OpenBlock change history

For more recent changes, see OpenBlock 1.1.0 (October 20, 2011).

OpenBlock 1.0.1 (Sept 7 2011)

This was a minor bugfix (and docs) release, and was mostly identical to 1.0.0.

• The georss scraper now gets coordinates in the right order on the first try, and populates location_name if it falls back to geocoding.
• Fix date formatting on newsitem-detail page. (ticket #201)
• The import_blocks_tiger and import_blocks_esri scripts had a circular import.
• Fix a broken doctest in bootsrap.py.
• Better handling of unicode in ebdata.textmining.

Documentation

• Added docs for cloning an EC2 instance from our Amazon AMI.
• Document the scrapers that ship out-of-the-box with ebdata.
• Remove nonexistent --city option from geodata docs.
• Changed docs theme for easier navigation.

OpenBlock 1.0.0 (August 30, 2011)

Upgrade Notes

• If you originally installed, or already upgraded to, OpenBlock 1.0 Beta, you may skip the rest of this section.

• If you have an existing database that was built with 1.0a1 or earlier, you'll need to run this command to deal with the removal of the "django-apikey" dependency:

  django-admin.py migrate apikey 0001 --fake

• Many data-loading scripts that were scattered all over the source tree are now installed into your environment's bin directory, so they should be on your $PATH. Documentation has been updated accordingly.

• As usual, you should always run after upgrading:

  django-admin.py syncdb --migrate

  If you were unlucky and had last migrated with a git checkout including migrations that later got renamed or removed, you may get errors from migrating. In that case try adding the --delete-ghost-migrations option.

• Production webserver configurations will need a line added to get the django-olwidget javascript and CSS to show up. For example, for Apache you'd add a line like (adjust path as needed):

  Alias /olwidget/ /home/openblock/openblock/src/django-olwidget/

• We now require Django 1.3. This probably doesn't have any impact on you. (ticket #155).

• Settings changes:

  • MAP_BASELAYER_TYPE can now be any base layer supported by olwidget, eg. "google.streets". (Some require other settings for eg. API keys; see ebpub/settings_default.py for comments and examples.)

  • You can add custom base layers to your maps by creating the dictionary settings.MAP_CUSTOM_BASE_LAYERS. See ebpub/settings_default.py for an example.

    This replaces the WMS_URL setting from openblock 1.0a1 which is no longer supported.

New Features in 1.0

• ticket #33: Different map icons for different news item types. To use this, you can use the admin UI to configure "map icon url" or "map color" for a Schema.
• ticket #85: Added streets.PlaceType model for categorizing Places. These also can have individual colors or icon URLs on the /maps/ view. (Original ticket title was "'Landmark' location type")
• ticket #142: JSON push API for news items. See docs/main/api.rst
• ticket #187: REST API standard features: API key provisioning; require keys (or auth) for POST / DELETE; throttling
• Import US Zip Codes as Locations, via the admin UI.
• Work-in-progress: user-submitted content. See code in the ebpub/neighbornews app.
• Work-in-progress: Maps you can share just by copy/pasting a URL. For a sneak preview, browse to /maps/.
• Much better admin UI maps. (ticket #140: Bad admin UI for GeometryFields)
• ticket #72: unify NewsItem.attributes and NewsItem.attribute_values
• ticket #52: Proper validation for Street Misspellings in admin
• ticket #157: fill in normalized name automatically
• ticket #123: Configurable base layer should apply to admin UI maps too

Bug fixes

This is not a complete list; not all bugs fixed in this release were ticketed.

• Fix #172: schema_detail view blows up (TypeError) if there are no NewsItems in the last 30 days, but there is a matching AggregateLocation. (That shouldn't happen, but evidently did with some boston demo schemas; also fixed a related possible off-by-one error that may have been a factor.)
• Schema filter page: don't say 'You might want to try...' if there's nothing to try.
• Fix bug where scrapers that create timezone-aware datetimes blow up
• Fix errors in bounds checking in location importers, thanks to Bret Walker.
• Fix missing import in Place admin
• Fixed several bugs where django-nose (optional) would try to run some things that aren't tests.
• ticket #110: Fix infinite loop if newsitem.schema.has_newsitem_detail is False but newsitem.url is empty; give 404 instead.
• Importers should now not blow up if run more than once.
• ticket #22: Scraper scripts in everyblock/cities/boston mostly don't work OOTB
• ticket #79: Geotagging oddity
• ticket #188: items.json doesn't include location_name
• ticket #200: "obdemo bin scripts are documented, but don't get installed when installing obdemo non-editable"

Documentation

• ticket #80: Documentation for Street Misspellings
• ticket #162: Document pip / easy_install workarounds
• ticket #139: Document adding database user / granting database access
• ticket #198: version number in documentation
• ticket #197: documentation for deploying static media
• Fix outdated paths to example scrapers.
• Fix location of get_or_create_lookup
• Note differences from everyblock

Other

• ticket #181: Prepare packages for distribution on pypi.
• ticket #83: Split out non-core packages into a separate download (ebblog, ebwiki, ebgeo, ebinternal, and everyblock are now at )
• ticket #156: Removing lots of clustering code that's totally unused.
• remove a redundant get_metro_bbox function from ebpub.utils.geodjango; use get_default_bounds(), does the same thing.

OpenBlock 1.0 beta (August 18, 2011)

This was largely identical to 1.0.0 described above, modulo a few small bug fixes.

OpenBlock 1.0 alpha 1 (June 9, 2011)

This was the first numbered release; too many changes since the "ebcode" source dump to enumerate.

Highlights

• Out-of-the-box theme, with maps.
• REST API
• Enable the Django admin UI
• Embeddable widgets that you can configure via the admin UI
• Lots more documentation