I’ve finally gotten my act together and published a new Desko release. This release offers much easier installation. It now uses components so that new components can be easily added by just unzipping them into the components directory. Along with this release I also want to point you to the Desko demo site where you can test it all out. If you’ve seen what worked in 0.0.2 you won’t notice any changes in 0.0.3 as far as user functionality is concerned. All the changes were under the hood and well deserved.

UPDATE: Project is dead.

I’ve been in the middle of rewriting a lot of the Desko code so that it makes use of components. The reason for this is that it’ll make writing new components easy for people because they won’t have to edit any of the Desko code. They can use one of the existing components as a guide on how to write it. Then a user just needs to download the component, unzip it in the components directory, and it starts working magically. This whole thing came from automating the process of component detection so the install is easier. Once this latest rewrite is complete it should be a lot easier to get rolling with Desko. I’m hoping to have the first component complete within the next day or two.

I’m a little disgruntled at the quality of the css media=print functionality of both Firefox and IE. Neither seem to work right. My problem is that I have a lengthy page that has 12 large calendars on it and the calendars are being split and part is printing on one page and the other half on the next page. My initial solution was to just try an add a margin or padding at the bottom of the tables which would give them just enough extra room to fit nicely on the pages. This worked fine in Firefox most of the time. I say most of the time because depending on the year and months they might not exactly fit in the page like I expected but about 90% of the time it does.

IE didn’t even recognize margin-bottom or padding-bottom for the class the calendar tables were using. This initially made me think that IE wasn’t even recognizing the media=print but I eventually realized that it just didn’t like margins or padding on the tables when printing them. Then I ran across page breaks. This worked great in IE and was exactly what I was looking for. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get Firefox to notice the page-break-after so I ended up combining my two solutions and got them both to somewhat look ok.

I’ve created a Trac plugin that associates tickets with their changesets. The way you’d have to do this before was to setup a subversion post-commit hook that would add a comment with the changeset number. My changes add the changeset to a database table and when you’re viewing the ticket summary you can see all the changesets for that ticket. The really cool part of the plugin is that when you click on an ‘All’ link it goes through all the changesets and lists all the unique files that have been modified by all the changesets for the ticket. This is extremely useful when pushing updates to production because all we need to do is see only what files we need to update by clicking on ‘All’. Trac itself doesn’t offer this type of functionality which is why people made the post-commit comment hack. Now, with my plugin you can easily associate changesets with a ticket and easily see the set of changesets. My plugin isn’t actually complete because I hacked together some things before I realized making a plugin was the way to go. It works for me now so I don’t have much motivation to wrap it up for everyone else. If anyone is interested in this please just email me and I’ll try to complete the plugin and post a link to it on my site.