CodeIgniter Bug Tracker

The CodeIgniter Bug Tracker that has been running at CodeIgniter.com has finally been closed in favor of the issue tracker at BitBucket.  We’ve found that the reports actually tend to be of higher quality at BitBucket, and of course integration with our repository is a boon.

If you reported bugs at the old Bug Tracker that did not get addressed, please be aware that we do have an internal archive of all reported bugs.  However, if you can still reproduce a bug using the current in-development code, it would be appreciated if a new issue were logged against that code at BitBucket.

If you do not have a reproducible bug or cannot provide a reduction test to demonstrate the bug, please post first to the Bug Report forum so the community can help you confirm whether or not it is a bug, and provide guidance for submitting the bug report.

If your browser does not automatically update it for you, don’t forget to change your bookmarks!  CodeIgniter Bug Tracker

Posted by Derek Jones on August 14, 2010

CodeIgniter Con 2010

There are remarkable things happening within the CodeIgniter community. One of these is the community run conference, CICON!

CodeIgniter Con 2010 is the first all-CodeIgniter conference and is being run in the UK. The conference will be a two-day event on the 14th and 15th of August, which will give you a great chance to meet fellow developers, pick up some new tricks and share your experience with others. The first day will be a series of talks from well-known speakers who have been using CodeIgniter for years in different ways. The second day will be a workshop / master-class day which will be of as much interest to new users as the more experienced users.

In order to get people as involved as possible, they are offering a “Buy a Day 1 ticket and get a Day 2 ticket free” special.

If you’ve ever wanted to rub elbows with a who’s who of the CodeIgniter community, don’t miss this chance.

https://cicon2010.com/

Posted by Derek Allard on July 19, 2010

CodeIgniter 1.7.2 Security Patch

A fix has been implemented for a security flaw in CodeIgniter 1.7.2.  You may obtain the fix either by downloading a fresh copy of CodeIgniter, or downloading this standalone patch.  All applications using the File Upload class should install the patch to ensure that their application is not subject to a vulnerability.

While fixing this bug, we took the opportunity to make an improvement to the Upload class’s ability to allow a file name override.  Previously, you needed to do a little dance in your controller to remove the extension from the file name if you were starting from user input; neither could you override the file extension.  Now when using the “file_name” config override, you will supply the full file name, including the extension, truly overriding the file name provided by the client user agent.

After applying the patch, you will need to adjust your code accordingly if you are using the ‘file_name’ override in the Upload class.  While we are not in the habit of making code changes within a version that has the potential to break compatibility, this change was necessary as part of the security fix.

If you are using CodeIgniter from the Mercurial repository at BitBucket, please make sure you pull the latest files.  Version 1.7.2 has been branched and retagged to include this fix.

We’d like to thank CodeIgniter user alexaholic for bringing this to our attention.  Security is always a top priority for our products, and we make ourselves available to be directly contacted for any security concerns.

Posted by Derek Jones on July 12, 2010

EllisLab moves to Mercurial, Assembla, BitBucket; CodeIgniter 2.0 Baking

EllisLab today announces changes to our internal development processes, including dropping Subversion in favor of Mercurial and adopting Assembla as our agile software development management tool.  Along with these changes, CodeIgniter 2.0 pre-release code is in development, and is now hosted at the Mercurial-focused social coding site BitBucket.

At EllisLab we make ExpressionEngine, the CMS for web professionals, and CodeIgniter, the only PHP framework to receive praise from Rasmus Lerdorf, the creator of PHP. We’re based out of Bend, Oregon, but only two staff members live there.  The rest are scattered roughly from West to East in Portland, Missouri, Illinois, Toronto, North Carolina, Ireland, the UK, Germany, and Austria.  In addition to very little face to face interaction with one another, our developers have to deal with as much as a 9 hour difference from other team members.  So we’ve adopted and continue to adopt methodologies and technologies to bridge those gaps and enable us to be as productive as if we were all in the same building, working the same hours.

Version Control

One no-brainer, and I hope most of you are using it as well, is version control.  Since 2005, we’ve been using Subversion, and it has performed admirably, particularly during the majority of ExpressionEngine’s life when there were only two Sith developers working on a project.  The first year that Subversion was in use, we even shared a single user and did not use commit messages.  That works fine when you can read the rest of your team’s minds, and you aren’t using version control for revisioning, but merely for convenient file sharing.

But Subversion comes with a lot of baggage, some of which becomes heavier in proportion to the distance between team members, and as both your projects and team increase in size.  Commits and diffs become laborious on even the fastest of networks.  The size of the repository balloons if you try to use basic features of branches and tagging.  Renaming and moving files is a pain, and can jam up your fellows’ repositories.  And don’t even think about working independently and merging.

These and other issues led us to examine dozens of version control systems (VCSes) to find the right fit for our team.  We looked at Git first, whose growth can be largely attributed to the popularity of GitHub, then Bazaar, darcs, Monotone, Perforce, BitKeeper, and so on.  But after weeks of research and test use, we settled comfortably into Mercurial.

Now before the Git readers get their pitchforks ready and head for the comments, let me be clear that we are not at odds.  Both are great distributed version control systems (DVCSes), have nearly identical features, and have a common enemy: Subversion.  So our switch to Mercurial means that Git users win too - joining a growing army against centralized version control.  It just happens to be that a few of the divergent features swing slightly towards Mercurial for our specific needs, but above all, our team enjoyed using Mercurial more than Git.  Not that we didn’t enjoy Git, we just enjoyed Mercurial more, and why is hard to quantify but there was obviously no reason to fight it.  We’re here to write code and create great applications; the more that our use of any VCS can fade into the background to accomplish that goal, the better.

Scrum

When your development team grows beyond two people, the mind meld dissolves, the ability to know at any given moment what the rest of the team is doing, and how well they are doing it dissipates.  Cowboy coding’s ability to be effective diminishes.  So a little over a year ago, we began looking at various agile software development methods, and decided to try out Scrum.  It’s been a tremendous success.

To bring Scrum to a team spread across the world, we’ve been using technology to create a virtual office.  Google Docs for shared spreadsheets to track our Sprints and burndown charts.  Planning Poker to help us plan Sprints.  Neither tool ever felt like a perfect match for us, though.  Whether it’s the clumsy manner in which product backlog items are stored and moved to a new spreadsheet to create Sprints, or not having the hour estimation card that we really wanted to play - resulting in a lot of “I estimated 16 hours but I really mean 12” - these tools were getting us by, but were not the most effective.

Enter Assembla, a tool we came across in our search for a new VCS.  Assembla is the perfect blend of what our developers and our product owners need for project management, and that mix is remarkably difficult to find.  It gives developers the ability to use any VCS they like, including those on your own servers, fully integrated with a ticketing system that is built from the ground up for agile software development.  Product owners are given a visual ticket organizer to effortlessly create Sprints from categorized backlogs.  Add to that a Scrum tool to make standing meetings less intrusive to the varied working hours of our distributed team, and it’s near perfection.

Assembla is the product that is saving us from having to write our own agile software management tool.  We’ve moved all of our software projects into Assembla.  This is a tool anyone working in a team should check out.

This is a behind the scenes change of course so it may seem inconsequential, but all of our users will benefit.  Like Mercurial, this logistical portion of our virtual office can just do what it’s meant to do and thus fade into the background, letting us focus on getting things done instead of on processes.

CodeIgniter

Of our communities, CodeIgniter benefits the most directly from these changes.  The adoption of a new VCS and new internal development tools allows us to not only be more effective in CodeIgniter’s development, but also enables us to give you more and to interact more directly with you.

Starting today, CodeIgniter 2.0 is baking, and I’m thrilled to announce that with Subversion gone, in-development code is available publicly on its new home: BitBucket.

After adopting Mercurial, joining BitBucket was a perfect fit for our open source projects.  It has a beautiful source code browser and will make watching code changes a breeze with its graphical changeset viewer and RSS/Atom feeds.

It also comes with a rich social layer, quick access to tagged versions, along with forking and patch queue management for advanced users.  Do you find yourself making the same modifications to CodeIgniter before beginning a project?  BitBucket and Mercurial can help you do that and share it with others with ease, using any version in the upstream repository.

We’re really excited to watch CodeIgniter’s growth accelerate due to these changes.  A discussion of CodeIgniter 2.0’s features and direction will be forthcoming, so be looking for that in the future in the news section of CodeIgniter.com.  What are you waiting for?  Go sign up at BitBucket and become a zealot, following the CodeIgniter project!

Discuss this story

Posted by Derek Jones on March 11, 2010

EECI2010 Full Ticket Giveaway

The ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter Conference (EECI2010) in May is the CodeIgniter and ExpressionEngine event to go to this year.  We want you to join the fun, so we’re giving away a full conference ticket to the year’s biggest event.  Read the full details and how to enter at the ExpressionEngine blog.

Read details for the EECI2010 Full Ticket Giveaway

Posted by Derek Jones on March 04, 2010