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We'll have a server of fun

2004-08-26
Back in early August we had the first Connexions bugday (Yes, I meant to write about then while we were fixing bugs. Instead I'm writing about about it now, after the fixes have been cut over to the live server.) About 45 different bugfixes/featurelets were committed which, along with some code refactoring, are now live on our site.

Some highlights of the new features:

Multi-term person searching

One commonly requested feature when searching for people to add to a module or a workgroup was the ability to search on multiple strings with the results OR'd together. Ross took charge of adding this feature to our people search code.

Unavailable usernames

This marked the return of one of Jenn's favorite features: the list of usernames that are not available when creating a new user account (no, not every unavailable name: just some common ones based on email address and full name that the user might be tempted to try). These are now listed struckthrough.

Unicode printing

This wasn't a bugday feature, but was rolled out at the same time. We've started using the ucs package to add unicode support to LaTeX. That and some asian fonts and we were able to make PDF generation work correctly for our Japanese modules. I think our multi-lingual support is pretty good right now. There's always room for improvement though. If you have suggestions, please let us know.

SQL Arrays

Another non-bugday change that was rolled out was the change to our DB schema to make use of SQL99 ARRAYs which the latest version of PostgreSQL has some support for. This change is completely invisible to the end-user, but does make many of our queries much simpler. And in some cases it even provided a small performance-boost.