Add a dialog for adding special characters, most notably the &something; ones. (Not really needed for ReST which escapes automatically.)

14. Publisher Methods.

    It would be nice if there was an easy way to call separate methods of the publisher class, e.g. for generating RSS only, etc. (Of course, these methods are dependent on each other... so that may not work.)

15. Entry Management.

    There should be a better way to manage lots of entries. If nothing else, we should be able to sort them. Or maybe filter them...

16. Exclude entries from RSS.

    Add a 'include_in_rss' variable for Weblog posts. By default, this value is True, but can be set to False to exclude. (This is useful in case of posts that are problematic for some reason, like when they contain characters that feed parsers cannot grok.)

17. Nested Macros.

    Nested macros? Is it possible?

    Problem is, it would be useful to combine certain ones, e.g. a {mkchar} within an {url}. The following is currently not possible:

    {url;Die Zoids sind zur{mkchar;u:}ck!;http://blah.com}

    Replacing it with

    {url;Die Zoids sind zurück!;http://blah.com}

    doesn't work either, because the ü interferes with how the macro is interpreted.

18. Firedrop2 Options.

    Save some extra options in the site directory or in firedrop.ini. For example window sizes, etc.

19. Newlines.

    There should be an option to eliminate newlines from text (and convert to and from UNIX/Windows/Mac). This is useful when pasting text from a browser or email.

20. Entry file format.

    When creating a site, users should be offered a choice: storing nodes as separate files (.fd2) or storing them in one large file (possibly a pickle, but other formats are possible too)?

    There should be tools (pack/unpack, whatever) to move from one format to another. The idea is that loading a lot of entries from one file should be a lot faster than loading them from a bunch of files.

    If we have the above, then we can considered a LinkCollection content type. (My current collection, for example, has ~600 links, and counting. It would take a long time to load these. Maybe loading them from one file would be faster. They'd still have to be inserted in the ListBox widget, though...)

    And, a LinkCollection content type would allow us to set up a RSS feed, much like Mark Pilgrim's b-links.

21. Tests.

    We need working and comprehensive tests for all the modules. Some have been created recently, but more are needed ...

22. RSS Validation.

    Automatic RSS validator?

23. Automatically Open New Blogs.

    When creating a new site, it may be better to open it automatically, then show a message telling the user to edit build.ini. Note that when you start Firedrop2, it already will open a default site that has been created previously.

24. Find and Replace Dialog.

    Add a "Find & Replace" dialog, using the funky one in Wax.

If you have any further suggestions for this list, or even better want to work on one of these yourself, let us know via the Mailing List.