LittleLink Custom now includes an .env config editor. This editor can be accessed via the Admin Panel under Admin>Config.
This editor allows admins to edit, backup, download and upload the .env configuration file. All in all, the new feature, allows users to more easily edit the configuration file, contributing to my goal of making LittleLink Custom easier to use.
Read more about this topic on the Blog https://blog.littlelink-custom.com/built-in-config-editor
LittleLink Custom now includes an open and free to use SMTP server. Mails from this service may only be used for password recovery and registration purposes involving users personal LittleLink Custom or LittleLink Admin pages.
Users of this service must abide by our Terms and Conditions found at https://llc-mail.tru.io/.
Motivations for this are explained on my blog post about this topic, which you can read here: https://blog.littlelink-custom.com/littlelink-custom-mail-server/
This 'bug' was caused due to the way the dark mode was applied. The dark mode detection detects the preferred theme style from the client and then saves the preferred type with a cookie, all with JavaScript. Then a simple PHP if-else statement loads either the dark or light mode CSS theme, depending on the cookie.
The problem here was that the cookie would only be detected if the page was refreshed, so once the cookie was set, the dark mode was applied every time without a problem. But the first time a user visited the site and the preferred theme was set to dark mode, the page would still display the white version until the page was refreshed.
Now, I could have changed how the page applies the dark mode, however I decided against that and went with this commit instead.
Now I'm not really experienced with JavaScript at all, so this definitely could have been solved in a more elegant way, but this is what I did:
I added a bit to the JavaScript that sets and reads the cookie. When the page finished loading, a simple if statement is run that requires the following conditions:
The URL contains a '#' and the color scheme equals 'dark' and the cookie isn't set yet.
After these conditions are met, '#dark' is added to the URL and the page will be refreshed.
This refresh is only performed without the cookie, thus only refreshing the page on the first visit if the dark mode would be applied.
The '#dark' is only added to the URL to fail the first requirement of the if statement, preventing the page from being reloaded in an infinite loop. Otherwise, the '#dark' part of the URL fulfills no purpose and only the '#' part is required, so it doesn't even matter what comes after the hash. I just chose this for clarification.
If the dark mode cookie is blocked by the user, the page will be set to light mode and refreshed every time they visit but the '#dark' will still be added to the URL, preventing the infinite refresh-loop.
This is a full-fledged demo of the website, complete with login and register functionality.
Feel free to register your account and try out all the features of LittleLink Custom.
Please take into account that performance on this page might not represent optimal performance achievable with LittleLink Custom due to compromises regarding our web hosting budget.
LittleLink Custom administrators reserve the right to remove any content or account registered on this page without prior warning for any reason whatsoever.
Fixed bug where users littlelink pages (domain.com/@username) would display a 404 error. This was caused due to the .env config file not containing an App URL. This issue could be solved by simply adding a URL to the config, this is now not necessary anymore, making the setup process easier and less confusing.
I changed every instance of "{{ config('app.url') }}" to "{{ url(' ') }}". This effectively automatically uses the correct URL for LittleLink links, even if LittleLink Custom is set up in a subdirectory.
In my testing, I couldn't find any problems this might have caused, so this appears to do the job just as well as setting the URL in the config. If I find any issues with this, I will revert this change.
This displays an update notice if a new version of LittleLink Custom has been released.
This one is definitely a messy one. Everything I added is commented, but I'm going to try explaining it here one more time.
General outcome:
• This feature checks the local version against the newest version stored on a separate server.
Error prevention:
• I used 'file_get_contents' to get the version number from a JSON file. If 'file_get_contents' cant find the file, PHP will throw an Error Exception.
• To prevent this, I put the update section in an if-statement that only applies if the following conditions are met.
Check if files exist:
• To test whether the file on the server exists (remember, if the server can't be reached, you will get an Error Exception) I used a function that checks if the URL to the file on the server successfully returns a '200 OK' response (see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/200).
• If this condition is met, it sets the variable '$ServerExists' to true, if not to false.
• Now, the previous mentioned if-statement simply checks if the local file exists and the '$ServerExists' variable equals 'true' to proceed.
Get version number:
• If all previous conditions are met, two variables get defined via 'file_get_contents' '$Vgit' and '$Vlocal'.
• Both the file on the server and the local file simply contain the version number.
• The variable '$Vgit' is the newest version number retrieved from the server.
• The variable '$Vlocal' is the local version number.
Display update notice:
• To finally display the version number (added with HTML) one last check via an if-statement is performed. This simply checks if the current user is an admin AND if the version retrieved from the server is higher than the local one.
• If both conditions are met, the notice is displayed.
In addition, I should mention that I put the existing 'Watch Page' link as well as the update notice in a div with the class 'row' to display both links next to another instead of them being stacked.
Added 'fadein' class to avatar image, littlelink_name and littlelink_description text. This class adds the fade-in animation from 'animate.css' found in /littlelink/css/.
Julian Prieber
dependabot[bot]