The activity system we were using was built around a separate table.
Whenever the user posted something, or deleted a post, we would sync
the table. The advantage of this was that we could aggregate activity
of all different types very efficiently.
It turns out that it came with a huge disadvantage: there was no
efficient way to enforce permissions on activity. If a user posted
something in a private tag, everyone could still see it on their
activity feed. My stopgap solution was to only sync activity for posts
that are viewable by guests, but that was way too limited.
It also turns out that aggregating activity of different types is
really not that useful, especially considering most of it is the user
making posts. So I've gotten rid of that whole overly-complicated
system, and just made the user profile display separate lists of posts
and discussions, retrieved from those respective APIs. The discussions
page is an actual discussion list too, which is pretty cool.
It's still technically possible to aggregate different activity types
(basically just aggregate API responses together), but we can do that
later if there's a need for it.
This is probably my favourite commit of the day :)
- Fix composer crashing/not showing alert on error
- Make a general ValidationException which takes an array of field ⇒
messages to be outputted nicely by the API
- Return all discussion post IDs from API requests which add/remove
posts, so the post stream updates appropriately. Related to #146
- Always unload posts that are two pages away, no matter how fast
you’re scrolling
- Retrieve posts from cache instead of reloading them
- Fix various bugs. Maybe #152, needs confirmation
- Use contextual namespaces within Flarum\Core
- Clean up and docblock everything
- Refactor Activity/Notification blueprint stuff
- Refactor Formatter stuff
- Refactor Search stuff
- Upgrade to JSON-API 1.0
- Removed “addedPosts” and “removedPosts” relationships from discussion
API. This was used for adding/removing event posts after renaming a
discussion etc. Instead we should make an additional request to get all
new posts
Todo:
- Fix Extenders and extensions
- Get rid of repository interfaces
- Fix other bugs I’ve inevitably introduced
A good start I think, but still some work to do. If we go ahead with
https://github.com/flarum/core/issues/132#issuecomment-117507974 (which
I am in favour of), we can extract the entity-related stuff into some
smaller service providers (e.g. discussion repo, an event listener,
permissions, and gambits stuff could all go in
Flarum\Core\Discussions\DiscussionsServiceProvider).
Also disallow the first post in a discussion to be deleted or hidden
(thus preventing discussions with zero posts)
closesflarum/core#90closesflarum/core#92
Only preloading data for basic requests w/o query params, at least for
the moment - if we have to preload for something like
/?q=test&sort=newest, we end up having to duplicate a whole lot of
logic between JS/PHP.
Explained in d1e7453ffd.
If we ever come up with a better way of doing this it should be easy to
change over, since modification of these properties by extensions is
abstracted by an Extend API.
All routes are now stored in a RouteCollection, which is then used
for dispatching by the (reusable) RouterMiddleware.
This change also entails moving all routes to the service providers.
This may be changed again later, and is done for convenience reasons
right now.
@franzliedke I didn’t realise that static properties are static to the
class they are defined on, and not each individual subclass. All of the
static members of the SerializeAction class (which are intended for
extensions to alter per-action) are being inherited by all actions.
Any ideas on how to work around this other than defining every static
member on each individual subclass?
Get rid of Permissible - too complex and inefficient. Replace with:
- a “Locked” trait which works similarly but only evaluates logic on
hydrated models.
- a “VisibleScope” trait which also works similarly but only scopes
queries
This is all we need, Permissible is overkill. There is only one
instance where we have to duplicate some logic
(Discussion::scopeVisiblePosts and Post::allow(‘view’, …)) but it’s
barely anything.
Haven’t decoupled for now, we can definitely look at doing that later.
Permissions table seeder slightly updated.
Also did a bit of a query audit, there’s still a lot to be done but
it’s much better than it was. Some relatively low-hanging fruit
detailed in EloquentPostRepository.
It works but it’s not the most pretty thing in the world. @franzliedke
Would be great if you could take a look at the whole formatting API and
work your magic on it sometime… my brain is fried!
This required some interface changes (mostly changing Laravel's or
Symfony's request and response classes to those of Zend's Diactoros.
Some smaller changes to the execution flow in a few of the abstract
action base classes, but nothing substantial.
Note: The request and response classes are immutable, so we usually
need to return new instances after modifying the old ones.
Originally the user activity feed was implemented using UNIONs. I was
looking at make an API to add activity “sources”, or extra UNION
queries (select from posts, mentions, etc.) but quickly realised that
this is too slow and there’s no way to make it scale.
So I’ve implemented an API which is very similar to how notifications
work (see previous commit). The `activity` table is an aggregation of
stuff that happens, and it’s kept in sync by an ActivitySyncer which is
used whenever a post it created/edited/deleted, a user is
mentioned/unmentioned, etc.
Again, the API is very simple (see Core\Activity\PostedActivity +
Core\Handlers\Events\UserActivitySyncer)
It turns out that the idea of “sending” a notification is flawed. (What
happens if the notification subject is deleted shortly after? The
notified user would end up with a dud notification which would be
confusing. What about if a post is edited to mention an extra user? If
you sent out notifications, the users who’ve already been mentioned
would get a duplicate notification.)
Instead, I’ve introduced the idea of notification “syncing”. Whenever a
change is made to a piece of data (e.g. a post is created, edited, or
deleted), you make a common notification and “sync” it to a set of
users. The users who’ve received this notification before won’t get it
again. It will be sent out to new users, and hidden from users who’ve
received it before but are no longer recipients (e.g. users who’ve been
“unmentioned” in a post).
To keep track of this, we use the existing notifications database
table, with an added `is_deleted` column. The syncing/diffing is
handled all behind the scenes; the API is extremely simple (see
Core\Notifications\DiscussionRenamedNotification +
Core\Events\Handlers\DiscussionRenamedNotifier)
Perhaps also in user activity stream. They are used in the mentions
extension.
In order to generate the excerpt, each formatter can implement a
“strip” method which basically converts block formatting into inline
formatting.
Also make some tweaks:
- Merge SerializeAction::$include and
SerializeAction::$includeAvailable into a keyed boolean array
- Set defaults for SerializeAction::$limit and $limitMax
- Rename SerializeAction::$sortAvailable to $sortFields
- An API action handles a Flarum\Api\Request, which is a simple object
containing an array of params, the actor, and optionally an HTTP
request object
- Most API actions use SerializeAction as a base, which parses request
input according to the JSON-API spec (creates a JsonApiRequest object),
runs the child class method to get data, then serializes it and assigns
it to a JsonApiResponse (standard HTTP response with a
Tobscure\JsonApi\Document as content)
- The JSON-API request input parsing is subject to restrictions as
defined by public static properties on the action (i.e. extensible)
- Also the actor is given to the serializer instance now, instead of
being a static property
- In order to be consistent with the Ember/LESS naming scheme, renamed
Flarum\Web to Flarum\Forum.
- Moved common classes into Flarum\Support so that Flarum\Admin doesn’t
depend on Flarum\Forum. Also moved Actor into Flarum\Support as it
doesn’t belong in the domain.
This allows me to override the handle() method in subclasses (where
I need access to the request object) without having to overwrite
run(), too.
The class is still abstract.
Perhaps this should be an extension, but it is pretty essential and I
can’t think of many instances where it wouldn’t be wanted. Would be
very easy to extract later on if need be.
New stuff:
- Signup + email confirmation.
- Updated authentication strategy with remember cookies. closes#5
- New search system with some example gambits! This is cool - check out
the source. Fulltext drivers will be implemented as decorators
overriding the EloquentPostRepository’s findByContent method.
- Lay down the foundation for bootstrapping the Ember app.
- Update Web layer’s asset manager to properly publish CSS/JS files.
- Console commands to run installation migrations and seeds.
Refactoring:
- New structure: move models, repositories, commands, and events into
their own namespaces, rather than grouping by entity.
- All events are classes.
- Use L5 middleware and command bus implementations.
- Clearer use of repositories and the Active Record pattern.
Repositories are used only for retrieval of ActiveRecord objects, and
then save/delete operations are called directly on those ActiveRecords.
This way, we don’t over-abstract at the cost of Eloquent magic, but
testing is still easy.
- Refactor of Web layer so that it uses the Actions routing
architecture.
- “Actor” concept instead of depending on Laravel’s Auth.
- General cleanup!
