One Bug’s Life

I’ve not blogged much about work recently, but this story is a good one if somewhat tangled.

We are working, in the Glow blogs team, on the next release. This is mainly to address any problems with the upgrade to WordPress 4.0.1 that came out in January.

My work includes: watching reports come through the help desk; passing on problems that come directly to me (twitter, email and phone) through to the RM. I do a wee bit of tyre kicking and talking to the test team on the way.

On Tuesday I got a mail from a teacher, to the effect that the link to My Sites from the Local Authority home pages didn’t work. Talking to Grant, one of the test team, I found out he was chasing the same problem. We kicked it around a bit and found that if a new users creates a blog on their LA before accessing My Sites, the link did not work, it leads to a list of blogs that the user has a role on.

This is not a show stopper as the user can click on any of the blogs and then the My Site link in the Admin Bar as a work around.

While testing this out we noticed that although the Admin Bar is visible on any Glow blog in your Local Authority, the My Sites link on it leads to the same error (with a list of your sites page).

Thinking these were linked I raised a call to the RM help desk. This got passed through to the team at Automattic. They have quickly fixed the first issue and recorded the fix in our system (JIRA) for following development. The code will be in the next release, hopefully in two or three weeks.

At this point we asked about the second bug, we were told that is was in WordPress core and the team had not only reported it but proposed an initial fix. It is worth pointing out that this was put into the WordPress tracking system at quarter to eleven on Thursday night:

#31314 (My Sites admin bar link broken when on blogs you have no role on) – WordPress Trac

You can see from the linked page, that the ticked was closed at 6:29 on Friday morning. The fix and some improvements are currently attracting the attention and input from three other developers who are completely unconnected from Glow.

So What?

The people that helped with this one included:

The teacher who reported the problem

The Testers contracted to the Scottish Government

The RM Help Desk who are the first point of contact for Glow fault

The Developers from Automattic working for Glow

WordPress developers who have nothing to do with and likely no knowledge of Glow

Which quite a complex system, but it seems to be working. Most of these people are on the hook and doing their job, but I wonder if a bug in a commercial system would be fixed so quickly? We don’t have the bug fixed in our system but it looks good for being sorted out in a subsequent upgrade.

For me this was pretty exciting. It feels pretty good for those of us who think that Open Source and Openness in general is a good idea in Education.