Pika 3.06: Reloaded

“The past is but the past of a beginning.” ~ H.G. Wells

For those paying attention, the second blog ever posted at Webdogs 2.0 was about the Pika 3.06 beta. (The beta test site linked there is no longer active.) That was then. (October 2006, to be exact.) This is now. Last week Aaron officially released the full-on version of Pika 3.06.

As you can see from the accompanying imagery, Pika has discovered gradients and has undergone a modest but appealing makeover, with updated colors and page elements. The case tabs have a new, spiffy 3-D look. And the Pika home page links directly to recently updated online Pika resources at the famed PikaDocs wiki, including the Pika User Manual and Pika Admin Manual.

Going deeper, Aaron has recoded things to make it way easier for organizations to maintain control of their (inevitable) customizations. Long time Pika-savvy ITs know all too well that, for example, the page templates for the older versions of Pika are located in the /templates and /subtemplates subfolders, and with every upgrade you had to be very careful and re-code the individual customized templates (or other customized files) to add in the new Pika coding. One could not just copy the new files over the old. No way.

But with this new version, actually you can! Here’s how it works in the new Pika 3.06: Aaron has recoded Pika to exploit a new special custom folder where you can place templates, subtemplates, tab customizations, modules and configuration files. Those are yours, and all yours. With those in place, Pika 3.06 automatically checks your installation to see if you have created a customization located in that special folder. If it sees that you have, Pika uses your customized file instead of the Pika default file. Sweet.

Among other tucks and tweaks that come with the new version are a major (if not yet complete) move towards removal of embedded style elements, pushing more and more of the presentational characteristics of Pika to external CSS. Pika 3.06 also includes improved report printing, courtesy of newly exploited CSS features that permit differing display of a web page in the browser and in print. The old option for printing reports as HTML or PDF is gone. The new approach is better implemented, relying on standards-compliant CSS print style sheets, so the user can see the report displayed in a web page or in a conforming “print” style to your printer or to a PDF file format, which in practice is essentially a print format. This is a singularly great improvement for all Pika users.

And since I’m on the topic of CSS, allow me to digress a bit about my present befuddlement about text resizing in Internet Explorer. Unlike all other browsers, IE does not resize page text if it is set in pixels, which is exactly what Pika 3.06 does, and has done in its earlier versions. (The Pika default body tag is set to “font-size: 13px” in the danio.css file.) There is irony in the fact that I have hammered Aaron on this point for the longest time but now I rarely use IE having joined the Firefox cult. But hey, on principle it matters! All users should be able to resize text within their browser. Yes, IE7 has a “zoom” feature but that is not the same thing as text resizing. Yet apparently in the current version of IE7 that is exactly what Microsoft, misleadingly, calls it when you select View > Text Size. Actually, what that option in IE now does is trigger the zoom function enlarging not just the text but all the other page elements on the page. Try text resizing in IE7 (which adopts the same Ctrl++ and Ctrl+- keyboard shortcuts used by Firefox for text resizing) and then view the same page doing the same thing in Firefox. Watch in IE as your text enlarges but also your whole page structure expands off to the right and the bottom of the page. Watch in Firefox as text resizing enlarges or shrinks the text but honors the page structure. Zoom has its functions, but it is a notably less effective way to allow users to granulate the size of page text to ease readability, while maintaining the basic layout and proportions of the page structure. This is a real stinker/cheat of an implementation in IE.

Now, back to our regular programming.

I spoke to Aaron a few days ago, and he reports the pace of the Pika development cycle, with its promise of Pika 4.0, will be picking up. Pika Software used to do customizations more when the Pika install base was smaller, but as things have grown he has shifted his focus more purposefully on full-on development and now refers customizations out to those open source savants over at Kaivo.

So, where does this leave the Webdogs? We can’t wait for Pika 4.0, but in the interim we’re going to do a lot with Pika 3.06. We have already set up a test bed and will begin to migrate our heavily customized version of Pika over to pull in all the new goodies. In the process we will begin to build yet another Pika redesign to build on all we have learned from our initial two years of experience with Aaron’s code. What this means for Webdogs 2.0 is that the long nascent Pika~palooza is back on, full on. Forget Project Claire. She is soooooo 2005. Get ready for Project Grace: The Pika Love Project.