CMSMS | CMS Made Simple

UPDATE: rc2 was released because of stupidity on my part. Menu Manager and Search would not install properly with rc1, and was fixed. Thanks!!!

Hey all,

New release candidate is up. The plan is to have this up roughly a week. If no major bugs are found, then we’ll release it as a full version. If any minor bugs come in, we’ll fix and continue with the schedule. We’re not planning another rc unless multiple major bugs show up, which we’re hoping doesn’t happen.

Please test away and report any bugs in the tracker or irc channel.

The changelog follows below…

Thanks!
Ted

- Numerous changes to attempt to minimize the potential for XSS attacks
- Cleanup SQL statements to prevent against SQL injection attacks
- Add the page alias to the link content type
- Add Apply/Submit/Cancel buttons to the top of the edittemplate form
- Upgrade to Smarty 2.6.18
- Upgrade to adodb_lite 1.42
- Add an apply button to UDT edit page
- Check usernames for invalid characters when creating/editing users
- Add sitename to admin title and header text
- Rationalization and fixes to the {menu} and {search} tags
- Adds the ability to have a separate syntax hilighter module for templates,stylesheets, and UDT’s
- Adds a date_format_string preference in the user preferences
- Modify the admin log to use the date format string user preference
- Show the last modified date in templates, stylesheets and content,
and use the date format string preference.
- Hide the encoding dropdown from the template page, if it is not already set
- Changes to the module api to prevent XSS vulnerabilities
- Call cms_htmlentities on each parameter in the form api that can be
output to html verbatim
- Add functionality for cleaning input parameters before they are
given to the module api. Also allows for optionally dropping parameters
that are unknown to the module.
- Add methods SetParameterType and RestrictUnknownParams to the module
api so that modules can inform the core as to which parameters to expect
on input,and how to clean them.
- Adds a RegisterModulePlugin method to the module api so that we can
use {modulename param=value…} instead of
{cms_module module=’modulename’ param=value …}
- Use root url for default content in links, fixes double url issues.
- Adds ajaxy code to the apply button when editing css, templates or
stylesheets so that the text area scroll bar doesn’t move.
- Add sender ip to the contact_form message
- Add a site preference to disable the safe_mode warning in the admin
- Add a site preference to restrict warnings about unknown parameters
- Now check for ‘Modify Any Page’ permission or ‘Modify Page Structure’
to allow people to activate or deactivate content.
- Fixes to the installer
- Upgrade Scriptaculous to 1.7.0
- Add some help on how to use CGB’s
- News enhancements
- Frontend Pagination for summary articles
- Admin article pagination, sorting, and filtering
- Use the date_format_string preference in the admin
- Display more information in the article list

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Hey all,

Sorry if I haven’t been around as much lately. As least with the forums, blog and working on 2.0. It’s just been a hectic month.

However, I do have some good news. We’re in for a few infrastructure changes onver the next few weeks. Here’s the quick rundown…

I’ve purchased a new server. In fact, this blog has been running on that new server for about a week now. It has double the memory, way more than double the hard drive space and is MUCH faster. The existing server is really struggling with the increased traffic load we’re received over the past few months, so this should help get rid of some of that down time.

I’ll be moving the main site, wiki and forums over tonight (sometime around 4 to 5 AM GMT — May 20, 2007). The downtime should be minimal, and it’s pretty much the slowest traffic time of our entire week, so I’m not TOO concerned about it affecting too many people. If I see a problem and have to abort, I will. In fact, I was going to do it last week, but mediawiki wasn’t having any parts of it, so I gave up. The issues are resolved now, so it should be good to go.

Gforge (dev.cmsmadesimple.org) will not be making the move, unfortunately. Gforge is great and all, but it’s entirely too much system for what we do with it. The mailing lists are annoying, it’s creating all kind of users and directories on the server, it’s cron jobs are taxing the system, etc.

Instead, I’ve rewritten a minimal gforge replacement in ruby on rails and figured out how to migrate the data. The rewrite isn’t complete yet, but it’s very close. I should have something working in another week or so, at which point I’ll be asking people to help to beta test and work out the kinks. Then when it’s time for it go live, we’ll just do a final database migration and shut gforge off forever.

After the first version goes live, I’ll be looking for people to help add some new features, so stay tuned for that.

After all this is done and the old server is off… the summer will be spent on 2.0. I’ll have another announcement regarding that soon, but the dev team and I have to work out a few scheduling issues before I’ll announce what it is.

I’ll make sure I post an update to this message after the migration is complete, for the curious…

Thanks!
Ted

UPDATE — The sites are moved. Everything seems to be working correctly. Let me know if something isn’t.

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Ok, so Featured Site Of The Week is just two months late, sorry Singapore kept me busy

As I came back from Singapore and started browsing through new sites mentioned in cms show off forum I was greeted with tens of great sites all around the world. Great job everybody.

Todays site Petersburg.ie comes from Ivan with the usual questionnaire.

tsw) Who are you and where are you going to?
Ivan) We are The Design Tribe, small creative web design studio based in Galway City on the West Coast of Ireland. ‘The Design Tribe’ consists of a three person team, Ivan who is responsible for all design and CSS, Alan the PHP/general ‘code monkey’ & Sue-Anne in Admin/Accounts. As a team, our main objective is to diver web design/solutions that are well designed, easy to use and functional.

tsw) What is this site all about?
Ivan) Petersburg.ie is a website for an Outdoor Education Centre in north Galway. The centre provides outdoor education courses to all age groups. The aim of the site was to promote the centre and to excite potential visitors about the possibility of using its facilities. We designed a site that used the strong bold colours often associated with the outdoor clothing industry. The site also features a one minute long ‘Petersburg Adventure’ flash animation that quickly shows the viewer where the centre is located in Ireland and also gives them a flavour of what awaits them in a days’ activities.

tsw) Why did you choose CMSMS?
Ivan) Having evaluated several open sources CMS’s - we chose CMSMS as it (A): had a beautifully designed end-user interface and (b): it allowed us great flexibility in delivering a perfectly tailored solution to each clients particular needs. CMSMS is just perfectly positioned in terms of functionality & features - it’s neither to simple nor to complex. I could go on all day listing out the various reasons why we like CMSMS – but basically - it allows us to produce multifaceted, well designed sites, relatively easily.

tsw) How do you create your designs?
Ivan) The design phase of any project starts with listening to the client and trying to ascertain their needs, tastes and wishes. All our designs start as a blank page in Photoshop so we boot it up and start determining the layout & colour schemes that best suits our clients’ needs. From here the design can go anywhere but the objective is always the same – a well designed usable site. Our designs are always a mix of eye-candy & functionality. Websites are meant to be used by users - so in our opinion usability comes a first, followed closely by eye-catching design.

tsw) What have been your major problems with CMSMS?
Ivan) Debugging can be slow. We’ve made a some modifications nearly creating our own development branch, but this means that we can’t upgrade our base install without a lot of work.

tsw) What has been good about CMSMS?
Ivan) The framework that it provides, initially the learning curve is a little steep, but once you figure it out you can customise any site & provide great functionality quickly. The entire package is well engineered, big kudos to Ted and his army of helpers.

tsw) Did you use extra modules?
Ivan) Yeah, used Album & feedbackform, hacked one together and we have a nice beta Property Manager on the way - which may be good enough for the community (good enough for the community to hack apart anyway J )

tsw) How did the site launch go?
Ivan) Flawlessly – after the launch the client had a few changes/additions – CMSMS made them a walk.

tsw) In your own opinion what’s good about this site and what’s bad? What would you do differently?
Ivan) We could have done with a bit more time to configure the album layout for the Gallery module. Otherwise we were very happy the project.

tsw) Thank you very much on taking the time to answer these questions. Now, what would you like to say to fellow CMSMS’ers.
Ivan) Dia daoibh! & CMSMS rocks!

Nicely done site, Thanks Ivan!

Hopefully I will have more time to write these articles more often during the summer!

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