[giapeto] A few thoughts on installation

[Jason Rust]

On 2004.01.07 16:20:02 +0000, Marko Djukic wrote:
> if you have time, let me know what your thoughts are... up till now i've been
> mostly on my own installing it... so would be good to hear opinions outside my
> mindset.

Now that I've got it up and running I'm really impressed!  It's exactly
looking for, which is to turn horde into a webpage for the public.  Here
were the thoughts/issues I encountered:

1. It took me a while to figure out that the page.html template could be
customized by me.  Once I figured out that I could edit it easily my
page was able to start taking form.  Specifically, I wanted to get rid
of the blocky menu up top so that it looked more like a homepage.

2. I didn't realize at first that the Page Layout settings were
different than the page.html template.  Once I realized that each page
could be given an arbitrary number of blocks but based on the same
template I was very impressed.

3. It almost drove me crazy trying to get permissions working so that
the outside world could see the main giapeto page.  Once I started
editing the perms via the main horde interface everything started going
smoother.

4. The color of the links for sub-pages are hard to read by default.  I
can change that with a better template, but it would probably help at
some point to have a better default template.  I have a designer working
on a layout design for us now, so I'll submit whatever template we come
up with.

5. Application blocks are really nice.  Makes the page always fresh with
new content.

6. You get a page not found when you click on Options.  Plus, I didn't
want the homepage to have a options icon anyhow.  So, I got rid of it
with a bit of a hack: unset($menu[0]) in config/menu.php

7. For the life of me I can't figure out how to use the image options to
change the image.  I upload an image, I go back to edit it, it shows
these nice options to rotate it, scale it, etc.  But clicking on one of
them and hitting Update has no effect.  And I can't figure out what the
Keep Original Image? checkbox does.

8. Some of the errors were pretty difficult to debug.  For example, when
I didn't have permission to the page and tried to view it publicly it
just said there was a configuration error (seems it would be more
informative to say I don't have permissions).  The following patch would
fix that:
Index: base.php
===================================================================
RCS file: /repository/giapeto/lib/base.php,v
retrieving revision 1.47
diff -u -r1.47 base.php
--- base.php    1 Jan 2004 15:14:53 -0000       1.47
+++ base.php    7 Jan 2004 16:38:38 -0000
@@ -28,8 +28,8 @@

 /* Set up the registry. */
 $registry = &Registry::singleton();
-if (is_a($registry->pushApp('giapeto'), 'PEAR_Error')) {
-    Horde::fatal(PEAR::raiseError(_("Giapeto is not correctly configured or there was an error loading configuration files.")), __FILE__, __LINE__, false);
+if (is_a($result = $registry->pushApp('giapeto'), 'PEAR_Error')) {
+    Horde::fatal(PEAR::raiseError($result->getMessage(), __FILE__, __LINE__, false);
 }
 $conf = &$GLOBALS['conf'];
 @define('GIAPETO_TEMPLATES', $registry->getParam('templates'));

And it doesn't give very informative errors if you don't have the vfs set up
correctly.  I had the vfs setting to sql, but I hadn't created the tables since
I thought it was stored in categories (stupid error I know).  But it looked
like it was saving fine, when in reality there were SQL errors happening under
the hood.

Anyhow, those are my thoughts.  Thanks so much for the great app!
-Jason