4th weekly live chat

Hi all,

We'll do our 4th weekly live chat on December 9th at 7pm-9pm GMT (1pm-3pm CST).

Our weekly live chat is a chat about Composr Deploying, Designing and Developing, open to any one who wants to attend. It's a great way to meet other Composr users, influence development, and get some free support from the busy developers. If you don't get a decent reply on something on the forum or IRC, the live chat is the best place to ask.

Agenda:

• Main topic: Advanced techniques with the main_multi_content block (by request) [pushed forward from last week]
• Community questions: the best way to corner me and get some free step-by-step support or even some coding (if we can cover it within the allotted time of course)
  • Write your questions in this topic
  • … or just ask them live (either by voice, or via the stream's text chat window)
• Random quick issues: from the tracker (I've tagged one's I thought we could cover quickly, please vote [monitor] for ones you'd like us to cover)

As always, the link is https://meet.jit.si/Composr. We'll also post a copy of the stream soon after it's concluded for those cannot attend.

See you there .

We covered a lot in the chat, Jacob will share the video soon.

Items:

• main_multi_content block
• Selectcode
• GUIDs
• Catalogue templating
• Breadcrumb editing (breadcrumbs.xml)
• fields.xml to apply some restrictions on default forms (may go into more detail next week)
• Writing a unit test for fields.xml

Here are the templating changes made:

catalogue_templating.zip

I had a problem saving Comcode pages early on, turns out my test site didn't have a write permission on the file and we had a bug omitting an error message . That'll be fixed in the next patch release.

I also had some slow page loads. Turns out my backup system was doing a backup while I was doing the live chat. But I just made some performance optimisations for decache/recache scenarios when I/O is saturated: https://github.com/ocproducts/composr/commit/f723e60b3a35964d14addcb955df3342cddd63c7

With each of these chats I'm going off the cuff (there's no rehearsal) – so I'll stumble back and forth a little until I get to the right solution or explanatory words. It's also turning out good for finding where UX improvements are needed. For example, I noticed in this chat (but didn't mention) that the breadcrumb management is underneath Configuration on the menu, but isn't listed on the Configuration index screen - and that's now rectified for the next release.

Hello all! Here's the video for Week 4:



Timestamps:
- Main multi-content block: 0:32
- Breadcrumb customization: 41:33
- Menu editing: 53:01
- Unit test for fields.xml: 1:03:20

I had some problems with my bandwidth this week, which is reflected in the recording. I'm going to try and get an improved connection for next week, but I'd also like to have some discussion about our recording setup and the chat structure in general next week. My apologies for the problems with the recording.