Bugs and betas
Yes, I know, I probably should have another entry in the self-editing series today :p But I decided to take a short breather to write about coding so as to reassure any Blog users sitting on the edges of their seats :p
I’ve finally gotten around the HTML comments being parsed out issue in HTMLEdit 🙂 As I believe I mentioned when I last wrote about it, I had switched to using HTML comments to mark out the position of the More … tag instead of the Blog tag that I’d been originally using. The HTML comments however were being stripped out and there was no help from the HTMLEdit author even after posting on his mailing list. He did release a new build of HTMLEdit a few days ago but there was still no answer to my question and the new build did not resolve the issue.
So, I sat down yesterday with the source code for the new build and Blog and began doing a few systematic runs to isolate the bug. I finally discovered that the issue was that any HTML comments were being saved fine but were stripped out when the entry was loaded again into the HTMLEdit component. The question was, why? So it was back to more debugging. It turned out that the HTMLEdit author was checking to see if a comment tag was in the HTML document’s body and the comment was saved only if it was in the body.
Now my entries, they are not full HTML documents. I simply save the entry as a snippet of HTML and so of course, there is no BODY tag and so the comments did not turn up as being in the document body :p So they were being stripped out. I modified the code to remove the body check and also notified the author of the component via his mailing list. So what this means is that I’m now ready to proceed with the coding that’s needed to get the next beta of Blog ready 🙂
What’s planned? Well, the thing which was holding me back was the conversion of <$BlogMore> tags to <!–more–> comments. Now that I can do that, I will be bumping up a beta version number to do the necessary internal changes. This release will also have tag support since MovableType has tag support via XMLRPC and I want it. I also would like to roll in the changes for the category categorization :p But I’m not sure if I’ll get that bit working in time for the next release. But hopefully, I’ll have a release ready soon …