At work, we have been receiving reports of people, particularly on Android 2, not being able to install from the Google Play Store citing an error message “Package file is invalid“. At the same time, I was trying to test one of the features I was developing on a couple of Android 2 test devices we have in the office, but I was repeatedly getting an INSTALL_FAILED_DEXOPT error from adb. It seemed that both of these issues could be related.
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MyBB 1.4 Released
We released MyBB 1.4 to the masses this weekend. I wouldn’t say it’s “overdue” but it’s about time we had this release out the door. We still haven’t managed to get the “self-fix” module working for MyBB to fix itself, so as usual support threads are pouring into the MyBB Community Forums. Unfortunately I was caught up in school and work to do as much development as I wanted to for 1.4, but the other developers did a great job recoding the entire Admin CP, and all the other things.
Hope you enjoy MyBB 1.4.
MyBB: Progress Report
Well as you can see I haven’t been blogging about MyBB much. In fact I haven’t been blogging that much at all, but that’s for a different blog entry.
I’ve been busy with school work and other stuff for the past several months, as I’m sure other people on the staff have been to. But nonetheless we are pushing forward with MyBB 1.4 at a steady pace.
We have seen Chris blog about the new built-in search-engine-optimized URLs. Although these “SEO” URLs are only present for pages with content that is “interesting” to search engine spiders (such as thread display, forum display, user profiles, announcements, and the calendar), they provide a much better “look” to the regular user than the standard ugly query string (for example, thread61881-5.html instead of showthread.php?tid=61881&page=5).
Then we have MyBB Merge (or is it MyBB Import, or MyMerge… ah well I don’t know exactly what name we have coined it today). This idea of having a centralized import/merge system has been an idea of Chris Boulton for at least one or two years, but we did not have the time to really develop it. But thanks to the work of Tikitiki (who is the lead of this project) users from a variety of other bulletin board systems can easily convert to MyBB. But you ask, why does the name have “Merge” and not “Convert”? Well because you can not only convert from another MyBB, but also merge the converted data to an existing MyBB forum if you wish. Imagine what you can do with this system: You can have an existing MyBB, and merge another forum (from SMF, phpBB, vBulletin, Invision Power Board, and others, or even MyBB itself) into it. Now how smart is that? Of course if you don’t have an existing MyBB, you can just convert your forum, since you have nothing to merge it with.
Recently we ported MyBB Merge so that it is compatible with MyBB 1.2, and at the time of writing it is under beta testing. Hopefully we can stamp out all the bugs so that we can release it to the general public. We’re expecting that the release of MyBB Merge will bring a whole new community to MyBB who would not have considered converting because of a variety of reasons (converter does not exist, converter is broken, etc).
MyBB 1.2 Beta: Usergroup Admin Permissions
Although this feature may not be used by many, it is now possible to give usergroups permissions in the Admin CP (only if the usergroup has “Can Access Admin CP” permission).
When you edit the permissions, the permissions listed are the same as the ones found in the existing individual user admin permissions.
How do these affect my admins, you ask? Well now let’s say you want your moderators to access the Admin CP to moderate posts and attachments, but you don’t want to set the individual yes/no permissions for all 20 of them. Now you can set the usergroup permissions to all ‘no’ except for the Moderate Posts/Threads/Attachments permission, and all the users in that usergroup will have those permissions.
Basically, if a user’s individual admin permissions are set, those will be used. If they are not set, then if the user’s usergroup has admin permission set, those will be used. In turn, if they are not set, then the user will use the default admin permissions.
Hopefully it’s not confusing for everyone.
MyBB 1.2 Beta: Translation Manager
Another of my Admin CP addons: The Translation Manager. This is also known as the “Language Packs” section, “Language Editor”, and other variations). It allows administrators with the new permission “Can Manage Languages” to edit each individual language variable in each language file, and also the properties of the language. Below is a screenshot of the main page:
There are two menus for each language. One menu allows you to choose the method of editing the language variables. The other menu allows you to perform operations on the language pack as a whole. Currently the only operation is editing the properties of the language pack, as shown below:
However, the editing of language variables is the best part of this utility. You can either edit languages by itself, or “with another language.” This allows translators (and anyone else) to compare two language packs, for example, the English translation with the translator’s language pack. First, a file must be chosen to be edited:
Below are two screenshots of the editor itself: one in single-mode, and one in dual-mode (comparing English to my test language pack).
I hope this feature will benefit both translators and administrators when editing language files. This makes it easy for any administrator to change the format of the emails, the registration agreement, and any other text in MyBB. Very flexible eh?
A technical note: The language folders and files must be CHMODed so that the web-server can write to it. If the files are not editable, a notice will be shown and administrators will not be able to save their changes.