I'm not the developer of this package, but would like to add a couple of comments in its defence.
Embedded Content was under active development at the beginning of the year - around the time when Umbraco 4.6.1 was released. As far as I'm aware, there hasn't been another release since v4.7.x.
The bugs with the "show in title" and "required" are checkbox related. This was due to an upgrade in the jQuery library (that ships with Umbraco) ... changes in how checkboxes are accessed/set. Only reason I know this is because we got caught by it on a few uComponents data-types!
Luckily the source was opened up last week and is available on BitBucket: https://bitbucket.org/TheFarm/embedded-content-umbraco/src - I believe the original developer is a busy guy, so it's most likely up to another community member to patch up any issues - could it be you? ;-)
Oh, this is another one of those "go fix it yourself" packages. There's way too many of those and I'm no fan.
But thanks for the explanation. I will not be fixing the package, I have already spent too much time fixing two other broken packages today. I am now trying the Multitype Datatype packages, seems similar and actually works as advertised.
Michiel, to be honest, I think your reply is really selfish... People here work their ass off creating awesome packages and most of them are also keeping their, and others', packages up-to-date.
Most of them are free, which also means there can't be support 24/7. Please try to understand this. If it's not good enough for you, leave them as they are and start contributing your own stuff!
While I understand some people might feel like they're personally attacked because they create packages, I would like to note that there's nothing wrong with people like Michiel asking for a bit of quality.
Personally, I do not upvote any package unless I've tried it myself and am positive that it works as advertised. I would recommend looking at the number of votes before downloading a package and also indeed read the details.
However, I am not pleased with the less than welcoming way a newcomer to the Umbraco community is being treated and would like to ask for a bit of nuance. We were all beginners once and maybe you were unassuming, but here's a guy diving in for the first time and he's bothered by a lack of quality. There's a few things we can do here:
- Make sure that quality packages get more attention - Help new users find those packages by suggesting alternatives - Be a little more patient, we're all here to learn
I take offense because I personally seduced Michiel into starting to use Umbraco a few months back and told him the community is friendly and welcoming to newcomers. I must say I'm a ashamed of your immediate dimissal and hope you will tone it down for other "n00bs" as well.
Michiel, if you ever want to discuss the best way to build things and which packages to use, don't be shy to call me.
Damn, I feel like a moderator right now, something I swore I'd never be any more. Carry on!
Kipusoep and Dirk, what's going on? Your attitude is no better than the one you're targeting. And you guys have *no* excuse. Maybe it's time to spend some time elsewhere for a while - I think you do more harm than good if this is the direction you're heading!
1) Michel obviously have had some pretty bad experiences with a couple of packages. I think we've all know the feeling of wasting time on something that wasn't 'your own fault'. It can make you go crazy - AND loose a lot of patience and tolerance you might have 2) Dirk, you write RTFM. But where does it actually state that it *doesn't* work with 4.7? And is that even an option? Most packages are marked as 4.5 compat, even those working on 4.7. I don't think Michel had a chance of knowing TBH. I wouldn't! 3) On the other hand I think Michel needs to adjust expectations and learn that kindness is the currency in open source. In this thread it seems that only Lee and Jeroen understands that.
Going forward, what can be learned from this? - That we need a way to mark compatibility for an Umbraco version on a package. This could be user generated (ie. package dev could mark the versions that works at the time of package release, but community members could mark issues) - That it's better to silence if you don't have anything constructive to say or you think we speak abbr in the Umbraco community (h5yr is allowed though ;-))
Uhm, seriously, what did I do wrong in your opinion Niels?! I feel like you're mixing up my and Dirk's comment, because I really can't find anything in my comment that's bad or offensive.
Anyway, can't help it if you don't like my comment, I think I really did my best not to let myself go and I succeeded not to..
@kipusoep: Your attitude is way out of line in the Umbraco community. I don't believe it could be excused to "lost in translation" albeit I wish it could. It was harsh, accusing and hostile at a guy who simply asked "why is this stated compatible when it's obviously isn't" and after being told that he could fix it, simply said "guys, I had enough. Already fixed two broken packages today". Yes, it could have been said more elegant. But I think it's easy to take a breath and remember how frustrated we've all been in likewise situations.
One thing that have made me proud of our community is how we've been able to kindly approach even people with frustrations. I'd rather close the community, than seeing this be the attitude going forward.
As such, I'm asking you guys to either go somewhere else or either silence or do better. You're not worth it.
There was no intention of flaming/showin a bad attitude in any way from my part to be honest. I'm not saying it's got something to do with my English, although I'm not the best English writer.
Anyway, like I said, there was no intention to be hostile, unfriendly or harsh and like you said; this is not the way we know you.
I really like you line saying "... and remember how frustrated we've all been in likewise situations." It is recognizable, but I've never felt like expressing it the way Michiel did. And in my opinion it wasn't a good way expressing these frustrations.
I will not take a break from our, just because of this single 'incident', as you'll understand I think. Though I will think twice next time commenting on such topics.
Getting back to the original issue: I think part of what's made this Embedded Content package especially frustrating is that it fills a gap in Umbraco, and could be very useful. Embedding a variable number of several basic datatypes in a page-- basically, custom widgets. (The only other simple way to do this is make the widgets be document types that go under the page in the hierarchy. I've found this kind of clumsy as it breaks the abstraction of the content items in the tree each being a seperate page with hierarchial URL.)
It's also frustrating because it's 90% there, quality and feature-wise. The original developer was very responsive at first, then suddenly disappeared from the Umbraco community. Worst of all, he didn't open the source code, even though he was giving it away for free. (My opinion is that free Umbraco packages should be open source, but that's another issue.) The code was just released, but I gave up on the package a while ago and removed it everywhere I was using it, since it seemed abandoned with no open source. Ironically, this package was created to replace a similar one that had also become abandonware.
It might surprise some of the very active community members, but not everyone who relies on Umbraco has time to debug or develop custom packages. You have to pick your battles.
"It might surprise some of the very active community members, but not everyone who relies on Umbraco has time to debug or develop custom packages. You have to pick your battles."
Some guys make time - and they should only ever be praised for that. It is a fallacy to suggest that some people are busier than others - it is just about how you set your goals and priorities.
I'm currently *violating* some rules but at there's no other way of contacting the OP then by replying to this thread:
"Dear Michiel,
Apologies if you feel my first reply was rude, harsh, inadequate or inappropriate to you. I'm sure it won't happen again. I would have liked to do this offline: I can't! Anyway, I'm still up for more constructive conversations offline if you'd like to. No offence if you don't.
I agree with Dirk. Like someone said on Twitter yesterday; you go to sleep, read it again in the morning and probably think; "Yes, it could be interpreted offensive". There was no intention from my side to be rude, if you do interpretit it that way; my apologies.
Like others have mentioned already; not everybody is looking for spending hours on fixing current packages and I understand. It's just that people really work hard to get their packages up-to-date with every umbraco release, which can sometimes be frustrating.
Anyway, I hope nobody in this thread will keep hard feelings about this.
All other issues aside, I agree with Niels that it would be really great to have a clear way to indicate which versions of Umbraco a package is known to be compatible with. Something like what Symphony does for its extensions, where developers can mark which versions of the CMS they have tested their packages with:
And as for what Michiel called "go fix yourself" packages, it'd be great if we could all just fix things ourselves and contribute back to the community. But first of all that requires open source packages, which not all packages are, and second of all, because Umbraco is such a powerful CMS for frontend developers, not all of us have the .NET skills to build or fix packages ourselves.
We're certainly exceedingly grateful to those of you who can and do build packages. But that doesn't make it any less frustrating to get stuck with a buggy closed-source package built by a developer who has since gone AWOL and abandoned it. If the package was clearly marked as abandonware, or as not-tested-with-any-release-since-4.5.0, that would certainly help.
My main beef is NOT with the package developers, whom I respect very much for their contributions. I would be proud if I could add my own package, but so far I have only submitted some bugfixes for Umbraco core. No packages from me (yet).
Although I did package up one fix from someone else and provided a download link, it may be I just need more karma to burn :-)
No my main beef is with the way the package system works. It looks like there's loads of resources, but in practice "your mileage may vary... a lot" which right now seems to depend on if you want to use the latest version of Umbraco or if you want to stikc with an older version (and miss out on Razor and other improvements).
It fixes 2 errors: The jQuery 1.6x change and the 'required' id is changed to 'require' because of Chrome HTML5 interpretation I've tested it on 4.5.2 and 4.7.1 Once I figure out to commit the changes to the repository I will :)
@Bo Kingo - excellent! #h5yr Best bet for getting the patches back to the guys at TheFarm is to fork their repo and apply changes, then make a pull request.
@Bo one other error that we spotted last week, but haven't had a chance to update on the src yet is that the use of server.mappath breaks publish at on documents with embedded content on.
If you want to fix it while you're on a roll, change the references to server.mappath to hostingenvironment.mappath instead, then it will work fine!
@Bo, yup, the publish at doesn't have the httpcontext available to it, so anything that calls things that require context without checking if it's there throws a null reference exception.
When it throws that error, the auto publish fails, leaving an error in umbracoLog. There's a few other datatypes that have this problem as well that we've identified, will publish the list when we're done!
This is great, was able to use the dll and fixed all issues. Thanks for the update! Wanted to know what it takes to update the package so when other users install the package from the repository they will have the updated version?
Using it for 1 minute, already 2 bugs?
In Umbraco v4.7.1, when I edit a data type with this control, the Show in title and Required values are not saved. So there's no way to turn those on.
Is this package tested at all with the latest Umbraco?
I'm not the developer of this package, but would like to add a couple of comments in its defence.
Embedded Content was under active development at the beginning of the year - around the time when Umbraco 4.6.1 was released. As far as I'm aware, there hasn't been another release since v4.7.x.
The bugs with the "show in title" and "required" are checkbox related. This was due to an upgrade in the jQuery library (that ships with Umbraco) ... changes in how checkboxes are accessed/set. Only reason I know this is because we got caught by it on a few uComponents data-types!
Luckily the source was opened up last week and is available on BitBucket: https://bitbucket.org/TheFarm/embedded-content-umbraco/src - I believe the original developer is a busy guy, so it's most likely up to another community member to patch up any issues - could it be you? ;-)
Cheers, Lee.
You can also find a solution in this topic: http://our.umbraco.org/projects/backoffice-extensions/embedded-content/bugs/24647-Show-in-title-and-Required-not-working
Jeroen
Oh, this is another one of those "go fix it yourself" packages. There's way too many of those and I'm no fan.
But thanks for the explanation. I will not be fixing the package, I have already spent too much time fixing two other broken packages today. I am now trying the Multitype Datatype packages, seems similar and actually works as advertised.
Michiel, to be honest, I think your reply is really selfish...
People here work their ass off creating awesome packages and most of them are also keeping their, and others', packages up-to-date.
Most of them are free, which also means there can't be support 24/7. Please try to understand this. If it's not good enough for you, leave them as they are and start contributing your own stuff!
Michiel,
RTFM! Let me quote from the project page of Embedded Content:
Project Compatibility
Compatible with version 4.5 using the new XML schema
And you seem to be working on a v4.7.1 install.
Cheers,
/Dirk
While I understand some people might feel like they're personally attacked because they create packages, I would like to note that there's nothing wrong with people like Michiel asking for a bit of quality.
Personally, I do not upvote any package unless I've tried it myself and am positive that it works as advertised. I would recommend looking at the number of votes before downloading a package and also indeed read the details.
However, I am not pleased with the less than welcoming way a newcomer to the Umbraco community is being treated and would like to ask for a bit of nuance. We were all beginners once and maybe you were unassuming, but here's a guy diving in for the first time and he's bothered by a lack of quality. There's a few things we can do here:
- Make sure that quality packages get more attention
- Help new users find those packages by suggesting alternatives
- Be a little more patient, we're all here to learn
I take offense because I personally seduced Michiel into starting to use Umbraco a few months back and told him the community is friendly and welcoming to newcomers. I must say I'm a ashamed of your immediate dimissal and hope you will tone it down for other "n00bs" as well.
Michiel, if you ever want to discuss the best way to build things and which packages to use, don't be shy to call me.
Damn, I feel like a moderator right now, something I swore I'd never be any more. Carry on!
Kipusoep and Dirk, what's going on? Your attitude is no better than the one you're targeting. And you guys have *no* excuse. Maybe it's time to spend some time elsewhere for a while - I think you do more harm than good if this is the direction you're heading!
1) Michel obviously have had some pretty bad experiences with a couple of packages. I think we've all know the feeling of wasting time on something that wasn't 'your own fault'. It can make you go crazy - AND loose a lot of patience and tolerance you might have
2) Dirk, you write RTFM. But where does it actually state that it *doesn't* work with 4.7? And is that even an option? Most packages are marked as 4.5 compat, even those working on 4.7. I don't think Michel had a chance of knowing TBH. I wouldn't!
3) On the other hand I think Michel needs to adjust expectations and learn that kindness is the currency in open source. In this thread it seems that only Lee and Jeroen understands that.
Going forward, what can be learned from this?
- That we need a way to mark compatibility for an Umbraco version on a package. This could be user generated (ie. package dev could mark the versions that works at the time of package release, but community members could mark issues)
- That it's better to silence if you don't have anything constructive to say or you think we speak abbr in the Umbraco community (h5yr is allowed though ;-))
Peace,
Niels
Uhm, seriously, what did I do wrong in your opinion Niels?!
I feel like you're mixing up my and Dirk's comment, because I really can't find anything in my comment that's bad or offensive.
Anyway, can't help it if you don't like my comment, I think I really did my best not to let myself go and I succeeded not to..
@kipusoep: Your attitude is way out of line in the Umbraco community. I don't believe it could be excused to "lost in translation" albeit I wish it could. It was harsh, accusing and hostile at a guy who simply asked "why is this stated compatible when it's obviously isn't" and after being told that he could fix it, simply said "guys, I had enough. Already fixed two broken packages today". Yes, it could have been said more elegant. But I think it's easy to take a breath and remember how frustrated we've all been in likewise situations.
One thing that have made me proud of our community is how we've been able to kindly approach even people with frustrations. I'd rather close the community, than seeing this be the attitude going forward.
As such, I'm asking you guys to either go somewhere else or either silence or do better. You're not worth it.
There was no intention of flaming/showin a bad attitude in any way from my part to be honest. I'm not saying it's got something to do with my English, although I'm not the best English writer.
Anyway, like I said, there was no intention to be hostile, unfriendly or harsh and like you said; this is not the way we know you.
I really like you line saying "... and remember how frustrated we've all been in likewise situations."
It is recognizable, but I've never felt like expressing it the way Michiel did. And in my opinion it wasn't a good way expressing these frustrations.
I will not take a break from our, just because of this single 'incident', as you'll understand I think.
Though I will think twice next time commenting on such topics.
Getting back to the original issue: I think part of what's made this Embedded Content package especially frustrating is that it fills a gap in Umbraco, and could be very useful. Embedding a variable number of several basic datatypes in a page-- basically, custom widgets. (The only other simple way to do this is make the widgets be document types that go under the page in the hierarchy. I've found this kind of clumsy as it breaks the abstraction of the content items in the tree each being a seperate page with hierarchial URL.)
It's also frustrating because it's 90% there, quality and feature-wise. The original developer was very responsive at first, then suddenly disappeared from the Umbraco community. Worst of all, he didn't open the source code, even though he was giving it away for free. (My opinion is that free Umbraco packages should be open source, but that's another issue.) The code was just released, but I gave up on the package a while ago and removed it everywhere I was using it, since it seemed abandoned with no open source. Ironically, this package was created to replace a similar one that had also become abandonware.
It might surprise some of the very active community members, but not everyone who relies on Umbraco has time to debug or develop custom packages. You have to pick your battles.
"It might surprise some of the very active community members, but not everyone who relies on Umbraco has time to debug or develop custom packages. You have to pick your battles."
Some guys make time - and they should only ever be praised for that. It is a fallacy to suggest that some people are busier than others - it is just about how you set your goals and priorities.
Hi,
I'm currently *violating* some rules but at there's no other way of contacting the OP then by replying to this thread:
"Dear Michiel,
Apologies if you feel my first reply was rude, harsh, inadequate or inappropriate to you. I'm sure it won't happen again.
I would have liked to do this offline: I can't! Anyway, I'm still up for more constructive conversations offline if you'd like to. No offence if you don't.
Kind regards,
Dirk"
[email protected]
@netaddicts
I agree with Dirk. Like someone said on Twitter yesterday; you go to sleep, read it again in the morning and probably think; "Yes, it could be interpreted offensive".
There was no intention from my side to be rude, if you do interpretit it that way; my apologies.
Like others have mentioned already; not everybody is looking for spending hours on fixing current packages and I understand. It's just that people really work hard to get their packages up-to-date with every umbraco release, which can sometimes be frustrating.
Anyway, I hope nobody in this thread will keep hard feelings about this.
Cheers!
I think we should all watch Niels Hartvig his Umbraco BE Festival Keynote again. It's a great great inspiration.
Be friendly, not naive.
Jeroen
All other issues aside, I agree with Niels that it would be really great to have a clear way to indicate which versions of Umbraco a package is known to be compatible with. Something like what Symphony does for its extensions, where developers can mark which versions of the CMS they have tested their packages with:
http://symphony-cms.com/download/extensions/view/70377/
And as for what Michiel called "go fix yourself" packages, it'd be great if we could all just fix things ourselves and contribute back to the community. But first of all that requires open source packages, which not all packages are, and second of all, because Umbraco is such a powerful CMS for frontend developers, not all of us have the .NET skills to build or fix packages ourselves.
We're certainly exceedingly grateful to those of you who can and do build packages. But that doesn't make it any less frustrating to get stuck with a buggy closed-source package built by a developer who has since gone AWOL and abandoned it. If the package was clearly marked as abandonware, or as not-tested-with-any-release-since-4.5.0, that would certainly help.
Example of how WordPress do this on their plugin section... community members vote whether a package/plugin works for a specific version combo.
Ref: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/
Cheers, Lee.
My main beef is NOT with the package developers, whom I respect very much for their contributions. I would be proud if I could add my own package, but so far I have only submitted some bugfixes for Umbraco core. No packages from me (yet).
Although I did package up one fix from someone else and provided a download link, it may be I just need more karma to burn :-)
No my main beef is with the way the package system works. It looks like there's loads of resources, but in practice "your mileage may vary... a lot" which right now seems to depend on if you want to use the latest version of Umbraco or if you want to stikc with an older version (and miss out on Razor and other improvements).
Sorry if I offended anyone!
To show that this is still THE nicest community, here's a new dll file that goes into the /bin folder:
http://www.flex-it.dk/TheFarm.Umbraco.EmbeddedContent.zip
It fixes 2 errors: The jQuery 1.6x change and the 'required' id is changed to 'require' because of Chrome HTML5 interpretation
I've tested it on 4.5.2 and 4.7.1
Once I figure out to commit the changes to the repository I will :)
/Bo Kingo
I like that Wordpress solution. Good catch, Lee. Especially that it requires a certain amount of data before it'll claim that something works.
@Bo Kingo - excellent! #h5yr Best bet for getting the patches back to the guys at TheFarm is to fork their repo and apply changes, then make a pull request.
Awesome work Bo Kingo, you beat me to it ;-)
@Bo one other error that we spotted last week, but haven't had a chance to update on the src yet is that the use of server.mappath breaks publish at on documents with embedded content on.
If you want to fix it while you're on a roll, change the references to server.mappath to hostingenvironment.mappath instead, then it will work fine!
:)
@Lee Done
@Tim How do you meen 'breaks publish'?
@Tim Never mind, I suppose it's because of the HttpContext. I've updated the source and created a pull request
@Bo
Could you also update the downloadable DLL file you've posted on the previous page, so we can 'take advantage' of it right away? :-)
@kipusoep Of course - it's updated http://www.flex-it.dk/TheFarm.Umbraco.EmbeddedContent.zip
@Bo, yup, the publish at doesn't have the httpcontext available to it, so anything that calls things that require context without checking if it's there throws a null reference exception.
When it throws that error, the auto publish fails, leaving an error in umbracoLog. There's a few other datatypes that have this problem as well that we've identified, will publish the list when we're done!
:)
Hey Bo,
Just wanted to say it's working beautifully. Thank you very much!
@Kipusoep You are welcome.
It's nice to finally give someting back to the community, as this was my first contribution
/Bo
This is great, was able to use the dll and fixed all issues. Thanks for the update! Wanted to know what it takes to update the package so when other users install the package from the repository they will have the updated version?
Thanks again!
It takes the package owner to update the files, which he won't, because he's kind of MIA...
@Bo - I need this update but its a 404 on the link - any change of re-uploading please? or email me at barryfogarty at gmail dot com please.
@Barry Should be running again
is working on a reply...