Blenderstorm reborn
Tags: blenderstorm, feature, letworyinteractive, proposal, solution
Hi all,
We’ve all been waiting for it since the dreadful crash of the servers and the backups: Blenderstorm is finally back and online!
The last 1,5 month I have been working on getting this done. I did some venturing out to alternative implementations – one in Lua (on top of Sputnik, which worked pretty nicely, but getting it to run properly on the host was a different story), and one in Python (using web.py). Both own implementation had the good part that they were light, but that was only the feature request part – no user management, no spam protection, nothing.
So, to save my own nerves, and to give you finally what you deserve, I decided to port Ideatorrent once again. This time though I made sure I had the code from the beginning versioned and in some off-location repository. You can find the code for Blenderstorm over at gitorious.org. Much of the work was about changing the schema to use the Schema API from Drupal for MySQL, and to have the corresponding PHP parts also updated for use on MySQL.
I think I’ve got now all fixed for MySQL – at least the testing I did myself didn’t pose any big problems anymore. If you find any, please report in comments.
Those who were registered with the beta version have been moved to the production site too. None of the requests and solutions from the beta side were moved, we start now with a clean slate.
Blender developers I ask to contact me after they have registered, so I can give them the proper permissions. Also I’ll be needing a few more reviewers and moderators to help managing the content for the site. If you’re interested in helping out in that area, please let me know!
Now, everybody, write your feature requests and proposals. Please be specific and complete – that way we can make sure that both the requests and inferred from that the actual implementation are going to be a success.
Enjoy!
/Nathan
felix said:
Aug 17, 10 at 10:31some overlapping problems with the layout, probably because of the tiny screen rezolution on my netbook:
i38.tinypic.com/azcw9d.png
Crouch said:
Aug 18, 10 at 10:38Confirming what felix said, I can see the same. Screen resolution: 1024×768 (I know, it’s tiny).
It’s just a minor issue though. The site looks very good and seems to work fine.
jesterKing said:
Aug 18, 10 at 15:19Thanks for reporting felix and Crouch. I’m aware the layout is still a bit unfinished. I hope that I’ll be able to work this year on an even nicer layout and theme.
Juan said:
Aug 18, 10 at 17:37Hello,
Not sure if this is the right place for this but I’m unable to create a new account.
The word verification seems to not be working properly.
jesterKing said:
Aug 19, 10 at 00:51Hi Juan,
Could you elaborate on how it is not working? When you register for the site, you’ll be redirected back to blenderstorm.org, where a message on a notification box above the main body tells you that you’ll receive email with further instructions.
Do you get different behaviour?
/Nathan
dk said:
Aug 19, 10 at 01:26This site is great, thank you for your efforts.
I already have tons of ideas, but maybe I’ll wait a bit until it settles down.
One tiny thing I noticed was the logout message: “Access denied. You are not authorized to access this page.” Something like “Logout successful” might be better, although I guess this has rather low priority at the moment.
Aloyr said:
Aug 19, 10 at 09:38Nathan,
This is [very] awesome! There are a lot of folks that could benefit from your work. Have you thought about posting your 2 blenderstorm modules back in drupal.org?
-Peter
jesterKing said:
Aug 19, 10 at 11:37Hi Peter, the entire blenderstorm.org site code is in gitorious: http://gitorious.org/blendersites/blenderstorm
If time permits I could work on making the modules behave nicer as modules – there’s plenty of places still that would need a lot of attention. Also, current code is for MySQL, ideally those parts need to be merged with the PostgreSQL part so that the modules would work with both.
jesterKing said:
Aug 19, 10 at 11:38Thanks for spotting that, I’ll try to figure out what’s going on there
JayDez said:
Aug 19, 10 at 11:43Great job on Blenderstorm, although as it has already been stated there are some problems on smaller screens(1024×768) with the layout, however when you zoom out (in the browser) they are cleared up.
I wrote a short blog on it here: http://jaydez-tech.blogspot.com/2010/08/blenderstorm.html so please let me know if I got anything wrong.
jesterKing said:
Aug 19, 10 at 12:30Thanks for the blog post – you’ve got it all right
And yeh, there’s still room for improvement – I wanted to get this out in the open now, so that people know again that Blenderstorm is up and running.
Juan said:
Aug 19, 10 at 17:21Hi JesterKing,
When I get to the create new account page on Blenderstorm, I enter a user name and email. Then right below that I see one of those word verification thingamabobs where you type what you see in a small image.
Well no matter how many times I try it, it always says I didn’t type it right. I also tried using the audio version but no luck either.
dk said:
Aug 23, 10 at 21:42You implemented tags that can be edited by anyone even before I suggested it! And logging out has changed, too.
It would be nice to have the title of the idea displayed in the browser tab instead of “Blenderstorm|Blenderstorm” (again, this is too small to deserve its own idea in Blenderstorm, so I’m just posting it here. I hope you don’t mind.). Keep up the good work!