How to migrate 1.7 plugins to 1.8

[dannyl]

Trying to get a running start on 1.8

Seems to be a lot of structural change.

I installed the 1.8 branch from the nightly (25/1/2011) and I'm trying to migrate our plugins. So far - without much luck

Is there a developers guide for the migration?
Explaining the changes in directory structure and APIs?

For example:

It seems that 1.8 uses a convention of views/default/layout/shells/
and 1.7 uses a convention of views/default/canvas/layouts/

It seems that 1.8 has a different (perhaps incompatible) way of managing the river - since after the upgrade - user comments on group Posts are appearing as river create group events (which is a bug)

Then there are the API changes - I am getting in the river error messages related to getSubject() and getObject() - these methods don't exist - I'm not sure that they have existed for a long time but now they bite the installation.

What is the appropriate migration for getSubject() and getObject?

Thanks!

[cash]

Danny - can you give us some more time on 1.8 before you start migrating?

1. We have not written upgrade scripts for a few of the changes (such as group forum posts). Some changes were made by Curverider in a non-compatible way and I haven't had a chance to fix these.

2. We have a few more refinements to make to the views

I have written a short guide to updating plugins that I plan to add to by migrating a few plugins. We will publish that.

[dannyl]

Cash

Sure. Just trying to get a head start. The trigger was actually something stupid - I needed a count of river items for a particular subtype for pagination and I noticed that the 1.8 branch had implemented count in elgg_get_river so I said why not give it a spin.

Famous last words ;-)

Danny

[dannyl]

Cash
One more thing.
I think I have modernized all our api calls to elgg_* but we still have calls to getObject in the 1.7 river views which won't work in 1.8 and it would be nice to replace the old calls with new 1.8 compatible calls - they are localized in groups/river/forumpost/create and blogs/annotate and a couple other places.

[dannyl]

and thanks for the great work!

D

[cash]

ElggRiverStatement::getObject() and ElggRiverStatement::getSubject() date back to Elgg 1.0-1.2. Elgg 1.5 replaced ElggRiverStatement by passing a plain old stdClass object. Given our policy of supporting deprecated functions for two versions, I don't think we are going to include a backwards compatible version for getObject() and getSubject().

I don't think the blog,annotate river view has been used since Elgg 1.5 and should have been removed. Do you have anything in your river table that uses it?

I checked the 1.7 branch for forum/create and it uses:

$performed_by = get_entity($vars['item']->subject_guid);

instead of

$subject = $vars['item']->getSubject();

We definitely want to maintain backward compatibility so if you see some place where we are breaking it, let us know.

When we are closer, I'll share the upgrade guide with you as a preview. It would be great to have someone else work through it as a check.

[dannyl]

Cash

Please share the upgrade guide - i'm sure it will save a lot of time.

If I may suggest - it would be a good thing to put build version numbers and revision date into the project files, especially the engine/lib files - like 1.8.2819 20100125 - this would definitely help developers pinpoint hot spots of change.

[dannyl]

Is there somewhere I can download the upgrade guide?

[cash]

Replying to dannyl:

All we have is a really rough Google doc. Documentation efforts have been going into preparing for GSoC lately. The only thing we've published so far is here: ​http://blog.elgg.org/pg/blog/cash/read/166/updating-17-plugins-for-18-while-still-using-17

[cash]

I updated the doc for the change in 'owner' to 'all'. We don't explicitly mention the summary view by name so Evan's modification does not affect the doc. What's the release mechanism here? Blog post with a link to the Google doc?

[ewinslow]

I'd prefer it go on the wiki first

[cash]

If no objections, I'll the current doc to the wiki. Let me know by end of the day.

[brettp]

Wiki sounds good.

[cash]

I tried to save it as an ODT file and then use OO to export as a MediaWiki txt file (thought that would be so much easier than reformatting the text). I do Java development and I guess my JVM breaks the OO MediaWiki export extension.

[brettp]

Where's the OO extension? I can try to export as MediaWiki txt.

[cash]

​http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/wikipublisher

It adds an "export to" option and maybe even a direct post to wiki.

[brettp]

Nifty. Attachment incoming.

[cash]

Thanks much, Brett. That saved me a lot of time. The only thing I had to adjust were the quote mark characters and one trashed link.

​http://docs.elgg.org/wiki/Updating_plugins_for_Elgg_1.8

[arsalan]

Sound like interesting if there is Built in Legacy Plugin That Work Elgg 1.7 plugins/mod in Elgg 1.8