548758 - creative.mozilla.org should not depend on 3rd party websites

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Websites :: creative.mozilla.org, defect)

Description

[Shyam Mani [:fox2mike]]

Fallout from Bug #548745

Basically in application/controllers/home.php lies the following code snippet

 if (!empty($response_array)) {
                        return $response_array;
                } else {
                        $url = 'http://friendfeed.com/mozillacc?format=atom';

                $curl = curl_init($url);
                curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);       //
Should allow results to be returned in a variable
                curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_MAXREDIRS, 5);               // So
we don't go too far down the rabbit hole
                curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 5);
                curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 10);
                $response = curl_exec($curl);
                curl_close($curl);
                try {
                    $xml = new SimpleXMLElement($response);

When http://friendfeed.com/mozillacc?format=atom isn't available or is extremely slow, it impacts creative.m.o badly, throwing a 500 or causing creative.m.o to load extremely slowly.

We should _never_ depend on 3rd party websites to display any of our content, code should be modified to cover the following conditions :

1) If there is malformed xml, chuck the result, load the page
2) Have a quick timeout (bout 1-2 seconds), if there is no response, load the page
3) Think about storing the results in a file or memcache as a fall back. In fact, we should just resort to loading/refreshing the feed once every x mins

Right now, there's a patched up version live, with the try/catch block commented out, we need to clean this up and push the fix live.

Comment 1

[Ryan Snyder [:ryansnyder] [:rsnyder] [:rysny]]

After talking with Tara, I've put together a Twitter javascript widget that will fail a bit more safely than the current RSS blog feed solution, and hopefully encourage more people to find MCC through their Twitter channel.  Committing to get it up on stage, but waiting for feedback for proceeding.

==

Sending        application/controllers/home.php
Sending        application/views/home/home_index_sub.php
Sending        mysql_schema.sql
Transmitting file data ...
Committed revision r63349.

==

Sending        application/views/home/home_index_sub.php
Sending        public_html/css/screen.css
Transmitting file data ..
Committed revision r63367.

Comment 2

[Ryan Snyder [:ryansnyder] [:rsnyder] [:rysny]]

Committed changes recommended by Tara.

==

Sending        application/views/home/home_index_sub.php
Sending        modules/auth/controllers/auth.php
Sending        public_html/css/screen.css
Transmitting file data ...
Committed revision r63943.

Comment 3

[Ryan Snyder [:ryansnyder] [:rsnyder] [:rysny]]

Adding Twitter icon to bottom of feed...

==

Sending        application/views/home/home_index_sub.php
Sending        public_html/css/screen.css
Adding  (bin)  public_html/images/twitter.png
Transmitting file data ...
Committed revision r63977.