Yes. You’ve read correctly.
There will be a 1.2 release of CMS Made Simple before 2.0 comes out. It should be in beta within the next couple of weeks. 1.2 will attempt to address some of the major glaring features that people have asked for and will be the LAST release of the 1.x series of CMS Made Simple (except for any security flaws that come up).
Beta testing will be exteremely important in this release, as we don’t intend to have a 1.2.1, and with the exception of security fixes, we’ll avoid it at all cost. We need to focus our efforts on 2.0 from now on. We expect, and hope that the user community can once again contribute with testing of this release to make it stable, and usable.
Here are the major things that will be in 1.2:
a) Frontend Wysiwygs
Some modules (News 2.5) support text areas in the front end. Modules will now be able to provide a wysiwyg on the front end instead of just a plain text area.
b) News 2.5
Has an ‘extra’ field for additional information (maybe an image) Supports frontend article submission
c) Allow gid == 1 (the admin group) to have all permissions, not just uid == 1 (The first user)
d) Fixes to pagination issues (particularly in the admin log)
e) Defaults for new pages
There will be a new page or tab in the global settings menu that allows you to set the defaults for newly created pages (set the default metadata, cachable, show in menu, etc).
f) A security enhanced content editor
People without ‘Modify Page Structure’ permission will not be able to change the ’show in menu’, ‘page alias’, or active flags of a content item
g) Additional Editor Groups
Along with ‘user’ additional editors, you’ll be able to select groups as additional editors
h) Enhancements to debug mode to assist with debugging issues
i) An enhanced module manager that will not allow you to install modules that are not compatible with your version of CMS Made Simple…. and that will ‘optionally’ only show the latest version of a module.
j) A replacement file manager
k) More batch operations in Content >> Pages. Including the ability to export pages to pdf.
l) Batch operations in Layout >> Templates, and Layout >> Stylesheets
As well, the development team as been making an extra effort to close off some of the glaring bugs in the forge. We can’t get to them all, but hopefully many of the bigger ones can be closed for 1.2
The feature list of 1.2 is pretty much locked in at this time. We’ve had extensive discussions about the topic over the past few weeks, and this is the set of features we thought we could implement in a reasonable period of time without dramatic overhauls to the way things work, so additional feature requests are probably off of the table for this release.
As you can probably see, this will be a considerable step forward for CMS Made Simple, and its stability is paramount. I’ll keep you posted, but would like to take this time to call for volunteers for beta testing. Our testing team can only do a limited amount, and can’t possibly test all the permutations and combinations of problems that you can.
[addendum]
The beta cycle for this will be short…. 1 week per beta…. and we want to have no more than one or two betas. So please, test, test, and test…. 1.2 would be perfect for all of the sites that are ‘in development’ but won’t be rolled out for a while.
