CMSMS | CMS Made Simple

So, we apparently miscalculated the acceptance of 5.3 along the major web hosting companies. The old track record of PHP adoption was that it takes several years for a major upgrade to be accepted. However, things must’ve changed, because we’re hearing more and more issues with 5.3 compatibility, even though it’s only been out for a few months.

With that, we’ve decided that there will be a 1.7 release of CMS Made Simple. This version will basically a 5.3 compatible version of CMS Made Simple, but it will most likely break PHP4 compatibility. Since we’ve been basically saying that PHP4 has been deprecated since 2007, but never acted upon, this shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise to everyone. We’re not positive that we won’t be able to keep PHP4 working with 1.7, but it’s a possibility that people should be prepared for.

All future releases of 1.6 will be security patches only, and only if necessary.

CMSMS 2.0 development will still continue on. 1.7 will only be getting a percentage of the dev team’s time in order to get PHP 5.3 working. Probably won’t be a ton of new features here as well. We’re trying to keep all the major work in the 2.0 branch.

So, in short:

1.6 – Security patches only. PHP4 compatibility.
1.7 – PHP 5.3 compatibility. Minor feature additions. Possible PHP4 breakage.
2.0 – Major redesign and redevelopment. PHP 5.2+ only.

Repository Changes

If you follow CMSMS development in subversion, we’ve moved some branches around in order to facilitate these changes. The original 1.7.x branch, which became 2.0 will be in the trunk. The old trunk became the old-2.0 branch, and we copied 1.6.x to 1.7.x for 1.7.x development. It looks something like this:

/trunk moves to /branches/old-2.0
/branches/1.7.x moves to /trunk
/branches/1.6.x copied to /branches/1.7.x

If you have a checkout of one of these branches, you can easily change it to the new location with svn switch. For example, if you’ve been following 2.0 development, you can go into your checked out version and do the command with the location of the moved branches location like:

svn switch http://svn.cmsmadesimple.org/svn/cmsmadesimple/trunk .

Bookmark to:

Just a quick word on the outage on Friday night.

Since the very beginning, CMSMS has been using Zoneedit as their DNS hosting provider. This was in the days before every domain registrar offering their own DNS hosting, so Zoneedit was the perfect solution for some quick, free DNS hosting. Since budget was such an issue in those days, we gladly accepted it.

Early Friday night, we started getting random reports of CMSMS sites not being able to resolve. Of course, since all of our DNS hosting was on Zoneedit, it was the only place to look for answers. It looked like ns19 (our first server) was totally out, and ns8 (the secondary) was intermittently answering.

We let it go for a few hours, but things weren’t getting resolved and more and more people started to question what was going on. So late Friday evening, I decided to move the DNS totally over to Godaddy, since that’s where the domain is registered anyway. I’ve been using the service for a few years and never had any issues, so I figured that it can’t hurt.

However, at some point in the near future, I will come up with a tertiary DNS server, so that if Godaddy does experience some kind of outage, we’ll at least have one more server to handle any new requests.

DNS name server changes can take anywhere between 1 and 72 hours to show up, depending on network conditions and your ISP’s caching. Most users should be fixed shortly, and if not, patience please… the DNS changes should be coming down your line soon.

Hopefully we won’t have any more issues like this in the future.

Bookmark to:

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!

Bookmark to:

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.

Bookmark to:

I’m very happy to announce the release of CMS Made Simple 1.5. Calguy and crew have done an amazing job keeping the CMSMS core chugging along and getting more stable and feature rich. Unless you’re totally locked into an older version, I recommend upgrading your site as soon as possible.

Some key points from the changelog:

• A new notification system in the admin
• A new dashboard page in the admin
• The ability to copy content pages has been added
• More bulk actions have been added to the list content page
• Numerous improvements to the installer
• Apply buttons on GCB’s and UDT’s
• TinyMCE changes: Updated to latest Tiny-core
• Extensive modifications were made to add a session key to each and every
  URL in the admin console. This prevents a medium level cross site scripting
  vulnerability
• Much, much more

As always, check out the full changelog for details on what has changed.

For a concise description on upgrading, take a look here.

Downloads for 1.5 can be found here.

Thanks again to all the CMSMS team: devs, translators and testers alike. You all seriously rock and here’s to another fine release.

Bookmark to:

Help make CMSMS award winning again

We got around to this a little late this year but there’s still time to nominate us for th Packt CMS Awards in the Overall Best CMS Category. You’ll have to hurry though as the nominations close August 25th!

http://www.packtpub.com/nominations-homepage

Bookmark to:

Hey all,

Continuation of the site moving process will be this weekend.

The main site, wiki, forums and module manager will be down starting at about 11 am UTC (7am EDT) and be down for 1 to 2 hours.

The majority of this time will be transferring files (the forum database is HUGE) and waiting for DNS changes to propagate. Everything should feel a lot snapper after the move.

If there are problems, schedule changes or whatever, I’ll post an update here.

Thanks!
Ted

Bookmark to:

Hey all,

We’re going to have a bit of downtime in the A.M (well, morning my time) as we move some of our services to new hosting. It’ll actually be a two step process with the 2nd bit happening in a week or two, but we’re handling the hard stuff now.

The forge, svn, translation center and downloads will be down starting at about 11 am UTC (7am EDT) and be down for 2 to 3 hours.

I’m hoping to have the downloads and forge up first (I’ve already done a test run and it worked fine), and then work from there with TC being last. I’ll then have some stuff behind the scenes to do for setting up various automations and backups, but that shouldn’t affect any users.

If there are problems, schedule changes or whatever, I’ll post an update here.

Thanks!
Ted

Bookmark to:

Summer is coming… and so is that time when the geeks behind CMSMS get together and swap war stories. As with last year, we plan on getting together in some unsuspecting city and causing our own brand of havoc for a weekend. We also plan to discuss the project’s direction and do some coding too…

This year, the unsuspecting city is Philadelphia, PA USA, which also happens to be my hometown. We’ve selected it because we wanted it on this side of the ocean, it’s relatively “central” to the people coming and I have a few connections for getting accommodations and other necessities.

The dates are Friday, August 22 through Sunday, August 24, 2008. Actual locations in and around the city are still sketchy at the moment, as is the exact schedule.

We are looking to have a public night one evening (probably Saturday) in which we can hopefully get some people to come out and tear up the town with us. If you’re in the area or like traveling, then stay tuned for more details on that.

We’re also going to do a donation drive similar to last year. I’d love to defer the costs for people as much as possible. We’ll discuss a goal and post that in a couple of weeks, probably around the same time as a set schedule.

I’ll keep everyone up to date with the details as I get them.

Bookmark to:

EDIT: The forum is back up. See below.

Hey folks.

The forum is down for awhile until I sort out some problems. Seems that all the posts from before December 11 were removed. I’m in the process to trying to recover what I can from backups, but it’s going to take some time for me to get it all sorted out. I figured it was best to take down the forums so we lose as little data as possible as I try to do a recovery.

I’ll post when it’s fixed.

EDIT: It’s back up. The last backup I have is from Dec 7th at 13.30 GMT. I restored it and tried to merge in the data afterwards with no success. Sorry, but this is best I can do. I have no idea what happened, but I’ll be looking at the logs to see if I can figure out something. Unfortunately, I just don’t have the time to play detective, so I’ll do what I can to lock down stuff so it can’t happen again.

As a side note, my new backup hardware came in this afternoon. So at least next time I’ll only lose a day instead of 2.

Bookmark to: