Digests 3.2.1-RC8 released

There’s lots of new stuff in this release and lots of bugs fixed. You can download it from GitHub here or from this site here. This version works on phpBB 3.2 Rhea and will not work on phpBB 3.1.

To update, make sure you follow the standard procedures. First disable the last version. If you delete data you will lose all digest subscriptions, so it’s not recommended. Delete the old files in /ext/phpbbservices/digests and replace it with the new files. Then enable the extension again.

Big thanks to all who reported bugs and asked for new features. I would be especially lax if I did not mention my French language translator Bonnaphil who asked lots of questions, did lots of testing and pushed me to deliver features I hadn’t thought of, like making the digests (well, HTML version anyhow) look “prettier”.

I haven’t figured out how to copy the branch to master, so if you know please leave me a note.

Summary of changes, Digests 3.2.0 to 3.2.1

Administration Control Panel

• Explanation text added for weekly digest day, to indicate that digests may be received on the day before the day set for users in the western hemisphere, since digests are sent based on UTC. This is already stated in the User Control Panel.
• BEHAVIOR CHANGE: Digests time zone removed. This was used in Edit Subscribers and in Balance load to show the hour digests are sent out. The timezone for the user in the User Control Panel is now used instead. This is less confusing.
• NEW FEATURE: Switch allows administrator to show the full forum path in digests. If set this applies to all users.
• NEW FEATURE: Switch allows administrator to lowercase the digest type. This is at the request of a language translator.
• BUG FIX: The default board language is no longer used as the basis for making digest language decisions in the ACP. Instead, the language you set in the UCP is used instead which is the way phpBB does it elsewhere.
  NEW FEATURE: Dates are translated into the language needed. The PHP date function only works with English formatted dates. strftime and a new function is used to translate date items like month names from English to the language desired.
• BUG FIX: When jQuery usage was introduced into Digests, it had the effect of undoing logic written that sent to the web server only those variables that were changed on the Edit Subscriber screen on form submission. Since there are so many fields, it could cause a PHP max_input_vars error. Changed the logic so that jQuery will handle this instead of regular Javascript.
• Cleaned up the jQuery so selectors weren’t used on multiple lines, the preferred way to do things in jQuery.
• NEW FEATURE: Administrator can specify tags to remove from HTML digests to prevent certain security issues. Removed tags are replaced with a message indicating the tag was removed and suggesting clicking on the post link to see the full content.
• BUG FIX: Mass subscriptions no longer set all new subscribers to the same hour. Rather if a random hour is requested, one is generated for each new subscriber. Previously after doing this you would also have to run Balance Load to distribute the digest send hour.
• NEW FEATURE: Balance load shows the average digests sent per hour (rounded to the nearest whole number). Hours are shown in more usable format based on user’s date/time format. A list of subscribers for the hour are also now shown with their digest type annotated by the styling used (none = daily, italics = weekly, bolded = monthly). In addition, you can limit balancing to a digest type (daily, weekly or monthly), you can specify the hours you want to balance and you can specify the hours to be used for balancing (for example, to avoid sending a digest in the middle of the night).
• User default settings now use the same language strings used in the User Control Panel interface where possible.

General

• NEW FEATURE: Timezone hours can be prefaced with a + if the hour is positive and the sprintf markup requests it.
• BUG FIX: Function dateFormatToStrftime will ignore AM/PM designation in date formats.
  Created many additional plural rules for language files were appropriate
• Where there is a substitution of more than one variable in a language string, they are now marked positionally, ex: %1$d instead of %d. This aids repositioning language elements in non-English translations.
• BUG FIX: Subscribe to digests on registration logic changed. You must be a human (i.e. omits possibility that bots could get a digest).
• MAJOR BUG FIX: Migrations of Digests from phpBB 3.0 no longer fails because an instance of the tools factory was not first declared. (This was not necessary in phpBB 3.1.)

Template changes

• MAJOR ENHANCEMENT: HTML digests look “prettier”. Background colors subtly change between posts within a topic making it easier to distinguish when posts begin and end. Background colors are consistent. Page background is now white. DIV boxes containing text no longer stretch across the width of the window if there is not much content.

Mailer

• NEW FEATURE: Switch allows administrator to lowercase the first letter of the digest type.
• NEW FEATURE: If show the forum path is enabled, the forum name in the digest will appear something like Category 1 :: Forum 1 :: Category A :: Forum B. Otherwise it will just show Forum B.
• NEW FEATURE: If the switch that allows administrator to lowercase the digest type is enabled, behavior changes for how the board name is shown in digests. For example, in certain languages “Daily Digest” would be “Digest Daily” and will logically precede the board name. If set to yes, then the digest title will appear something like “Digest daily of my board name” depending on the translation with the first letter of the board name in lowercase.
• BUG FIX: If for some reason the last time digests were successfully sent is after the current time, the mailer will log an error and abort. Otherwise an infinite loop starts.
• BUG FIX: Language files are applied for each user based on their preferred language. This keeps for example a user who has their language set to French from getting English markup in the digest.
• BUG FIX: Mailer no longer allows bots and inactive users to be selected in the initial query of users receiving digests for an hour.
• MAJOR BUG FIX: List of posts for the time period is no longer constrained by the SQL call to limit the maximum number of digests based on the administrator or user’s maximum posts settings. This can cause other users to not see posts.
• MAJOR BUG FIX: Fixed bug that did not correctly compute month start and end dates for monthly digests. Date function was incorrectly called generating a warning.
• NEW FEATURE: Digest translator can now be optionally identified and linked at the bottom of the digest.
• BUG FIX: Fixed bug that printed a “No private messages” announcement twice in text digests.
• MAJOR BUG FIX: Fixed bug that did not properly sort posts for some digests because no array was initialized.
• NEW FEATURE: Dates appearing in digests are now translated to show month names and days of week (including abbreviations) in the user’s language.
• NEW FEATURE: Administrator specified tags (which may cause security problems) are removed from HTML posts. A message is substituted letting the subscriber know content was removed.

User Control Panel

• Spacing for digest type is now consistent with other spacing for fields on the screen.