[Officeshots] New gallery feature implemented, but the upgrade caused loss of data

[Sander Marechal]

Hello all,

Good news and bad news on this first day of the second ODF plugfest.

Dataloss
--------

The bad news first (because it's most important): When I upgraded the
database schema to a new version for our new gallery feature I made a
mistake. Too many tables were copied from the development server to the
live server, which caused some loss of data. Unfortunately shortly later
I found out that out backups have been failing so I am unable to restore
from a recent backups.

Some accounts, some factory configurations and all uploaded documents
were lost.

If you find that you cannot login anymore, please re-register[1]. If you
are running one or more factories for us, please check if your factory
configuration still exists on the server and if it is still correct. If
not, please re-create your factory configuration on the server. Your
clients are unaffected but may have to be restarted afterwards.

[1]: http://www.officeshots.org/users/register

The loss of submitted documents is not a problem since the server
regularly wipes old documents anyway.

I apologize for the inconvenience.

Gallery features
----------------

Now for the good news. Officeshots now has a gallery feature which you
can use to showcase your documents and how they were converted. There is
a "Galleries" link in the menu. Any registered user can create new
galleries.

A gallery consists of a description and one or more linked documents.
There is a WYSIWYM[2] editor for the description that uses Markdown [3]
for formatting. To help you, there is a Live Preview of the formatted
description below the editor. It is updated as you type.

[2]: What You See Is What You Mean
[3]: http://www.officeshots.org/pages/markdown

After you have created a gallery you can add one or more of your
uploaded documents to the gallery. When a document is in a gallery,
anyone can see it and anyone can see the conversion results that go
along with it. You will also see an "edit description" link on your
uploaded document pages. You can give your documents a description in
the same way as you give a description to a gallery, with the WYSIWYM
editor.

All galleries are publicly visible but you can control who can change
them. All documents that are linked to a gallery are publicly visible
but their description can only be edited by the owner of the submitted
document.

If you have any questions about the new features (or about my mistake
that caused the dataloss) then don't hesitate to reply either here on
the mailinglist or to me privately.

Kind regards,

-- 
Sander Marechal