[see original post on the forum (ita)]

You can’t.

The DateChanger plugin allows for one date selection at the time of the creation; once the post has been created you cannot choose another date for that post.

The question in why.

While it is technically possible changing the date of a post, it is quite complicated, and this is linked to the way FlatPress lays files on the file system (which was inherited from SimplePHPBlog, and which sounded a good idea at the time — I still think it is, since its features make it human intelligible).

Each post is contained in a file POST-ID.txt, which contains, along with the actual text of your post, other pieces of information such as the date; the date is stored in a field called the TIMESTAMP.

Now, POST-ID it is defined in a form which reflects the contained TIMESTAMP field.

Each file is in fact named entryYYMMDD-hhmmss.txt (where YY stands for a two-digit year, MM month, DD day, hh hours, mm minutes, ss seconds), and it is saved under the directory tree

fp-content/content/YY/MM/

So, say, a post written on January, 1st 2010, saved at 7 o’ clock would be

fp-content/content/10/01/entry100101-190000.txt;

also, any comment associated to that post would be in a directory called

fp-content/content/10/01/entry100101-190000/comments/.

Each post-id/timestamp is also stored in several indices, one global, and one for each category under which the post has been filed.

Now, suppose you want to change date to that one post, and suppose you have to move it to February, 2nd.

1) You have to update the contained TIMESTAMP field
2) You have to move the file; which means renaming to the new ID and actually move it to another directory tree (in this case fp-content/10/02/); directory tree which might not exist, so you’d add to this creating those directories (also if /10/01 became empty FlatPress would even delete 01! so, sum this one up, too)
3) You have to update each associated index: which translates into deleting the old ID associated to this post, and then add back the new ID.

I believe you can see how many things can fail in the process.

If the ID had no associated meaning (the date/timestamp) you would just have to update the contents and the indices.

Unfortunately, this is not the case.

[see on the forum]

So, since this “doing-multiuser-even-if-I-don’t-want-you-people-to-do-multiuser” is becoming rather popular I’ve decided to put together a very base locking mechanism in SVN.

For those of you interested in the details

it is an exclusive lock on the whole system index, which means one write at a time per entry;

even though the system index is split over several files (one for main, one for each category, and one for the title cache), which would allow for a higher degree of concurrency, you have to remember I am very lazy :P So the lock is global over the whole index.

What does this mean for you

Well, if you’ve been using FlatPress with a single user as it would be meant to be, nothing.

If you have more than one user, then your index won’t probably become corruputed as often as before: when a concurrent access attempts to get a write lock on the index, and the index is being written by someone else, FlatPress will refuse to modify it; but this does not mean you will lose your work! your entry will still be saved as a draft, so you’ll be able to try and save it again, which will eventually succeed, unless another lock has been acquired by someone else in the meantime.

Caveats

if you are the admin of the system and you are sure that nobody except you is trying to post something, and still you can’t post your entry regularly, then the lock file might have erroneously been kept after the last write: in this case you can delete it manually, you can find it in : fp-content/cache/bpt.lock (bpt stands for B Plus Tree, the underlying data structure).

Have fun with testing!

Wow, it’s been a long since my last update here, sorry guys;

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Btw there is some pretty rad stuff on the forums! Check it out!

bye

OH XSS Vulnerability.

If you happen to use the lastcomments plugin, either disable it or read here.

(Fix included)

Bye!

A really funny guy who signs himself as “Fuck yeah, FlatPress!” exploited FlatPress’ lack of a comment flood limit and/or a moderation queue to bomb many blogs with his message:

Maybe your Atom feed is broken because I tried to subscribe but always got errors.

(or a variation on this theme)

Classic joke, man!

The following horrible script will delete any comment containing the string “Fuck yeah”, so be careful with that. IT WON’T make any difference whether the string is in the CONTENT of the comment or in the NAME, so think well if you have a comment you want to keep with that text.

Upload it to your blog root, browse to it, and then delete it

<?php
include ’defaults.php’;
include INCLUDES_DIR . ’includes.php’;
header(’Content-Type: text/plain’);
if (!user_loggedin()) die(’Please login to FP first!’);

class deldel extends fs_filelister {
var $_directory = CONTENT_DIR;
function _checkFile($d,$f) {
if (is_dir(”$d/$f”)) return 1;

$p=”$d/$f”;
if (false===strpos($f,’comment’) ) return 0;
$string = file_get_contents($p);
if (strpos($string, ’Fuck yeah’) !==false) {
	echo $string, ”\n”;
	unlink($p);
}
return 0;
}
} 
$a=new deldel;
$a->getList();