So, what can we do about the "unblocking" problem?
Apparently, Microsoft has recently enabled blocking zip files that have been downloaded from the internet. It's something that is supposed to be respected by every browser (and as far as I know it IS being respected by IE, Firefox and Chrome).
When you the Umbraco unzip file that is blocked, it will not unzip a few files that it thinks are potentially dangerous to your machine. And in the end, that causes the "empty trees" problem that many people have been having recently. How annoying, especially because it's not an obvious problem, especially people new to Umbraco will just think the binaries are bad and might abandon Umbraco completely.
So, what can we do about this? The only thing I can come up with now is not to offer a .zip file, but a self-extracting .exe file. I like them because I can still use 7zip to open them up and unzip them. However, I am not 100% sure that these files will not be blocked either.
Another option is to make it an explicit step/check in the umbraco installation. Try to find out if files are missign and explain the user to unblock the zip file.
There are some workarounds over here (method #3 might be of interest, the others suck and a solution that enables website operators to prevent their files from being tagged with zone information should not be expected):
Thanks Atze, but they are no solutions at the moment, you don't want to tell users to disable the function, it's quite useful to prevent malware from coming into your machine! Anyway, we need something automated, it's currently not discoverable for anybody and you need to be able to tell users why their install is not working/will not be working.
Apparently users als could add for example *.codeplex.com to their "Trusted Sites" using the Windows "Internet Options", so they are not required unblock the downloads anymore.
This is still not discoverable for anybody. The point is that everybody that HAS this problem doesn't know anything about files being blocked. Hence the plethora of Tweets and forum questions about the empty trees problem.
So, what can we do about the "unblocking" problem?
Apparently, Microsoft has recently enabled blocking zip files that have been downloaded from the internet. It's something that is supposed to be respected by every browser (and as far as I know it IS being respected by IE, Firefox and Chrome).
When you the Umbraco unzip file that is blocked, it will not unzip a few files that it thinks are potentially dangerous to your machine. And in the end, that causes the "empty trees" problem that many people have been having recently. How annoying, especially because it's not an obvious problem, especially people new to Umbraco will just think the binaries are bad and might abandon Umbraco completely.
So, what can we do about this? The only thing I can come up with now is not to offer a .zip file, but a self-extracting .exe file. I like them because I can still use 7zip to open them up and unzip them. However, I am not 100% sure that these files will not be blocked either.
Another option is to make it an explicit step/check in the umbraco installation. Try to find out if files are missign and explain the user to unblock the zip file.
Any other ideas?
checking existance of files and performing a crc check would be interesting from mutiple perpectives
There are some workarounds over here (method #3 might be of interest, the others suck and a solution that enables website operators to prevent their files from being tagged with zone information should not be expected):
http://www.petri.co.il/unblock-files-windows-vista.htm
Hope this helps you.
That's what I though Rik!
Thanks Atze, but they are no solutions at the moment, you don't want to tell users to disable the function, it's quite useful to prevent malware from coming into your machine! Anyway, we need something automated, it's currently not discoverable for anybody and you need to be able to tell users why their install is not working/will not be working.
Apparently users als could add for example *.codeplex.com to their "Trusted Sites" using the Windows "Internet Options", so they are not required unblock the downloads anymore.
This is still not discoverable for anybody. The point is that everybody that HAS this problem doesn't know anything about files being blocked. Hence the plethora of Tweets and forum questions about the empty trees problem.
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