Playing with gl_fusion

I have been using geeklog on a number of websites. Geeklog just released 1.5.0 which enabled openid support and a few other things, but gl Labs just released a drop in replacement for geeklog call glfusion. Unfortunately it wasn’t a drop in replacement for me, not because of GL Labs, but because of Geeklog’s dumb ass way of implementing paths in their new database based configuration settings. I tend to move the paths around when upgrading so I don’t completely bork a site in the process. So after installing glfusion in the glfusion-1.0.0 directory, nothing worked, I just got a message saying “Unfortunately, an error has occurred rendering this page”. So I hacked the error handler to give me something something more useful to point me in the right direction. I then had to manually update the conf values in the database, this brings me to dumb assessed part of the implementation, look at this row


| path_language | s:41:"/www/eduni-dc.org/geeklog-1.5.0/language/"; | text | Core | s:0:""; | 0 | -1 | 100 | 3 |

That s:41 actually means string of length 41. Took me a little while to work that one out. Come on guys have you never head of strlen()? Next why the F…. does this all have to be in one column, if you really need to know that something is a string of 41 characters then put them in a different columns.

So now I have got my rant out of the way, glFusion has some cool stuff it it. It comes with a number of plugins built in and ready to go. It also has mooTools built in to the nouveau theme. See my test page for some of the extra formatting fluff you get

I am most impressed that glLabs is watching the bug tracker for geeklog and has already applied a patch I submitted to geeklog before geeklog has even confirmed it as a bug. So one less thing I need to patch when upgrading my geeklog sites.

If you want to see my first glFusion site go to www.eduni-dc.org

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4 Responses to “Playing with gl_fusion”

  1. Wayne says:

    It stumped me too, I use custom names for admin, layout and so on but the config would not allow me to alter them 🙁 as soon as I changed admin to myadmin the install was useless. Even tried editing the database config entries.

    GLFusion is great its the GL restrictions above, that is the problem.

    .W

  2. Geoff says:

    Curious. I used Geeklog. This appears to be a fork in the road as glFusion will go a different way. Do you think there’s more long term future in one or the other? I read that glFusion won’t provide an upgrade path from GL in future versions, so I guess I’ll have to make a decision whether to jump over. I’m no expert and really don’t have time to stuff around – to me this fork is a real worry and a real shame, splitting the community and reducing the chance that either will be long term viable. But I’m an outsider looking in.

  3. Ian says:

    The thing i liked about gl_fusion was that it gave me a complete environment that would be patched as a whole. I am not a huge fan of a plugin environment where there is not automatic notification of a new releases, especially when it fixes a security issue. My thinking was that since a lot of the plugins came as part of gl_fusion then I would only have to monitor one location for the fixes.

  4. Lee says:

    To see why the configuration fields use “S:41:….”, visit http://us.php.net/serialize and http://us.php.net/unserialize.