Publ v0.5.3, Authl v0.2.2

I’ve released updates to both Publ and Authl.

On the Authl side:

• Code quality and documentation improvements
• Add an asynchronous client-side lookup thing that tells users how their login will proceed
• Add the redirection target to disposition.Error so that can be preserved correctly
• Update the Flask wrapper to use disposition.Error.redir
• Let the application know the redirection target in render_login_func

On the Publ side:

• If the site is configured to force HTTPS in authentication, force the cookie to be HTTPS-only
• If a user is already logged in, make the login handler redirect them to their destination

For both:

• Improved build scripts to make it less convenient to accidentally push a build from the wrong branch or version

These changes help to keep sites more secure from eavesdroppers, while also hopefully improving the user experience!

v0.5.1 released (also Authl v0.1.6)

Oh gosh I seem to be on a roll with these updates again. Here’s what changed in Publ:

• Fixed a silly bug in the admin dashboard renderer which made it not work in production mode
• Make the admin log only record the most recent access per user per entry, making it way more useful
• Make the logout operation happen via POST method rather than GET, fixing a problem with browser prefetching; added a logout.html template to support that. (Also made the default unauthorized.html use Authl’s default CSS.)
• Actually make entry.authorized available, rather than just documented. Also gave it a better name while I was at it.
• view.entries can now take an optional argument for inlining unauthorized entries, improving its usage within feeds.
• view.unauthorized can now take an optional argument for limiting the unauthorized view count, which helps performance and makes it a bit more predictable
• Images now provide their filename as the default alt text, which is arguably better for accessibility than just leaving it a blank string. I am willing to change my mind on this, however.
• Cleaned up the code around category.subcats(recurse=True) and also added some actual tests for the sort ordering. They pass.

And the Authl changes (which were actually released before Publ 0.5.0 but I didn’t bother announcing them until I had them tested “in the wild”):

• Changed to using packaged data for templates
• Made the login page CSS available through url_for
• Removed the spurious precision from the email message template

Anyway, I of course updated the sample beesbuzz.biz templates to reflect the new functionality.

Wow, Publ’s feeling like it’s actually kinda pretty good at stuff now. I hope someone else ever wants to actually, like, use it or something.

v0.5.0 released

I figured there wasn’t really any reason to keep waiting. So here we are.

Changes since v0.4.6:

• Improve the performance and stability of the admin dashboard
• Correctly fall back to the internal Authl templates
• Remove some spurious/empty attributes from image tags
• Don’t cache template mappings forever
• Don’t mark an entry title as being markup if its markup is disabled
• Correctly set the default entry recursion for entry.previous/next
• Disable an arrow warning for a future change

In other news, over on my main website I have successfully migrated my comments over to Isso, which is a nice self-hosted alternative to Disqus that does a much better job of handling privacy in particular, as well as providing a simpler UX that doesn’t try to get in your face about everything. If you want to read more about how I made that change, read the several blog entries starting with “Moving away from Disqus,” and also look at the sample templates to see the actual implementation.

May your private entries remain exclusive, and your public entries be brilliant.

UPDATE: Someday I’ll learn to use and test rc builds before making an actual public release. Oops.