Decaf v1.6 RC1 now available

Decaf v1.6 RC1 now available

Paul Nicholls -
Колькасьць адказаў: 19

Hi All,

I've just made Decaf v1.6 RC1 available in the plugins database.  Following on from Decaf v1.5 (and the subsequent fixes in v1.5.1), v1.6 adds some more usability enhancements and fixes a few issues:

  • Complete rewrite of Awesomebar styles - minor visual changes, but the styles are now simpler and hopefully easier to maintain/improve
  • Improvements to custom menu appearance, to match Awesomebar more closely
  • Awesomebar now lingers for 500ms when the mouse moves off it
  • Awesomebar now shifts long/low submenus up if they'd run off the bottom of the screen
  • "Back to Top" arrow now present on front page (fixes JavaScript errors)
  • Page layouts brought closer in line with standard and tidied up (makes some pages look a bit better)

There's not much that's worth a screenshot, but here's a shot of the shifted submenus which might help make it clearer (and shows the other minor visual changes to the Awesomebar):
Decaf with enhanced Awesomebar

(image scaled - open it in a new tab or download it if you'd like to see it full-size)

If you find any issues with this new version of Decaf, or have any feedback (particularly relating to the changes listed above), please reply to this post.

-Paul

Сярэдняе рэйтынгаў:Useful (1)
У адказ на Paul Nicholls

Re: Decaf v1.6 RC1 now available

Miriam Laidlaw -
Выява Plugin developers

Awesome job, Paul. I love that you found a fix for the menus disappearing off the bottom of the screen. Так

Сярэдняе рэйтынгаў: -
У адказ на Miriam Laidlaw

Re: Decaf v1.6 RC1 now available

Paul Nicholls -

Thanks!  The one issue is that it's now possible for menus to go off the top of the screen - but I think it's unlikely enough that it's not worth spending a great deal of time on.  The only exception should be mobile devices, which probably ought to be using a mobile theme instead of Decaf (though if you really want to use Decaf on a small mobile device, you could set it to leave the Settings and Navigation blocks visible, so they can be used by mobile users - not ideal, but probably a little easier than the Awesomebar).

I've just released RC2, which contains a couple of minor compatibility fixes (I'd accidentally used a short PHP opening tag in one place, and the embedded layout file wasn't using the new content token in Moodle versions where it exists).  It can be found in the plugins database as per usual.

Сярэдняе рэйтынгаў: -
У адказ на Paul Nicholls

Re: Decaf v1.6 RC1 now available

Mary Evans -

Hi Paul,

Thanks for all the work you are putting into this awesome theme!

I'm in the process of trying it out, but keep getting a Strict Warning: I'm not sure if it is my PHP (Version: 5.3.4) or my WAMP server or what. It happed to Julian's Rocket theme & Moodlebook when I was testing these two out earlier, and as you know, both uses the Awesomebar.

I'm using Moodle 2.3 Alpha so it could be a conflict with that I supose. Anyway...here's the text!

( ! ) Strict standards: Declaration of decaf_expand_navigation::initialise() should be compatible with that of global_navigation::initialise() in C:\wamp\www\moodle\theme\decaf\lib.php on line 577
Call Stack
#   Time    Memory  Function    Location
1   0.0026  44980984    {main}яйка   ..\index.php:0
2   0.9537  100099968   theme_config::loadяйка   ..\index.php:159
3   0.9553  100132168   theme_config->__constructяйка    ..\outputlib.php:332

Hope this makes sense?

EDIT: Incase you are wondering...YES I am using the latest update RC2 of Decaf.

Cheers

Mary


Сярэдняе рэйтынгаў: -
У адказ на Mary Evans

Re: Decaf v1.6 RC1 now available

Paul Nicholls -

Hi Mary,

You're spot on - it's a conflict with 2.3.  I've so far managed to keep Decaf to a single version which works on any version of Moodle 2.x, but I might now end up having to split it into a version which supports 2.0-2.2 and another which supports 2.3+.  I'll need to investigate the changes in 2.3 thoroughly before I can determine that, so hang tight and get stuck into the easter eggs that have appeared in your post while I look into it падморгваньне

-Paul

Сярэдняе рэйтынгаў: -
У адказ на Mary Evans

Re: Decaf v1.6 RC1 now available

Paul Nicholls -

Hi Mary,

Good news - updating it to fit in with 2.3 and remove the strict warning hasn't caused any problems with 2.0-2.2!  I've released RC3 now, with a fix for this issue; there's just one warning: make sure you run the upgrade as soon as possible after updating the code, as Moodle <2.3 may show nearly-blank pages to users who were logged in before the new code was rolled out, until the upgrade is run.  Of course, you shouldn't be rolling out changes to a production environment unannounced and unplanned anyway падморгваньне

-Paul

Сярэдняе рэйтынгаў: -
У адказ на Paul Nicholls

Decaf v1.6 RC4 "Speed Demon" now available

Paul Nicholls -

Hi all,

I've just released Decaf v1.6 RC4 "Speed Demon" in the plugins database.  As the name implies, the focus of this release is on performance: compared to previous versions of Decaf, the "Speed Demon" release performs considerably fewer database queries (down from 444 to 175 on a test course page), and generates pages more quickly (down from 1.9 seconds to 1.2 seconds on my dev server).

Since this build contains key changes to the code which generates the Awesomebar, I'd like it to be tested as thoroughly as possible before I call it a stable release.  As such, please try it out - and share your feedback here, whether you find issues or not.  Although I'm pretty confident that there are no major issues with it, I wouldn't recommend upgrading a production site to this build - but if you have a development or testing site, please go ahead; the more feedback I get, the sooner I'll be able to produce a stable release!

-Paul

Сярэдняе рэйтынгаў: -
У адказ на Paul Nicholls

Re: Decaf v1.6 RC4 "Speed Demon" now available

Mark Pearson -

Paul,

Just downloaded and installed Decaf 1.6 RC5 and am testing successfully with 2.3.1+.  Just a couple of thoughts:

  1. There's a handy dandy floating 'move to top' button but what I need more is a 'move to bottom' button! Have you tried using the backup / restore lately? -- the screen contents can be ginormous. And all the [Next] [Continue] [Previous] links are at the bottom of the page. This means beacoup de tedious scrolling. A [Move to bottom] button would send me straight to the bottom of the page where I could zoom through the process. Ditto for other excessively long pages.
  2. While the [Edit] buttons are quite nice in concealing all the editting tools , have you looked at Mark Ward's autohide.css at https://gist.github.com/2027976 ? I got it working with an earlier version of Decaf and it's double-plus cool.

Just have to say that Decaf saves a Moodle Administrator's life!! усьмешка

Сярэдняе рэйтынгаў: -
У адказ на Paul Nicholls

Re: Decaf v1.6 RC1 now available

David O'Brien -

Hi Paul

I am finding the page load slow. For instance going from /admin to home:

This is about average for each page. I am using 1.6 RC4 (2012053100) and Moodle 2.3beta (Build: 20120618)

OS is Ubuntu 11.10, 3.9GiB Memory, browser is Firefox 13.0.1.

The only error reported is Maximum execution time of 60 seconds exceeded in /var/www/moodle/lib/navigationlib.php on line 584

Regards

 

Сярэдняе рэйтынгаў: -
У адказ на David O'Brien

Re: Decaf v1.6 RC1 now available

Richard Oelmann -
Выява Core developers Выява Particularly helpful Moodlers Выява Plugin developers Выява Testers

Hi David - I'm not sure as I haven't downloaded Paul's latest yet, but for comparison have you tried in Chrome? In know from other discussions that the latest FF versions have been blamed at times for very slow performance of a number of websites. Not saying there isn't an issue - just asking if you might have comparative figures to check against усьмешка

Also just to help with any testing/comparison, do you have any similar figures for using standard theme which may be useful?

Richard

Сярэдняе рэйтынгаў: -
У адказ на Richard Oelmann

Re: Decaf v1.6 RC1 now available

David O'Brien -

Hi Richard,

Thank you for the reply. Sadly there is no change in page load speed when using Chrome.

When using FF and the Afterburner theme going from /admin to home:

0.833122 secs
RAM: 75.4MB
RAM peak: 75.7MB
Included 872 files
Contexts for which filters were loaded: 1
Filters created: 1
Pieces of content filtered: 0
Strings filtered: 0
get_string calls: 1158
strings mem cache hits: 2060
strings disk cache hits: 200
Included YUI modules: 54
Other JavaScript modules: 3
DB reads/writes: 140/1
ticks: 84 user: 77 sys: 4 cuser: 0 csys: 0
Load average: 0.33
Session: 6.2KB

It is the same when using Chrome and the Afterburner theme.

Regards
Dave

Сярэдняе рэйтынгаў: -
У адказ на David O'Brien

Re: Decaf v1.6 RC1 now available

Richard Oelmann -
Выява Core developers Выява Particularly helpful Moodlers Выява Plugin developers Выява Testers

Thanks David - I'm sure that will be useful to Paul as a comparison. And I'll try and get the latest version downloaded as soon as I get chance to take a look at it and see what happens on my dev site too усьмешка

Richard

Сярэдняе рэйтынгаў: -
У адказ на Richard Oelmann

Re: Decaf v1.6 RC1 now available

David O'Brien -

Hello

Well I believe I have found what my issue is. The Awesome bar has the same content that is in the Navigation block EG My Home, Site Pages, My Profile and Courses. By restricting the Navigation Block to just the Front page and then hiding it my page load speed is now down around 1sec усьмешка

Hope this might help anybody else experiencing speed issues.


Regards

 

Сярэдняе рэйтынгаў: -
У адказ на David O'Brien

Re: Decaf v1.6 RC1 now available

Paul Nicholls -

Hi David,

Glad to hear you've got things under control - sorry for the much-delayed response, I've been away on holiday and attending conferences.  I'm surprised that having the navigation block present caused such a major jump in page generation time - I suspect that you're hitting some kind of limit at the server end (probably RAM-related, either due to a relatively low memory limit in your PHP config, or the server actually running out of RAM).  If you're able to provide more information about your server setup, maybe we can work out what's going on.

-Paul

Сярэдняе рэйтынгаў: -
У адказ на Paul Nicholls

Re: Decaf v1.6 RC1 now available

David O'Brien -

Hi Paul

Thanks for the reply.

The server memory_limit is 1024M and it has 4GB of RAM on an Ubuntu 12.04 VM.

Regards

Dave

Сярэдняе рэйтынгаў: -
У адказ на David O'Brien

Re: Decaf v1.6 RC1 now available

Matthew Slatter -

I've been having a similar after setting this theme on a site I've upgraded. 

I've upgraded from 1.19 to 2.24+, all seemed fine, and then installed decaf (latest version). As soon as I set it as the default theme the main page failed to load, with just the black bar showing. It loaded okay on further attempts though but other pages didn't, such as all category pages and most settings pages. Sometimes they failed with the back bar, other times with an "Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage" error. Courses seem to load fine. 

I enabled debugging and the error I got was "Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in /var/www/moodle/lib/navigationlib.php on line 588". 

I've checked my memory limit in phpinfo and it’s set to 512MB. I've been running this theme fine on an empty test site (2.24+) for a few weeks, though this was on Windows (php 5.3.5) where as my main server is on Ubuntu 12.04, (php 5.3.10).

I've changed my max_execution_time to 90 seconds and all pages seem to load now, just very slowly.

The server is a VMware server with 16GB of RAM

Any pointers as to where to look would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Matt

Сярэдняе рэйтынгаў: -
У адказ на Matthew Slatter

Re: Decaf v1.6 RC1 now available

Paul Nicholls -

Hi Matt,

I'm not sure why you're seeing such slow performance in Decaf - but maybe we can narrow it down if you can answer a few more questions:

  • Which DBMS are you using?
  • Where is the database server? (Is everything on one server, or do you have a separate DB server?)
  • If the database server is separate, what are its specifications, and how is the front-end server connecting to it?
  • How much CPU power is available to the VM?
  • Which version of Decaf are you running?
  • Do you have Decaf configured to hide the Settings and/or Navigation blocks?
  • What are your Moodle navigation settings? (Site administration -> Appearance -> Navigation)
  • What other non-core plugins/modules are you running?

-Paul

P.S. I'm happy to help you investigate this outside of the forums, and then report back here with any findings - if you'd like to do so, send me a private message and we can take it from there.

Сярэдняе рэйтынгаў: -
У адказ на Paul Nicholls

Re: Decaf v1.6 RC1 now available

David O'Brien -

Hi again Paul,

I have the same small issue as http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=153801#p894605 on Moodle 2.3.1+ (Build: 20120712) and Decaf 1.6 RC4

I have tried the Afterburner theme where the problem does not exist. I have dug around the CSS most of the morning but cannot find the bit I need, any quick pointers?

Regards

Dave

Сярэдняе рэйтынгаў: -