CMSMS | CMS Made Simple

So here it is… after building alot of anticipation, and only a week behind schedule, CMS Made Simple 1.6 is now ready for public consumption.

Changes/Features/Bug Fixes

There have been a great deal of changes,.. so I’ll just brush on them here… please read the changelog notes attached with the release at:
http://dev.cmsmadesimple.org/project/changelog/1897
* Content Type Changes
Major effort has been undertaken to make the system faster, better and easier to extend. We’ve reworked the content types and various
classes so that the number of queries is better optimized, and so that there is more options for configuration of what is to be displayed to
your users on the edit content page.

* Permissions Changes
We’ve completely re-worked the content permissions to allow more flexibility, and allow greater control over what your users are allowed
to do with respect to content. Briefly, the permssions model has changed to:
- Additional Editors or Owners of a content page
can edit that content page
- The “Add Pages” permission states that the user can create pages as children of pages that he is already an owner/additional editor of.
- The “Remove Pages” permission states that the user can only remove pages that he is an additional editor/owner of
- The ‘Manage All Content’ permission allows you to do anything with all content.

* New Themes and Content
- Two new frontend themes have been developed, and the default content for new installations changed considerably.

* Forgot Password functionality in admin
- The admin console now has the ability to handle forgotten passwords, if an email address has been associated with the admin account.

* 404 error handling changes
- A new content type ‘Error Handler’ has been created to handle 404 errors. This page is just a regular content page with some extra
functionality. This will allow you to do things like embed module calls, etc. into the 404 page.

* Site Preferences rewrite
- The site preferences page has been completely re-written.

* Sitedown IP address exclusion
- When sitedown mode is enabled, it is now possible to exclude certain IP addresses from that restriction. In this way the site can be
down for everybody but the developer working on it.

* Page Preview fixes
- Page preview now works with page templates that have multiple content blocks.

* UTF-8 changes for new installs
- On new installs, the installer now tries to change the default encoding for newly created tables, etc. This allows better utf-8 flow
for most sites.
- A new ’set_names’ config entry has been created to allow doing a ’set names utf-8′ at the beginning of any request. This is on
by default for new installs, and off for upgrades.

* config.php cleanup
- We’ve removede a bunch of the redundant stuff out of the config.php, and optimized the pretty url stuff so it should be a bit easier to
understand.

* MenuManager improvements
- The admin panelo for menumanager has been completely re-worked to be more obvious, and easier to use… there is now the ability
to specify a ‘default’ menu template.

* ModuleManager improvements
- Module Manager now has the ability to check dependencies before installing a module.
- Module Manager can now check to see if there are newer released versions of any of the modules that you are currently using on
your site.

* TinyMCE improvements
* Search improvements
* Printing improvements
* Many, Many bug fixes.

Compatiblity

- For sites with multiple admin users who have different levels of permission for editing content, you will need to re-visit the permissions,
and to make sure that everything is setup the way it needs to be.
- Users using Cataloger, PageBlocks, and other modules that create content types will experience problems with compatibility. Please
contact the authors of these modules and ask them to release a version compatible with CMS 1.6 as soon as possible.

Diff Packages

Due to the extent of the changes, there will be no diff releases for 1.6. You will need to download the full package, and transfer the whole thing up to your new website… please download the appropriate checksum package and validate your upload with that.

Thanks
I would like to take this time to give my thanks to the development team, and the beta testers who contributed hundreds of hours in testing, fixing, enhancing, and debugging this release. If I forgot your name, please remind me and I’ll add it ASAP.

Dev Team Members

Ronny Krijt
Rene Helminsen
Alberto Benati
Nuno Costa
Mark Reed
Morten Poulsen
Ted Kulp
Tyler Boespflug

Beta Testers

SimonSchaufi
duclet
Sonya
bess
Nullg
JeremyBASS
ZiggyWigged
Maarten

That’s it… I’m sure you’ll find this release the best ever…. It can be downloaded from the usual locations… Enjoy.

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The developers of CMS Made Simple have finalized plans for the yearly developer conference. However, there is one major change… we’re inviting you to join us.

On 26-27 September, CMSMS will host the first public Geek Moot event at The Showroom in Sheffield, UK. There will be plenty of presentations by the devs and others, events, networking and just general geeking out. There are plans for evening events in the works and they will be announced soon.

Come spend the weekend with the CMSMS devs and other people just like you for a weekend of fun with the system you love.

For more details on the event, see http://geekmoot.com.

Presentations

We are looking for people to do talks and presentations on CMSMS related topics. If you’d like to do a presentation (and promote yourself as a CMSMS know-it-all or your company), please contact us here. Proposals are due by 1st July.

Sponsors

We are also looking for sponsors. There are details about what sponsorship could provide here. We would love to get several sponsors if possible.

Donation Drive

We will also do our yearly donation drive in a month or so. The money for this will go to paying for several devs to travel to the conference, as they normally wouldn’t be able to. We’ll announce that when we’re prepared to handle the influx of funds — and figure out who needs them.

Thanks!

We hope to see you in September!

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This is just a small maintenance release that fixes a couple of annoying bugs:

a) The logout/session issue should now be resolved permanently.
b) The problem with errors in preview on new installs because of some bad logic in the default templates has been fixed.

Diff packages are available (they are very small) to allow you to quickly upgrade your 1.5.3 site to 1.5.4.

This is an optional upgrade. If you’re not experiencing problems with the logout/session issue, then staying at 1.5.3 for a while should be fine.

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Well, I must say that the idea of having a real CMSMS conference has gone over better than I originally expected it to be. That’s really good news. We have a lot of dedicated users, which is a great thing to have in any community.

We discussed the idea yesterday and we’re going to move forward with trying to put this together. We’ve had a few ideas as to where to hold it, but nothing in concrete. As an experiment, I’ve decided to open this up the community to see if someone will help us plan an event.

What does this mean?

We’re looking to get several proposals together by the 22nd of April. We have a few ourselves, but we need more to really make a good decision. We’re hoping that people in the community might have better ties with this sort of thing than we do on the dev team. We can make a good attempt, but you might know better.

So what do you need?

We’re looking for a facility with the following specs:

• Able to hold roughly 100 people — would be great if we could go bigger if we have more turnout than expected, but this is a good start
• Western Europe — the more central the better, so that people can easily drive or train
• Nearby hotels and pubs — it can’t be out in the middle of nowhere. Would be great if we could get a group discount, but not necessary
• Nearby airport and/or train station — bigger the better
• We need it for 2 days, plus an afternoon to setup. Friday to Sunday in mid-to-late August is best, but other dates could be considered
• We need a PA and a projector. If the facility doesn’t have it, we’ll have to rent those things for the weekend
• Reliable, fast internet access. Many, many geeks with laptops will attend, plus we’d like to stream what we can. Spotty internet would be disastrous
• Scenic and/or lots to do is a big plus

A rough price and availability would be fantastic, plus any contact details. There will be a fee to attend, so we understand it won’t be free. However, price does factor in so we can charge something that isn’t astronomical.

What am I signing up for?

By doing this, you’re not necessarily signing up to run the whole thing. We can probably take care of it once a location is decided. We’re just looking for a good place to hold the thing. Of course, having a local contact will make some things easier — but we can probably handle the majority of it via the internet.

We’ll throw in free admission (and beer — if you like that sort of thing) for the person who helps us out. And, of course, tons of recognition for all your hard work.

If you can help out, please send an email over to ted at cmsmadesimple dot org before the 22nd with any and all details, and we’ll put it into the voting. We want to announce the full details on or before May 1st, so stay tuned.

Thanks!

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Found here: http://forum.cmsmadesimple.org/index.php/topic,32453.0.html

I’m just trying to gauge the potential interest of a CMSMS focused conference in lieu of (or addition to) the traditional geek moot we normally do. There would most likely be a charge. Nothing crazy, but it would be necessary to cover the costs of the facility and any other resources we’d need to get to put on a conference. It would be in Western Europe… possibly the UK, and most likely in the late summer, early autumn.

If people are hungry for this kind of thing, we could consider it. But given it’s a LOT of work to put on, there would have to be considerable interest before proceeding.

Thanks for your help!

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Coming May 30th, starting at 11:00 AM, the second Dutch-speaking CMSMS users workshop will be held. The location chosen is Amersfoort, which lies in the center of the Netherlands. The agenda will be quite diverse, from performing an upgrade, through the explanation of the backend of the last release, site-creation, useful modules and more.

For the forum-post (in Dutch) with the full agenda and the list of registered users, check the following post of rbroen. The organisation of this workshop is done by rbroen and Duketown:

The post in the forum

For those that want to join in, just leave a reply in the thread.

Ronny

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Here it is….. after a long wait… this version should clear up a large number of the minor issues people have been having of late.
there are not many new features, but alot of bug fixes. and you should notice that the package is getting closer and closer to that ‘rock solid’ state.

I would like to take this time once again to give many thanks to the dev team members and translators that have donated countless hours of their time to this project. They’ve been managing the bug tracker and feature request list, testing, reproducing bugs, fixing them and then testing the fixes. I couldn’t even guess the number of hours that have been put in by the team for this release alone.

Everybody owes these people a huge thank you:
Nuno Costa
Ronny Krijt
René Helminsen
Morten Poulsen

For those people that like details. Here’s a copy of what is in the doc/CHANGELOG.txt for this release.

Version 1.5.3 - Arecibo
—————————–
- Fixes of several bugs:
- #2516 Javascript script errors in admin listcontent.php panel.
- #2706 CreatePagination() does not include Session Key.
- #2915 Typo in multicontent.php throwing errors.
- #2925 User not exist in sample content.
- #2940 Field-length dateformat in UserPrefs shorter than in GlobaSettings.
- #2995 Group assignments bug.
- #2996 Language string missing.

- Notice error in modform.inc.php.
- Fixed a minor permission issue on editpref.php.
- Added an option to disable the wysiwyg for a content-page.
- Fixed (hopefully) problem with pseudo-random logouts when there is inactivity in the admin section.
- Put ‘canonical’ logic in the default templates.
- Made ‘NCleanGrey’ the default theme, in an install without default content installed as well.

- Search 1.5.3
- #3034 Searching for words in the footer expose all pagenames on my site.
- Now remove event handlers when uninstalling the module
- Dont return page results for non searchable pages, even if the result was found in the template.
- Make changes to convert search results to entities on output to help with validation.
- Now search for the ’stop phrase’ in the base addwords function, allowing optionally excluding specific module records from being indexed.

- Feature requests that are included:
- #1231 Make default templates use uploads/images/logo1.gif instead of images/cms/logo1.gif.
- #2897 Moved Image/Thumbnail in content-page to options-tab.
- #3025 News: new parameter, action=”detail”, which can be used to show a specific entry in detail-mode directly.
- #3035 link from admin backend to the forge.
- #3068 New plugin; page_attr that returns attributes of a page.

- TinyMCE
- Added support for configuring the third toolbar
- Added option to show actual thumbnail-files
- Fixed filetype icons in FilePicker
- Implemented | as seperator in toolbars
- Fixed working of force-cleanup-on-paste
- Fixed toolbars for frontend-usage

- News 2.9.3
- Minor improvements to the articles tab in the admin
- Now output a canonical URL in detail view
- Changes to default templates
- #3027 field definitions not deletable when entry is made using fesubmit.
- #2941 (News) Extra-field not showing in detail-view.
- Draft news articles are not indexed in the search module.

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CMS Made Simple is now available for download. This is just a bugfix release, with little in the way of enhancements…. but a large number of bugs have been fixed…. Some of them were in the forge… some of them we found on our own or were reported by valued members.

The only real new feature in 1.5.2 is the {page_image} plugin which makes it simple to use the image and thumbnail content attributes.

Many thanks to the development team for their hundreds of hours of testing and debugging, without them, this package would be nowhere near as stable and feature rich as it is.

Diff packages are available for convenience in upgrading from 1.5.1 to 1.5.2

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Coming January 24th, starting at 11:00 AM, is the first Dutch-speaking CMSMS users workshop. The location chosen is Rosmalen, which lies in the center of Belgium and the Netherlands. The agenda will be quite diverse, from the explanation of the last release, SEO, module creation and more.

For the forum-post (in Dutch) with the full agenda and the list of registered users, check the following post of Duketown (Dutch module-developer and organizer of the workshop):

The post in the forum

For those that want to join in, just leave a reply in the thread.

Ronny

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As I’ve worked on CMSMS 2.0, I’ve run into a few recurring issues that I didn’t quite have an answer or reason for yet…

1. I wrote a lot of very generic pieces of code in order to make 2.0 easier to develop in the long run. I think I might’ve gone overboard a bit. I wasn’t ever sure why.
2. As a professional developer, I kept running into issues where I wanted to use some of that code for other stuff. And it was too difficult to just pull out the piece I needed and didn’t do it.

When talking to my friend, Greg (who, incidentally, helped push me to launch CMSMS as a project), I was telling him about some of the things that 2.0 could do. I said something along the lines of, “Really, except for some routing and a few other little things, 2.0 could be a full development framework for other applications.” And, in my typical way, I thought about this for a few days… and didn’t do much else.

So, I’ve decided to use my week off from work to put together the basics of a PHP5 based web application framework. This framework will then become the base of CMSMS 2.0 (it’s less work than it sounds — trust me) as well as any other application you might want to develop. It’s a generic framework that builds on some of the key ideas we’ve had in CMSMS all along — it just makes those tools easier to setup for whatever you’d like to develop.

Who is this aimed towards?

Professional PHP5 developers, plain and simple. If you know what a framework is and why you’d need one, then you’re probably the correct candidate for this project. If this just flies over your head, then it’s probably safe to skip to the next post in your news reader.

What’s the name mean?

It’s smooth. It’s strong. It’s a nice foundational material… Really? It’s a short name that fits well when you put it in every class name and it’ll also make for a nice logo someday. Calguy said “smooth” and it just went from there.

What are the requirements?

PHP 5.2+ on any compatible web server. A database of some sorts — MySQL will be tested heavily. PostgreSQL and SQLite should also work fine. Development and documentation will be targetting developers on Unix based systems… Windows users might have to do a little bit of investigative work to develop with the system.

What do I get?

• ADODB5 - The standard in database abstraction. Silk uses it throughout.
• The Silk ORM - Built on top of ADODB and uses the ActiveRecord pattern. Cuts down lines of code and makes basic database access very simple and OO.
• Smarty - Uses the power of smarty throughout. Smarty templates are used for all templates and layouts, as well as smarty plugins created for all form and navigation elements.
• Magic MVC - Using file naming conventions, new actions, controllers and views can be added with very minimal work. Everything is customizable afterwards.
• jQuery - We’ve standardized on the jQuery javascript framework. Used throughout, we’ve included some javascript helpers to make Ajax simple to use.
• Events system - Stateless event handling system based on the one from CMSMS 1.x — without the database. (coming soon)
• Unit testing - Ability to have unit tests on models, views and controllers. (coming soon)
• Users, groups, permissions - Have a basic system for handling these 3 things that fall into almost every web application. CMSMS 2.0 will use the same system, so applications will be able to share login information directly with CMSMS. (coming soon)
• OpenID - Logins will support the OpenID protocol and standard using the php-openid library. (coming soon)

License?

Silk is licensed using the MIT open source license. It’s both GPL compatible (for release with CMSMS) and also able to be used in commercial/proprietary applications without question. This will allow people to use Silk for practically anything.

How do I get involved?

Silk isn’t really “there” yet. It’s still in the early phases of development, though, it’s been moving pretty fast and working out above expectations. The source code is hosting on github: http://github.com/tedkulp/silk. If you’d like to make contributions or play with the code, fork a copy and play away. If you feel that something is patch worthy, send me a pull request and I’ll take a look.

In the near future, I will post some HOWTO’s and API docs to silkframework.com. After I feel that things are stabilized a bit, I’ll write up a HOWTO on how to write a simple application using Silk that hints the major points and gets people on their way.

How does this affect 2.0?

Only a bit. The admin will be rewritten to use the new MVC system, events will have to be changed a bit, and well as a few other changes. But we’re still moving forward without having to throw away a lot of code. This is still a positive step forward with only a few small steps back.

—

Thanks, folks! Let me know if you have any questions or would like to get involved.

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