Projects

Download Meta 0.2.1

The previous version of the Meta plugin contained several bugs, the majority of which were related to the Open Graph protocol.

• Open Graph Meta tags article and profile were mistakenly started with og: prefix, what made them unrecognizable by Facebook debugger.
• The article:author Meta tag contained author’s full name instead of author’s profile URL.
• Instead of the fb:app_id Meta tag the plugin generated another fb:admins tag with the app identifier as the value.
• Wiki page URLs were rendered incorrectly for Open Graph and Twitter Cards under Redmine 1.0.x.

All these issues were fixed in the version 0.2.1.

This news was sent to subscribers of this project (to ones, who chose “News” under the “Subscription” title on the sidebar). The same way some users got notifications about new files added to the project, the version closure, and so on. You can get such notifications too – just subscribe to the project with the “Subscription” block, which can be found on the sidebar.

My book Mastering Redmine got the project on my site with the same name. There you can check the table of contents and the sample chapter or submit errata or other feedback.

Download Extended Profile 1.2.0

There were two reasons for starting work on this new release: a) Redmine 2.2.x was released and b) bug #2115 (and #2116) was found in Extended Fields. The plugin appeared to work fine under Redmine 2.2.x without any changes (have not gotten something like this for a long time), so you don’t have to update it specially for Redmine 2.2.x. Therefore, this release comes only with fixes for the Extended Fields bugs.

Some time ago I added another extended field to user profiles on my website – Github. Also I wanted to add Google+... The stopping factor for including these fields into a plugin’s release was that not all plugin’s users may want these fields. But then I came to a simple solution:

This release comes with support of “Github” and “Google Plus” extended custom fields, which, however, do not get created automatically and, therefore, should be created manually, but only if you want them to appear in your user profiles (check this page for parameters of these custom fields). It is quite safe not to create these fields – the plugin will work fine without them! In fact, any of the existing custom fields, which are used by the plugin and get created automatically on the plugin installation, can be safely removed without any damage to your Redmine and the plugin (and they won’t get recreated on upgrade).

This approach will be preserved in future versions of the plugin (Yeah! I think, I will continue improving it!) – new supported fields will need to be added manually, if you’ll want to have them.

The previous version of the plugin (which was 1.1.0) was about to include the Twitter Follow button instead of just link in the user profile. But then I thought, that this would make it impossible just to check tweets of the user, before following him/her. So I rolled back my changes (see also news for the previous version and #1953)...

But, in fact, the idea of the “Follow” button is not bad at all! So this release comes with it along with the Facebook Follow button (which lets you send a friend request to the user). But instead both buttons appear on the sidebar, which gets added to the user profile. So it’s still possible just to load Facebook and Twitter pages (without subscribing to or following them).

I also wanted to add the Google+ “Add to circles” button, but it appeared to occupy too much space. Could not make it smaller.

I doubt you have not noticed the big ad to the right from the page... Yeah, I wrote a book! This book have nothing to do with the Extended Profile, but does mention its base plugin – Extended Fields. It’s needless to say, that by buying this book you “donate” to me as to its author. But in addition you also donate to the Redmine team, authors of an open source application, which this book describes (see here, what do I mean).

To be among the first, who receives news about this plugin, subscribe to it using the “Subscription” block on the sidebar.

Download Role Shift 0.1.0b

The Role Shift plugin is one of the newest, but also one of the most wanted. While I’m still not sure how popular is it, its functionality seems to be much needed. For this reason I mention this plugin in my book (see the right side), and for the latter reason I also hurried to make this release.

This release, however, does not bring any new functionality – it just makes the plugin usable under Redmine 1.4.x, 2.0.x, 2.1.x and 2.2.x. The plugin also does not loose the “b” (beta) marker as I’m not sure, that it works without issues (remember – use more restrictive roles as base roles and less restrictive ones as shifts).

To be familiar with events related to the plugin (e.g., to know about new features coming with its new versions) subscribe to the project using the “Subscription” block on the sidebar. Under this block you can also select types of events, you are interested in.

To buy the book, in which this plugin is mentioned along with many other plugins and iteresting things, use this link or the “Buy the book” button on the right side of the page (by the way, two buttons (Facebook’s and Google’s ones) beneath it allow you to subscribe to the book’s news).

Download Meta 0.2.0

Sometimes I get stuck with a plugin’s functionality and the plugin seems not going to have any new features. The Meta plugin used to be such. Other times such plugins appear to literally require more features to be really useful. And the Meta plugin appeared to be such too...

I believe, that the Meta plugin is an underestimated one, as I think, it is essential for any public Redmine installation. Otherwise Redmine will fail to provide useful structured information to social networks and search engines, what is extremely important nowadays. For this reason I review this plugin in my just published book Mastering Redmine. And because the book (with its review) was just published I hurried to carry out this release, which includes the lacking support for recent Redmine versions and some interesting new features...

As it was mentioned before, this plugin provides “description” and “keywords” Meta tags, which were used in the past to show the short summary of the page in search engine results. Yet still these tags are widely used by social networks. In addition, to get more social-friendly data some social networks introduce their own Meta tags:

• Thus, Facebook announced support for the Open Graph protocol, which allows to provide more data about web pages for social networks.
• Twitter, providing more specific social functionality, developed its own Meta tags named Twitter Cards, which are, actually, based on Open Graph.

Looks like Twitter Cards must be enabled for your domain by Twitter. To send the appropriate approval request to Twitter use this link (certainly, do this after you have installed the plugin).

Both these technologies are now supported by the Meta plugin!

So, let’s see how do they work?..

This is this particular news added to Facebook:

While, generally, it looks the same, as if we were using just “description” and “keywords” Meta tags (which existed till 0.2.0), the actual difference is inside. Thus, when I add the news to Facebook, the social network suggests to use only images, which are actually in the news article. But this feature has more power, which is invisible to the end user.

The Twitter, on the other hand, suffers more visible impact (if the domain is approved – mine is not yet):

As you see, a link powered with Twitter Cards tags gets “embedded” into the tweet view with such info as the author’s Twitter username and so on.

As you might be unwilling to include Open Graph and Twitter Cards and as they can come with some specific data, which should be configured, this version of the plugin also comes with the configuration, which can be found in Administration → Plugins → Meta tags → Configure:

The configuration of the plugin also includes settings for Facebook:

• Administrators can be set to one or more Facebook user IDs (e.g., “andriy.lesyuk” or “100000066953233”), in which case the corresponding Facebook users will get access to the statistics regarding likes, and so on.
• App identifier allows the same, but should be used for the cases, when the particular Redmine installation is represented as an app in Facebook (see here).

However, a Facebook user to be able to administer the resource must first “like” this resource, even if his/her username is set as an administrator in the meta tag. So in order to use this functionality you also need the Like Button plugin.

While the name of the plugin was “Meta Tags” the main its goal was search engine and social media optimization. Currently this is done using just meta tags, but in future releases it is also planned to generate SEO-friendly links (see #1986) and so on. Therefore, I was thinking about renaming the plugin with one of future releases... But, currently, decided to drop “tags”, so the name would be just “Meta” (this way technically the plugin has not been renamed). This name, of course, has nothing to do with SEO-friendly links, but.

Due to this change, anyway, users, who use the SVN repository of the project, need to update the repository path as follows:

$ svn switch --relocate http://svn.s-andy.com/redmine-meta http://svn.s-andy.com/meta

To be sure you’ll be among of the first, who will be notified about the next felease, which is going to include some really cool features (see the issue list), subscribe to the Meta project using the “Subscription” form on the sidebar.

To buy the “Mastering Redmine” book, in which the Meta plugin is mentioned along with other interesting plugins and many other useful features and secrets of Redmine, use this link. Note, that buying this book you also donate to my plugins development (as, certainly, I get royalties from its sales) and to Redmine development (as the Redmine team will get royalties as well – see details).

Download OpenID Fix 0.1.0

First, I would like to thank Rostislav, who drew my attention to a possible serious vulnerability in the OpenID Fix plugin (see #2045). The fix for this issue comes with 0.1.0.

In fact, before Rostislav reported the issue I had discussions with a few other users on, for example, why don’t I allow activation by email for OpenID registration. All these questions (including the Rostislav’s issue) made me revise the behavior of the plugin and, therefore, as a solution, this release comes with the plugin’s configuration, which contains just one setting:

This setting allows to override the self-registration configuration for OpenID users. To use the default system setting (which can be found in Administration → Settings → Authentication) select "(No change)” here.

By default the OpenID Fix plugin preserves the old behavior, that is, uses the manual activation, if it is selected in Redmine settings, and the automatic activation otherwise. So you should not worry, that the behavior will change on the plugin’s update.

In addition to the above things this release comes with a long-waited support for Redmine 1.4.x, 2.0.x, 2.1.x and 2.2.x (yeah, it was a long time I did not update the plugin).

Also taking the opportunity, I want to draw your attention to the feature, which can come with one of next releases – see #2113. It’s about restricting access to OpenID providers, that is, about controlling, which OpenID providers are allowed to be used by your users for logging in. Please share your thoughts on it!

Generally, you have, perhaps, noticed, that my work on my Redmine plugins has slowed down dramatically recently. The reason for the slow-down was my work on another project for Redmine – I was working on the “Mastering Redmine” book, which was just published and which can be bought now using this link. Now I got back to work on the plugins!

Also reminding you, that you can be among the first, who will know about major events on the OpenID Fix project, by subscribing to it using the subscription form on the sidebar.

Download Extended Fields 0.2.1

When Redmine 2.2.x came out, I just started the editing phase of my book (see the announcement). So I needed to learn new features quickly and to update the book accordingly. Thus, since that time I was not able to work on plugins (the book was published recently). And this is the first my plugin, which comes with Redmine 2.2.x support.

When releasing 0.2.0b I felt too unsure about the stability of the plugin (see the appropriate news). And this feeling appeared to be correct – 0.2.0b was quite buggy (so the “b” in the version is very appropriately). This fact was the main reason for starting preparing the updated version. Another reason – Redmine 2.2.x came later.

Many people helped me to discover issues, fixes for which you will get with this release! But Alexander Kuznecov went deeper and suggested changes to the code. This helped me much! Thanks, Alexander!

Let me remind you, that you can get notifications about new releases of this plugin (and news, if you want) by “subscribing” to this project using the “Subscription” form on the sidebar (to the right).

Also you can now order my book about Redmine, titled “Mastering Redmine” and published by Packt Publishing, using this link, or Amazon, or your Kindle device. Using the book page on Packt Publishing website you can also check the table of contents and the sample chapter.

Download WikiNG 0.0.3

Did you know, that Redmine supported specifying CSS class names for many Wiki elements all along?.. This feature is not widely used because (I guess) it requires such CSS classes to be added into CSS stylesheets. So this feature can be used either individually only (per Redmine installation) or such CSS classes should come with a Redmine theme or a plugin. Thus, I thought: Why WikiNG can’t come with some pre-defined CSS classes especially designed to be used in a Wiki content?

Therefore, WikiNG now comes with the following CSS classes (all should be specified along with the wiking class):

Class name	Used with	Example	Demo
shadow	!...!	!>(wiking shadow).new-text.png!
mac-shadow	!...!	!>(wiking mac-shadow).new.png!	See to the right of this table →
pressed	<pre>...</pre>	<pre class="wiking pressed">Your code here</pre>	Your code here
button	"...":http://...	"(wiking button)Download!":/projects/wiking/files	Download!
small	%...%, p. ...	%(wiking small)Slightly smaller text%	Slightly smaller text

Of course, this feature is new and should be considered to be experimental. The next version of the plugin will, probably, come with more new interesting classes. You can also suggest, what CSS classes to add, using the “CSS Class” issue category (can be found on the new issue form).

For any application it is very important to have active users... Such users help a lot by testing the application, by using it and, therefore, finding issues and by suggesting new features. Luckily, WikiNG has such users!

Thus, version 0.0.3 also comes with a new feature, which was suggested by WikiNG’s active user Ismail SEZEN. This feature is support for file links, i.e., links to files under the Files tab. The syntax for such links is: file#<id> or file:"<filename.ext>". To link to files in another project, you can just prepend the syntax rule with the project identifier, e.g., project-identifier:file#<id>.

So, now you will be able to include the download link in, e.g., your news. Thus, use the following link to download WikiNG 0.0.3: wiking-0.0.3.tar.bz2.

Besides suggesting the just mentioned feature Ismail also noticed the start page bug (see #2074) and translated the plugin into Turkish. The translation and the fix for the bug are also included in this release. Thanks, Ismail!

In addition, this release comes with the Bulgarian translation (thanks to Ivan Cenov) and with the fix for HTML entities issue (#2090), which was discovered by Xavier Calland (thanks user(Xavier)#498).

And the last but not the least: Version 0.0.3 of the WikiNG plugin supports Redmine 2.1.x (i.e., Rails 3.2.x and jQuery).

A short note in the previous news regarding support of conditional macros under ChiliProject ended up with immediate reaction of Holger Just (one of Chili’s core developers), who contacted me to assist resolving the issue. As a result the alternatives for the {{date}} conditional macro, the today variable (see #1055), was included into version 3.3.0 of ChiliProject. The alternative for the {{version}} macro is planned (see here). While they are not in my plugin I still want to thank Holger for taking care of them! It’s greate pleasure to be able to inspire core developers. Thank you, Holger! By the way, I don’t mind if some functionality of the plugin will be included into the Redmine core...

To be notified about news happening in the project you can subscribe to it using the Subscription block on the sidebar.

Not much time has passed since the release of 0.4.1 as new version of Redmine has come. This was Redmine 2.1.x, which (much similar to 2.0.x) switched to the new version of Rails – 3.2.x. Luckily, new Rails did not introduce so many changes as 3.0.x. However, it moved from Prototype to jQuery... So, all the JavaScript code needed to be fixed. As usually these fixes do not break the plugin’s compatibility with previous versions of Redmine down to 1.0.x.

While porting to Redmine 2.1.x was not a very complicated task, two guys really helped me to coomplete it by testing the plugin on the recent Redmine, by researching reasons of issues and by providing patches to the code. These guys are Martin Corino and Takashi Okamoto. Thank you, guys! It’s worth mentioning, that it’s not the first time, when Takashi Okamoto contributes to the SCM Creator code...

Martin Corino, however, helped not only with porting... He found the bug #2102 and provided the fix for it. I guess circumstances, which make Martin find this bug, were not pleasant. Sorry for this, Martin, and thanks for the fix!

Perhaps, I hurried, when was working on the 0.4.1, as this release included another bug – #2095, or its duplicate #2120. Both issues included the patch fixing the bug. These issues were reported and patches were provided by Manfred Kröhnert and Christian Rishøj. Thank you, guys!

Also with 0.4.2 the SCM Creator got the Korean translation. Thanks to Jaebok Oh!

If you want to be among the first, who gets notified about upcoming versions of SCM Creator, subsribe to this project using the Subscription block on the sidebar.

There are two major features I, personally, need and want to see in the Sidebar plugin: ability to turn on the sidebar for the pages, which do not have the one by default (e.g., new issue page) and support for multiple sidebar contents (see #1695)... I’m proud to write, that the first mentioned feature comes with version 0.1.0! Thus, currently the Sidebar plugin allows adding the sidebar to the following project pages: news list and news pages, version pages, file list, new issue page, forum list, topic list, topic page, repository pages, settings and more. Sidebar visibility can be controlled globally and/or per project – the plugin introduces the configuration policy, which makes the configuration even more flexible. See this Wiki page for details.

With this release the Sidebar plugin also supports Redmine 1.4.x, 2.0.x and 2.1.x. Actually, the release of Redmine 1.4.x caught me unready, when I was working on the sidebar visibility feature. So that’s why they (the support and the feature) come together.

New version also includes new translations: Portuguese (thanks Mario Luzeiro), Turkish (thanks user(Ismail Sezen)#107) and Chinese (thanks Steven Wong).

Besides, the version 0.1.0 no longer uses the Project Settings plugin (so it can be removed, if you do not need it for other plugins)... In fact, the Sidebar Content was my last plugin, which used Project Settings (the functionality of the latter is simple to replicate)...

The new feature, which allows configuring the sidebar visibility, is a kind of useless, unfortunately, for ChiliProject 3.x... The point is that ChiliProject 3.x introduces huge layout changes, which make the sidebar visible on every page (as it contains the project menu, which is represented as tabs in Redmine). Besides this sidebar is at the left side, below the project menu... Therefore, I believe, putting content on the sidebar is not so useful as before. So, I need to get the feedback on using the plugin on ChiliProject 3.x (and above) to get an idea, how it can be improved for this application...

Before this the project had the name “redmine-sidebar”, but as a part of The Rename I changed it into the “sidebar-content”. The repository name also changed... So you need to update it, if you use my SVN. Luckily it’s easy:

$ svn switch --relocate http://svn.s-andy.com/redmine-sidebar http://svn.s-andy.com/sidebar-content

P.S. So which plugin is now next?.. A complicated question! Next plugins would be the Download Button and Contact Form, but... SCM Creator (+Github) and WikiNG, I started the porting with, now need to be fixed for Redmine 2.1.x, which was released afterwards... So let the fortune decide this time!

Redmine 2.x and Rails 3.x introduced so many changes that even such small plugin as the Author Box needed to be updated... So this is the main change in 0.1.0 – support for Redmine 1.4.x, 2.0.x and 2.1.x.

Other changes are also included but they are only translations. In particular: Ludovic Meyer added the French translation (#1871), Mario Luzeiro submitted the Portuguese translation, Pawel Orzechowski uploaded the Polish translation (#1896) and Ismail Sezen submitted the Turkish translation (#2061). Thank you, guys!

Since the first version the Author Box plugin supports adding custom content to the author box... However, this was not described anywhere. So I decided to write, how to do this, for this release. Check this Wiki page to get a better idea of what I’m writing about.

The Rename also affected the Author Box plugin – its identifier has changed! So if you use SVN you need to update the repository URL using the command:

svn switch --relocate http://svn.s-andy.com/redmine-author http://svn.s-andy.com/author-box

Reminding once again: You can always subscribe to any my project using the Subscription form on the sidebar. The form is provided by the Subscription plugin...

P.S. Which plugin is the next in the queue for porting to Redmine 2.x?.. It’s Sidebar Content! Expect it very soon...