"Text" block no longer available on page builder, after upgrade 1.9 -> 15.04dev

[Aaron Wells]

If you do an upgrade directly from Mahara 1.9 to 15.04dev, the "Text" block isn't available in the block pallette on the page builder. (It should show up next to the "Text" block).

There is no problem if you do a clean install, or if you upgrade from 1.10.

Using git bisect I traced it to this patch: https://reviews.mahara.org/#/c/3943/

Probably the problem is that our code that uses the "Shortcut" category to identify the blocks that should be placed in the shortcut, is not compatible with the code that we used to convert the 1.9 "text box" block into the 1.10 "text" block.

[Aaron Wells (u-aaronw)]

Right, so the problem is that new plugins get installed before core upgrades run. So what's happening is this:

1. The new "text" blocktype goes to install. It uses the method install_blocktype_categories_for_plugin() to fill in the plugin's categories. This method looks for the available categories in the "blocktype_category" table. It doesn't find "shortcut" there, so it skips that one, leaving the "text" blocktype in no categories.

2. The core upgrade runs and sets up the "shortcut" category type.

I'll have to do a little research to figure out the best way to resolve this. I'd like to think that it makes more sense to install new plugins *after* running core upgrades and maybe upgrades for existing plugins as well. But certainly before we make a change that big to the install process, we need to look at the code history and determine whether there's a reason why the new plugin installs come first.

[Mahara Bot (dev-mahara)]

Patch for "master" branch: https://reviews.mahara.org/4331

[Robert Lyon (robertl-9)]

A short term 'hack' way of dealing with this:

https://reviews.mahara.org/#/c/4331/

Put the blocktype.text upgrade after the adding of the 'shortcut' category option.

[Mahara Bot (dev-mahara)]

Reviewed: https://reviews.mahara.org/4331
Committed: http://gitorious.org/mahara/mahara/commit/f247b267231844b935b25a796c6fb77c9a299ccd
Submitter: Aaron Wells (<email address hidden>)
Branch: master

commit f247b267231844b935b25a796c6fb77c9a299ccd
Author: Robert Lyon <email address hidden>
Date: Mon Mar 2 10:46:13 2015 +1300

Upgrade the blocktype.text after adding 'shortcut' category (Bug #1401708)

what we really want to do is rewrite the order of how plugin are
installed compared to core - but as that won't happen in the short
term what we can do to fix this problem is put the blocktype.text
upgrade after the adding in of the 'shortcut' category item.

Change-Id: Ib2ec695de73754f8e35f2284577e7fdf15fe0a6d
Signed-off-by: Robert Lyon <email address hidden>