This extension works really nice, but I miss one feature. I’m going to import blog posts to a TYPO3 website and I’d like to keep the categories already associated with the original post also related with the news imported in the website.

An example:

• Import one post that has the categories TYPO3 and PHP in the RSS
• If you have defined in your website the category TYPO3
• Then the tt_news record imported will be related with TYPO3 category

Finally, I’ve implemented it, you can find a patch at TYPO3 Forge. Also some little bugfixes for yafi extension.

This together with gl_pages_cat could help to feed your website automatically showing only related news on every categorized page.

PD: An inspirational post by Federico Mena today:

[...] If you don’t “git push” today, your day was a waste of time.

There is a CAS client available written in Ruby: RubyCAS-Client.

So, I’ve made some modifications on Redmine code in order to use the CAS service to authenticate Redmine users. Moreover, user information is updated from a LDAP every time the user login in the Redmine website (using Net::LDAP). And the fields to modify this data will be disabled on My account page.

Summarizing, I’ve uploaded a patch which provides this specific behaviour (this patch is done against the revision 2824 of Redmine). I know that it’s hardcoded, but it could be a base for further steps and I hope that it could be useful for someone else (or even for me in the future ). In the next paragraphs I’ll go into more technical details.

Instructions

Once you’ve installed the last version of Redmine (I’m using trunk revision 2824), you’ll need to install RubyCAS-Client (again from trunk because of some functions are not available at last stable 2.0.1):

./script/plugin install http://rubycas-client.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/rubycas-client


First of all, you should add the basic configuration for CAS at config/environment.rb:

CASClient::Frameworks::Rails::Filter.configure(
  :cas_base_url => 'https://localhost/cas/'
)

Moreover, it’s needed to add the next line to the class AccountController at app/controllers/account_controller.rb:

  before_filter CASClient::Frameworks::Rails::Filter

Then, in order to change the login behaviour you should modify the login action of the account controller. Change the method login at app/controllers/account_controller.rb:

require 'casclient'
require 'casclient/frameworks/rails/filter'

  def login
    if session[:cas_user].empty?
      # Logout user
      self.logged_user = nil
      CASClient::Frameworks::Rails::Filter::redirect_to_cas_for_authentication(self)
    else
      cas_authentication(session[:cas_user])
    end
  end

Now, it’s necessary to add the new method cas_authentication, which register an user if it’s the first time that makes login on the Redmine website:

  def cas_authentication(cas_user)
    user = User.find_or_initialize_by_login(cas_user)

    if user.new_record?
      # Create on the fly
      user.login = cas_user

      user = update_user_data_from_ldap(user)

      user.status = User::STATUS_REGISTERED

      register_automatically(user) do
        onthefly_creation_failed(user)
      end
    else
      if user.active?
        user = update_user_data_from_ldap(user, true)
        successful_authentication(user)
      else
        account_pending
      end
    end
  end

The method update_user_data_from_ldap gets the user data from LDAP, and update user data on database if needed:

  def update_user_data_from_ldap (user, save = false)
    ldap = Net::LDAP::new
    ldap.host = 'localhost'
    ldap.port = '389'

    treebase = 'dc=example,dc=com'

    filter = Net::LDAP::Filter.eq('uid', user.login)

    entry = ldap.search( :base => treebase, :filter => filter, :attributes => ['cn', 'sn', 'mail'] ).first

    user.firstname = entry.cn.first
    user.lastname = entry.sn.first
    user.mail = entry.mail.first

    user.save if save

    return user
  end

Following, you should modify the logout behaviour, changing the method logout of the same controller:

  def logout
    cookies.delete :autologin
    Token.delete_all(["user_id = ? AND action = ?", User.current.id, 'autologin']) if User.current.logged?
    self.logged_user = nil
    CASClient::Frameworks::Rails::Filter::logout(self)
  end

The last step is to disable the fields gotten from LDAP at My account page. Modify the app/views/my/account.rhtml file adding :disabled => true option:

<p><%= f.text_field :firstname, :required => true, :disabled => true %></p>
<p><%= f.text_field :lastname, :required => true, :disabled => true %></p>
<p><%= f.text_field :mail, :required => true, :disabled => true %></p>

Finally, you can get all this stuff from a single patch. Any comment or suggestion are, as usual, welcomed.

• GTK+ 3.0, paso a paso where Carlos Garnacho showed us some interesting things that will be the future of GTK+
• Tracker. ¿Qué he hecho yo para indexar esto? interesting talk about the new Tracker 0.7 by Iván Frade.

Moreover, we present our talk about Tarefas at GUADEC-ES, it seems that people like the idea and how it was developed as part of the Master on Free Software. BTW, you can get the slides (in Spanish).

Finally, Berto and me went for a walk around the old city, this part is really nice.

Summarizing, it was a great week in Gran Canaria, where I could meet a lot of great hackers. A lot of interesting stuff: Mojito, Tracker, Zeitgeist, Midgard2, CouchDB, GNOME Shell, … I should take a look at some of them in the future, I hope to find some time

Then I moved to the GUADEC Mobile Day in order to attend the following talks:

• Designing Moblin-Netbook. A free desktop on a 7-10″ Screen
• MAFW: the Media Application Framework for Maemo

Afer that, I moved again to GUADEC-ES where Víctor explained how to generate .vapi files in his talk Un vistazo a Vala.

And I finished the conferences day in the next talks:

• Couch DB: Cross Desktop Data and Demos
• Pitivi Video Editor

Finally, I went to the GNOME Hispano dinner and also attended to the party sponsored by Collabora.

After the conference some of us went to the beach and other hackers join us there. BTW, my second swim in Gran Canaria

Finally, some igalians and Federico Mena went to dinner to the city centre. I had the chance to ask him about Zeitgeist internals, how they detect the events and so on. It was a nice night with a great guy.

• WebKitGTK+
• I can has aliens too? Client side windows in Gtk+
• Modest: Creating a modern mobile email client with gnome technologies
• GNOME 3.0 – A Live Circus^WStatus Update
• Vala: Compiler for the GObject type system
• GSettings: Next Gen of Config Management
• GNOME 1,2,3

Quite interesting talks today, and a very funny talk (GNOME 1,2,3) by Fer and Xan. Furthermore, it’s good to see how Igalians have started to appear as speakers

Today is the GNOME party sponsored by Igalia, now it’s time to go there!

BTW, master students (Manuel, Javi and me) have started to prepare our talk for the GUADEC-ES. Moreover Sergio has found some time, after the Modest talk, to help us with the Maemo port. Thank you very much!

• Desktop search: Extracting semantic meta data
• Tracker: Metadata central storage for the Desktop
• Animated UI technologies in maemo 5 (Fremantle)
• WebKit combined GTK+/Qt talk
• Profiling and Optimizing D-Bus APIs

I liked the Desktop search and Tracker talks, that allowed me to understand better the problems and ideas of these projects. From the D-Bus talk I should extract a basic concept:

D-Bus API shouldn’t be just a mapping of your library

You should use some time to think the proper D-Bus methods that you need. Another interesting thing was Bustle, a kind of D-Bus monitor that seems very interesting.

At the afternoon the GUADEC starts, and I’ve attended:

• Introduction to the GNOME Shell
• GNOME Zeitgeist
• Sipping Mojitos and thinking RESTful thoughts
• State of Clutter

It was interesting see the current status of GNOME Shell. The GNOME Zeitgeist talk reminded me some ideas of MyTime. Finally, I had the chance to talk a bit with Rob Bradford about Mojito project, a very interesting way to access social networks from the desktop.

BTW, Nokia’s party is waiting, see you there tonight

Among the keynotes, I liked the talk about Sugar with some interesting concepts and examples, I should give it a try. On the other hand, Stallman remembered to the whole audience his opinion about C#. Finally, Quim Gil revealed the future of Maemo linked to Qt.

BTW, first swim on the Las Canteras beach, now is time to go out to dinner

This will be my GUADEC, and this is the first time that GUADEC and Akademy are organized together (a great idea in my opinion).

I hope to learn a lot during this fantastic event and meet a lot of interesting people. See you in Gran Canaria

BTW, I’ll be part of a talk given in the GUADEC-ES by all the Master on Libre Software students. In this talk we’ll talk about our experience developing a GNOME application as a practice for the Development of Libre Software subject.

• Anonymous users
• Captcha prevention
• RSS
• BBCode

So I’ve been testing different TYPO3 extensions:

• mm_forum: The most used and with community and recent activity. Only one problem not logged users can’t write posts.
• chc_forum: Not updated since 2006. Without Captcha prevention. RSS feed is added with another extension.
• wec_discussion: An active extension, but with a forum system quite simple and without BBCode support.

All of them miss some of the required features. After some tests I decided to use chc_forum, mainly because we’ve already used it in a previous project and another extension already provides Captcha prevention, but it’s not working properly.

I’d prefer to use mm_forum but it was more difficult to add the missed feature. I’ve added a new issue and I hope that this feature will be implemented in order to improve this great extension.

Finally, the result is:

• A new TYPO3 extension chc_forum_captcha, based on chc_forum_popup source code, that adds Captcha prevention to chc_forum.
• A little patch for chc_forum_feed, because it was not detecting the website protocol (HTTP or HTTPS).