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When did we switch to pophelp in preference to rpc.textpattern.com?
I’m trying to find out when we started bundling pophelp into the core distribution.
Our current approach to admin-side help uses the contents of the pophelp repo, which is included in the Textpattern distribution. Prior to this, we used an RPC-fuelled site with the help files essentially maintained in a Textpattern instance. This site is still live, and an example follows:
rpc.textpattern.com/help/?item=upload
I’ve traced the first commit to the pophelp repo back to 2013. The earliest evidence of pophelp being included in the distribution is Textpattern 4.7.0…from mid-2018…which is more than 7 years ago at the present time.
Can anyone sanity check my logic, please? Did we have any baked-in pophelp stuff in Textpattern 4.6?
There are decreasing volumes of non-bot hits to the RPC pages, and the majority of the traffic (98.5%) is bot junk. If my Textpattern 4.7.0-pophelp logic above is sound, that implies the 1.5% of actual hits are coming from pre-Textpattern 4.7.0 instances.
We haven’t lost these folks to the annals of time…we have an opportunity here: decommission the Textpattern instance behind the RPC site, and replaced with static files with the help contents hard-coded along with a note that they really need to upgrade Textpattern.
There’s no holding the help text to ransom, we can just wrap it with an advisory and link to a help doc to show them how to upgrade their site. Easy. Viable. And we get to decommission the string-and-tape that is the legacy RPC site. Every time we do a minor release and / or minor PHP bump, jakob does a sterling job of hacking around in the RPC site to get it working again. I am always, always grateful for this work…but I look forward to a time where it’s no longer needed. That time could be sooner rather than later.
Any input very graciously received. Thank you.
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Re: When did we switch to pophelp in preference to rpc.textpattern.com?
Static site it. Add advisory. Then bin it. That sounds like the way forward.
4.7.0 was the first release with bundled pophelp. Prior to that it was only en-gb in the distro and 100% RPC to handle version updates and manage the string packs for all languages. And it was chaos to maintain.
I have zero desire to go back there ever again.
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Re: When did we switch to pophelp in preference to rpc.textpattern.com?
Aye, cap’n.
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Re: When did we switch to pophelp in preference to rpc.textpattern.com?
I’m using github.com/textpattern/rpc as a workspace for now.
Currently: I have dumped the txp_server_help table, made it somewhat more presentable, removed a lot of cruft, and I’m left with an ~8,000 line file. This file contains the Textile’d article (this will be removed), and the HTML’d article (this will be kept). The HTML’d portion will become its own .html file, along with a wrapper advising the user to upgrade and a link to the docs site article to open in a new window. This should cover all bases.
There’s a bunch of hours of grunt work to do, but I suspect it’ll be a lot easier as the input file is sifted through and the output files are populated.
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Re: When did we switch to pophelp in preference to rpc.textpattern.com?
Update: input file now ~6,000 lines. Snow blindness has set in; tomorrow is another day.
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Re: When did we switch to pophelp in preference to rpc.textpattern.com?
That smells like a job for a shell/AWK script and pandoc 😁
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