Author Archive
AMO 3.4.3 delayed until June 12th
We attempted to push the AMO 3.4.3 update last night but ran into some problems. Our initial investigation is pointing to the advanced search queries taking far longer than the previous version. The slave databases couldn't handle the load and we had to back the update out. We'll come up with a solution this weekend and plan on pushing the 3.4.3 update on June 12th. Read More »
AMO 3.4.3 update scheduled for June 5th
Due to the holiday on Monday we're going to delay the AMO 3.4.3 update this week until June 5th. Aside from some bug and security fixes in this release we're mainly focusing on search improvements, streamlining the editors' queue, and making it easier to browse and discover themes. There are currently 43 bugs targeted for the 3.4.3 update about half of which are fixed and verified. When bugs are resolved you can view the changes on preview.addons.mozilla.org. As always, feel free to send us any feedback you have. Read More »
AMO 3.4.2 update scheduled for tonight (Thursday)
As previously mentioned we're planning on updating addons.mozilla.org for the 3.4.2 changes tonight. There are 32 bugs that will be fixed with the update. Please let us know if you see any regressions or anything you'd like to see changed. The next update is scheduled for May 29th and will be mainly a bug fix release with minor new features (like bug 432669). There are currently 28 bugs scheduled for the 3.4.3 push. Read More »
AMO 3.4.1 update scheduled for Thursday
The AMO team is finalizing the latest update, 3.4.1. This is a bug-fix release addressing things like double escaping, improper L10n redirects, and category cleanup. A list of all the bugs targeted for this release is available. We'll be committing the last of the patches very shortly and the changes will be available on preview.addons.mozilla.org. Feel free to look at the changes and send us any feedback you have. We expect to push the changes live this Thursday evening (May 1st). Our next release, 3.4.2, is currently scheduled for May 15th. 3.4.2 will also ... Read More »
Second thoughts on dynamic content
I was looking at one of the AMO v3.2 mockups today. There are strings like "See All Interface Tweaks Add-ons" that we've avoided up till now, but this isn't the first time they've been proposed. The problem we're having is that a string like that is from two different sources - static and dynamic data. "Interface Tweaks" is the name of one of our categories so it's stored in the database, and the rest of the string is static, so it's in a .po. The static string would look something like: See All %s Add-ons and ... Read More »
Kubla is dead! Long live Kubla!
The last time Kubla came up we were still evaluating options and the code was an old version of CakePHP all flushed out with scaffolding. Most of the time between then and now has been spent on other projects (I'm looking at you AMO) but we've made enough progress to justify another update. Out of the CMS's evaluated, we thought two showed great promise for our set of requirements. The first option that I got excited about was Wyona's Yulup. This is actually an add-on for Firefox that can talk directly ... Read More »
Teaching CakePHP to be Multilingual (part 3)
This is the last part of a three part series. (Part 1) (Part 2) The basic premise of our strategy for dynamic localization was to replace actual strings in the database with ints, which were foreign keys into a `translations` table that held the actual strings. The `translations` table looks like: +------------------+------------------+------+-----+---------+-------+ | Field | Type | Null | Key | Default | Extra | +------------------+------------------+------+-----+---------+-------+ | id ... Read More »
AMO Updates
Since the site launched a couple weeks ago, the AMO crew has been working diligently to polish off some of the rough edges and fix the bugs that have been reported. We've pushed an update to the site tonight that: Fixes files that couldn't be downloaded Updates for all 13 languages currently offered Fixes add-on data that was being encoded improperly (And removed the excessive encoding of some data) Added a localizer control panel Fixes a problem with language fall back Fixes over 80 total bugs, many from v2, including one filed from 2004. Thanks to everyone who reported or ... Read More »
AMO v3 (Remora) Delay
If you're reading this, you've probably noticed that AMOv3 still hasn't taken over addons.mozilla.org. We've hit some unforeseen problems that have been plaguing us since our attempt to launch on Monday. Without getting into the details, we're having some issues with the way our infrastructure is caching (or not caching) the new AMO v3 pages. Rather than risk a slow, (and thus, frustrating) user experience at launch, we've decided to iron out the problems with the servers before deployment. That means the new site still isn't live, and won't be until we can get things fixed. I assure you ... Read More »
Teaching CakePHP to be Multilingual (part 2)
This is part two of a three part series. (Part 1) For the static content, we decided to use PHP's built-in gettext functions. Let's double check the requirements from part 1: Speed: Strings are pulled from a binary file and aggressively cached by apache. Robustness: Gettext has been a standard for years and is used in a wide variety of systems reliably. Friendliness: Due to its age and widespread use, the .po file that is distributed to localizers is widely recognized and has several applications to assist in the translation. Anything else? There are command line programs for creating ... Read More »
