Thalassa CMS

Sorry for the inconvenience, but I had to fix another FSM-related bug: the generator in 0.2.52 sometimes places a paragraph start just before the end of a tag where paragraphs are not eligible (e.g. h2, ul, pre...), so Thalassa 0.3.53 has just been made available, in which the problem is (hopefully) fixed. This time no changes to configs are needed, just replace the version and recompile. It is also recommended to regenerate your site, just in case the bug manifestated somewhere you didn't notice.

I'm really sorry for having this many bugfix releases in a row, which means each time I was releasing immature code. This is only because the initial “major” release, 0.3.50, was an urgent fix itself.

Thalassa 0.3.52 uploaded. Another FSM-related bug has been fixed (well, paragraphs starting with a permitted tag such as em or strong didn't render correctly). Besides that, support for the new filtering policy has been added to templates, both Smoky and Agenda; by default (which is specified within the “base” part of the templates, not intended for changes), tags a, img, span are no longer listed as permitted, and the only premitted attribute (listed for all tags) is title. However, within the default config.ini, these tags are permitted as well as some additional attributes. If you use any of the two templates and comments are premoderated at your site, you might want to add something like this to your config.ini:

[options site]

moretags = a img span
moreattrs = a=href img=src img=alt img=height img=width align style class

Don't do this if untrusted users are allowed to leave comments with no premoderation on your site.

UPD (Jan 21, 2025): the version 0.3.50 found to be buggy. Please download the version 0.3.51 which is a quick-fix release.

Some brain-damaged webcoding addicts demonstrated me (by submitting comments with some related crap) the possibility to introduce JavaScript into user comments using tag attributes appeared in HTML5 such as onclick, onpageshow etc., and browsers happily ignore the fact the document they render has nothing to do with HTML5. I have to admit I didn't realize things like that are possible. Luckily, all my sites are premoderated, so no visible consequences occured, but it became obvious for me that tag attributes need to be filtered just like tags theyselves.

It took several days of work to significantly rewrite the filter (for those who're courious, it is implemented in the lib/stfilter/stfhtml.cpp file using an FSM) and add the appropriate support to Thalassa itself, as well as to the thalcgi.cgi program. Anyway, Thalassa 0.3.50 is now ready and has just been made available.

There are two user-visible changes:

• New parameter named tag_attributes is added to the [format ] section both in the Thalassa main configuration and the thalcgi.ini file. A kinda-safe default is provided for its value, and the default value is a=href img=src img=alt, only allowing to use the href attribute within the a tag, and src and alt attributes for the img tag, if the tags are allowed. All this only affects headed text files where the tags flag is found in the format header field (typically the comments written by users using the web interface). You only need to worry about all this in case you really wish to allow users more things to do within their comments, like, e.g., allowing the style attribute for all tags (think carefully before you do).
• For the thalcgi.cgi configuration, the %[cmtinfo:attrs] macro function added.

Nothing should (hopefully) break on your site if you move to this new version from the previous one; most users leaving comments simply don't remember about all these tag attributes. However, we strongly recommend to test it before deploying on running sites.

Thalassa 0.3.30 released. This release is mainly devoted to the new comment displaying style, named thread. With this style, top-level comments are displayed on the page being commented, and for each top-level comment, a separate page is created to hold replies on that comment, if any. The Agenda template, from now on, allows to choose the style for comments, either “plain” (list), or tree (the default one), or the new thread style. The new comment style also affected the macroprocessor, where the %[cmt:replies] and %[cmt:threadpg] functions are added.

Besides that, this release fixes a problem related to the dirname(3) function. The problem didn't let Thalassa work on OpenBSD due to a slightly different implementation of the function.

And the last thing to mention: the %[rfcdate: ] macro now adds “UTC” to the text representation of the date.

This release doesn't (hopefully) introduce any incompatibilities with earlier releases; it should be safe to upgrade both the Thalassa version and the Agenda template. If you'd like to give a try to the support of different comment styles, then take a look at the appearance.ini file, find the [options cmt] sectioin and copy it to your appearance.ini, then edit as appropriate.

Thalassa 0.3.20 released. This time Thalassa itself gets only minor changes:

• the menu facility now supports text labels (texts displayed inside the menu, not being a menu item) and breaks (may be whatever you want, placed between certain menu items to group the items and separate the groups from each other; e.g., an extra whitespace, a rule or a bullet);
• sections that define stand-alone page now recognize a path parameter which overrides the section name for local path (URI) of the page; the parameter is passed through the macroprocessor, so the actual name for the generated file may be set by, e.g., an option, and setting it to some “special” values disables the page.

Besides that, a segfault has been fixed, which happened on an attempt to generate an unknown (unconfigured) stand-alone page from command line.

More significant changes are related to site templates. First of all, a brand new template, named Agenda, is added. The new template mostly provides the same functions as the old good Smoky: pages, feed (either a news strip or a blog, exported to RSS), a guestbook and contact form. Unlike Smoky, Agenda uses a side panel for the main menu, and the panel may be placed at the left side, at the right side, or suppressed (in which case you'll probably have to care about basic navigation on your own). Four prepared color schemes come with Agenda, and generally a color scheme consists of less values to be set, so it made customizable by the site author. Besides that, some sizes and lengths may also be customized; the side panel's width may serve as a good example.

The next notable thing is that both templates now support translations to languages other than English. In the source tarball, translations to Russian are provided, both for koi8-r and utf-8 encodings.

The two templates have a lot

Thalassa 0.3.10 released. This is mainly a bugfix release, including:

Within the documentation section, a step-by-step guide to setup Apache for serving Thalassa-based sites is now available. It is strongly recommended to use suexec even if your servier is only going to serve a single site, but along with that, the guide explain how to configure your server properly to make the default Apache site Thalassa-based and how to serve several virtual sites without suexec, although it is specially stressed that this approach is ugly.

Despite less than a month passed, it's time to announce another “major” release, 0.3.00, which is now available for downloading. This time, the list of changes since the previous version is relatively long.

There are three visible changes in functioning of the CGI program, and each of those actually

New “major” release, 0.2.00, is available. In this release, another token (nonce) is added to the CAPTCHA test procedure. For every successful test, the pair of the time and the nonce is stored on the server (for at least the time of test validity) disallowing to reuse the same CAPTCHA challenge for creating more than one session. Configuraton files of existing sites need to be slightly updated; hence the version number change. Also in this version:

New release, 0.1.20, has just been uploaded to the download page. In this version:

• a new macro named %[listinfo:] added to the static content generator; see the documentation for details;
• the CGI program now stores technical information such as IP address/port, session id and little else within the comment's source file headers when the comment is created and modified;
• a framework for custom CGIs, named dullcgi, created (mostly out of the existing modules used by the thalcgi.cgi program); see the documentation page devoted to dullcgi;
  • the ytid.cgi CGI program, which has long been working at the Infoviolence site, is finally available, as one of the two dullcgi examples (see the thalassa/examples/ytid directory, and be sure to read the README file there);
• in the Smoky template:
  • guestbook comment links made permanent;
  • custom error page added for error 403;
  • comment source text is now passed through the ltgt filter (which replaces the three active HTML chars with the respective HTML entities) before placing it within the textarea tag; well, this achieved by adding the appropriate calls to the ltgt macro;
  • added user-configurable files htaccess.ini (so that the user is able to decide if (s)he needs the .htaccess file to be generated at all, and what it must contain) and cgilocal.ini, intended for adding custom pages served by the CGI;
  • in the list of allowed tags, incorrect (non-existent) quote replaced with blockquote;
  • fixed some incorrect XHTML such as unclosed tags.

I decided to give away the program I wrote to get my stolyarov.info site out of its jail formed by several pieces of EOLed software. So, the program named drupal2fs is now available at the download page.

It is a single C source file, and the file contains everything I had about it, including the instruction how to build the program, its licensing status (well, it is public domain), etc.

Please don't expect much from it. I wrote the program to recover one particular site, and I never intended to make it anything more than just a single-use tool. It is highly unlikely to work with later versions of Drupal, and even for the Drupal 5.* it only recovers the texts of nodes and comments, and little else; see the large commentary text at the top of the source file for details.

Good luck to those who decide to try it.

Thalassa 0.1.10 has been published. In this update:

• for the Thalassa CGI ini file, functions ifparent and parent added to the %[discuss:] macro;
• the scriptpp library got fixes so as to compile under FreeBSD; hopefully, the whole thing will now compile under FreeBSD, and thanks to folks who reported the issue;
• some minor improvements done to the Smoky template (e.g., on the “comment view” CGI page there's now a link to the comment's parent if the parent exists).

Thalassa 0.1.06 is available. In this update:

• for the Thalassa CGI ini file, the %[cmtinfo:tags] accessor added;
• some cosmetic improvements for the Smoky template;
• in the text of the LICENSE, some English grammar fixed and some long lines made fit into the 75 column limit.

An updated source tarball, 0.1.05, uploaded. In this update:

Newer source tarball, 0.1.01, is available. This version contains a lot of fixes, most of them — to the Smoky template. I'm sorry folks, but comments almost didn't work in the version of Smoky included into the 0.1.00.

It took less than a day for some unknown shit-eaters to create a new account on GitHub pretending it is mine, and to put Thalassa sources there. So, now officially:

1. I don't have any accounts at GitHub, GitLab and generally at any "free" repository hostings, as a matter of principle; I even refused a well-paid job once, solely because it was mandatory to use GitHub for doing that job;
2. I don't have any accounts at centralized social media sites, at least under my real name; as of present, the only exception is YouTube, where I've got a "channel" that mirrors my videoblog devoted to information violence, but this has nothing to do with free software and, generally, with computer programming;
3. I strongly discourage publishing of any of my code not only on these free repository hostings, but, generally, on any site that uses JavaScript, and, definitely, in absolutely no event will I do it on my own; hence, no copy of any of my code published anyhow on GitHub or any site resembling it will ever have anything to do with me, or have my approvement.

Well, formally this doesn't violate the license (from the other hand, impersonation violates existing law in many countries, but, well, I'm too lazy to call police). So, just keep in mind: if you see my code on GitHub, it is a thing I never approved.

The very first Thalassa CMS source code snapshot is now available. A lot of features are still to be implemented, and perhaps there are tons of bugs and various flaws; it is really a doubtful idea to