Sunday was the first little get together of the Known Open Collective / IRC community, at the Indieweb Summit in Portland, OR.

It was really great to get everyone together, and to have a little chat about the Known world.

I give a quick overview of what I’d like to work towards on the future roadmap, as well as a summary of progress and some things I’d like to see worked on as we move towards version 1.0 and beyond.

Other community members voiced their desires, as well as raised a few itches, including the need to give the micro pub plugin some love, and to smooth the installation process.

You can read more on the etherpad.

My hope is that these meet ups will become semi-regular, and help grow the community, as well as help drive development forward.

Hashtag GetInvolved.

Just a quick one.

I’ve added a library, which hopefully will help Known development. I’ll be adding to this library as I go, but for now there’s a version manipulation tool.

I got sick of modifying version details in the various files related to Known and their plugins, so I wrote a quick tool.

version.php will allow you to bump patch, minor and major numbers, as well as maintain the build number.

I’m probably going to be running this from a commit script from now on. Hopefully this will be of some use to you!

» Visit the project on Github...

Ok, this caused a fair amount of hair pulling at my end, and I couldn’t find anyone else who had blogged about it… so..

I recently rolled Known’s Symfony components up from using the 2.x version of PDOSessionHandler to 4.x. I had tried this before, but I thought I’d have a fresh attempt at it, but ran into the same weird problems.

Sometimes things would work, but other times it wouldn’t, and the CI tests would consistently fail with a PDOException "There is no active transaction"

Symfony docs, and no amount of googling, got me nowhere. Eventually, reading through the code comments, I hit on the answer. So, I’m writing it here to make things clearer, and with hopes that someone else in a similar position doesn’t have such a frustrating time of it.

Turns out that PDOSessionHandler has switched to using transactions by default. Fine, but it turns out that this can cause some interesting interactions if you share the same database connection as used by the application (which was what we were previously doing, and was the standard way of doing things circa 2.x).

Your options then are either to create a second connection to the database, just for the session (which is not great for our purposes, as it would require two database connections per page load), or turn off transactions.

To do this, pass as an option:

'lock_mode' => PdoSessionHandler::LOCK_ADVISORY

Hope you find this helpful!