
Announcing CMS Made Simple 1.4 “Jamaica”
August 3rd, 2008 by Robert CampbellHere it is, the latest and greatest.
Many people have donated hours of their valuable time to develop, design, manage and test this release, it is a real testament to the community that CMS has grown. Lets keep it going people, great work by everybody involved.
Version 1.4-beta2 was downloaded over 450 times (not including language packs and checksum files)…. and we had a relatively low amount of bugs reported, this is a fantastic thing.
Version 1.4 “Jamaica”
- Includes a new system information page in the admin
* Many thanks to Alby, and others
- Smarty now works as you would expect in the admin
* Any new or rewritten pages in the admin are using this
* This may break pisearch plugin, etc
- A completely new way of page template processing.
* We split the template into three pieces
a) Any text ontop of
b) The section
c) the rest of the template (the body)
* We then process the top section through smarty, then the body, and finally the head. Then we glue it back together. This will allow variables set in page content or in various module templates to be used in the head section to effect such things as meta tags, and page titles.
* A new text area in the options tab of content pages allows specifying page specific data (as opposed to putting page specific data into the metadata section of the page)
* A new plugin {process_pagedata} processes the page specific data through
smarty. It should be at the very top of all page templates
* On new install, all page templates have {process_pagedata} at the very top.
* This may break sites that have used some of my tricks to
change the page title based on news or other modules content
so it will be off by default after release, and on for the beta
- Memory optimizations, and query optimizations: We’ve done a few checks, and improved a few things here and there that will provide a modest boost in performance.
* FileManager is now an admin only module
* nuSOAP is now an admin only module (for most sites).
* more in memory caching
- Massive improvement in stylesheet handling: It is now possible to allow or deny browser stylesheet caching. Stylesheets are now re-orderable
- Updates to the admin menu structure: Main is now called CMS, and the logout and view site links are under there.
- Theme Improvements
* Many thanks to Nuno
* New icons for view site and logout
- Cleaned up and improved Module Manager. It should be much faster and leaner now.
- Minor improvements to CMSMailer
- Improvements to the Installer
* Many thanks to Alby
* The installer is now fully translatable, so you can choose what
language you want the installer pages to appear in
* Many more checks have been added and re-organized to hopefully
solve some of the issues people have with installation.
- Safe mode is still a warning, however we do a required check to see if the httpd server process can create a file within a directory it created. This should help track problems with safe mode enabled when php is running as an apache module (which we do not support).
- We now ship a full distribution as well as an english only version and several ‘language packs’.
- NCleanGrey is now the default admin theme.
- you can now specify default text for additional content blocks in page templates.
- A new permission that controls access to the Tags page so that editors, etc. can see the help there.
- Add assign parameter to numerous plugins (including all module plugins)
- adds the image_url plugin (thanks Nuno)
- Now use a wysiwyg for the sitedown message and the custom404 message.
- Added the target option to the ‘content’ content type.
- A general review of security checks in admin methods (thanks Nuno)
- Modifications to the group permissions, and user creation forms makes managing users, groups, and permissions much simpler.
* Many thanks to _SjG_
- Updates to the embed plugin
- Add three new page attributes to content, PageLink, Link, and SectionHeader content types
- Modify the menu manager to export the new page attributes. This will be useful for permissions, or meta data or other tags.
- FileManager gained recursive chmodding, custom sorting and saner permission handling in windows
- Printing updated to latest TCPDF release 4.0 including rewritten html rendering code
- TinyMCE got updated and some css-related issues were fixed
- Search Improvements
* Minor performance tweaks to Search Re-indexing
* Now escape any characters that have special importance in regular expressions before performing the search
* Restore the template to it’s pre-1.5 behavior whils till retaining the new functionality.
- Now remind the user to configure their mail settings
- A new admin function to check the current install against either a release-generated checksum file or a previously downloaded checksum file. This will help to find upload errors, or to find files that have been modified since the last known good state, to aid in detecting hacks.
- News has had minor tweaks
* Now handle the old pretty urls as well as the new ones
i.e; News/
News/
* A new icon for rss feeds
- Though it’s not really a 1.4 issue, the Translation center has been fixed (many many thanks to the regex guro _SjG_) so that links will work in translated files. We essentially translate all quotes inside of tags to a special string, then do the html entity stuff, then translate that special string back to quotes. Translators need to go through and update ALL translations.














August 3rd, 2008 at 1:18 pm
Cool as! Downloading it now. Thanks for the great CMS guys.
August 3rd, 2008 at 2:32 pm
Great work.
how to upgrade 1.3.1 to 1.4.
thanks
August 3rd, 2008 at 7:42 pm
Awesome! I love the updated installer as well as the new admin theme. Everything installed perfectly.
August 3rd, 2008 at 11:11 pm
What is the different between the base and full?
There are a lot of changes with 1.4… how do you upgrade from older version?
August 4th, 2008 at 4:12 am
Thanks for the new release, but could there not be more help for newcomers to know which packages they need to download?
August 4th, 2008 at 5:18 am
Hello,
I love CMSMadeSimple and have been working with it for quite a few releases. I would love to update my (multiple) sites with 1.4 but I find there are no release notes/change log, leaving me quite puzzled about the strange download possibilities. Where there used to be a “cmsmadesimple-diff-1.x.x.tar.gz” (note the ‘diff’ here) I now find a whole lot of language files and files with base and full versions. Not wanting to loose my clients carefully built-up sites, I’m now at loss what to use to update their sites. Could you please add release notes/change logs with which files to use in case of updates and in case of new installments? And how/if to use the language files? Many many thanks in advance!
I love CMSMadeSimple!
kind regards,
Isolde
August 4th, 2008 at 7:11 am
It’s a simple choice really:
For new installs:
Use the base package + whatever language packs you want
just untar them all to the same directory, and then ftp everything to your host.
For upgrades
Use the full package…
Untar the full package, and then ftp everything to your host.
There are no diff releases because this release was too large, almost every file changed in some way or another… there would be no point in a diff.
August 4th, 2008 at 5:05 pm
Excellent work guys, I have 4 instances of CMSMS to upgrade!
August 5th, 2008 at 4:23 am
Hello everybody !
First of all, congratulations for all the work…
Could you explain how to upgrade from the 1.4-beta2 version ?
Thanks…
August 5th, 2008 at 7:04 am
Good release, just updated a site im working on at the moment and the upgrade went easily and smoothly, thanks guys!
August 5th, 2008 at 7:17 am
Jean… to update from 1.4-beta2, you should just have to upload the files from the 1.4 release. There aren’t any database changes from the beta to the release afaik.
August 5th, 2008 at 10:49 am
Kudos to the lead developers and the worker developers! You all have great talent! Got about half-dozen sites to update. This is “simple”. Making my life a whole lot easier.
Cheers!
August 5th, 2008 at 11:48 am
i’m french, sorry for my bad english
congratulations for this new verson of cms ms.
thanks for your work !!!
August 5th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
Wow! The appearance of the admin panel is amazing. What a fancy look and feel. I’m going to check the rest of the new features right away. Thanks everybody!
Jacob
August 5th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
I’d like to take this oppotunity to thank the developers of CMS Made Simple. First I tried Joomla and Drupal, and they are far too complicated. CMSMS is so simple and easy to use, plus it can even do more than Joomla. Please continue the good work.
August 5th, 2008 at 11:49 pm
[…] my look at SkyBlueCanvas yesterday I today got the message that the good people at CMSMadeSimple released their latest version, 1.4. There seems to be alot going on in the community, and many are […]
August 6th, 2008 at 6:56 am
Not sure about the implications of “FileManager is now an admin only module
” - this could prove too restrictive. For example a site that I may convert from a static site to a CMSMS site will need to allow editors to upload MP3 files - is it possible to configure this in the new release without making them admin users?
August 6th, 2008 at 8:42 pm
[…] many more. You can see the full list of changes here. or read our review of the previous version (apparently I need to do a new review now.. ) here. […]
August 7th, 2008 at 2:49 am
excellent work team..
admin theme is very tidy also
August 7th, 2008 at 12:53 pm
On an upgrade, everything worked but I can not get the NCleanGrey theme to work throughout the entire admin. Login screen is good but the rest of the admin is set at the old theme?
Can not seem to fix this?
August 11th, 2008 at 8:56 am
Moorezilla, thank you…
Well, I won’t do it right now, as I’ve just seen a new version (1.4.1).
So, I guess I’ll wait a little bit…