So a huge thanks to all those who voted for us and an even bigger thanks to everybody who has contributed time, money code and resources and helped us to make CMS Made Simple the great piece of software it is. And let’s make sure we’re a smash hit at No.1 next year!

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I think a lot of us on the developer team take it for granted that we welcome volunteers. However,
we thought we’d make a formal announcement to that effect.

So … if there’s something that you want to improve, something that bugs you and that you can fix, please jump in and do it! To be effective, you should coordinate with us. Generally, the best way to do that is join us in the IRC Channel (also accessible via the Forum. For even more information, take a look at the IRC Support Page.

If you know you want to help, but don’t know what needs doing, we’re always looking for people to help on:

• Documentation
  • Tutorials
  • How-Tos
  • Screencasts / demos - show people how to solve common problems, or show the clever ways you accomplished something cool on your site
• Design
  • Themes (both user-facing and admin)
  • Logos and promotional items, for T-Shirts, mugs, etc.
  • UI / interface designs - got ideas for an easy way to improve usability in modules, the admin, or the default templates?
  • Powerpoint or other marketing materials to use to demonstrate or promote CMSMS (e.g., to conferences or users groups)
• Coding
  • Bug Fixes - send your patches to the forge!
  • Features - have you added functionality? Got ideas you’d like to implement?
  • Modules - writing modules is fun, useful, and oh-so-profitable! Here’s your chance to get in on the action.
  • Demos - are you willing to set up a Virtual Appliance demo? A bootable demo CD image? Some other cool way of showing off CMSMS?
  • Core/2.0 - are you a database optimization expert? A top notch coder? Here’s your chance to help us make this the best system ever.
• Other Stuff
  • Promotion - demo CMS MS to your local classroom, user’s group, or boss. Write articles or letters about it.
  • Nominate CMSMS for awards, or vote for it where it’s already been nominated.
  • Donate money.

So there you are: a lot of opportunities to make your mark, and to make CMS Made Simple even better!

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I apologize for the downtime of the forge server lately. We’re currently working with the hosting provider to track down the issue. I pulled the server down last night for a couple of hours to do some maintenance work on the file system… which I’m hoping will fix the random lockups and weird file corruption we’ve been seeing over the last couple of weeks.

Only time will tell whether this actually fixed it or not, but I’m feeling confident that linode knows what they’re doing. I’ll keep everyone posted and thanks for your patience!

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Now that CMS Made Simple has been nominated in the Packt 2008 Open Source CMS Awards it’s time for the community to turn out the vote and help make us winners in one or both of the following categories:

1. Most Promising Open Source CMS Award Finalists
2. Best Open Source PHP CMS Award Finalists

Not only will the project gain prestige and exposure from being ranked in this award but the prize money will help towards development costs and help speed the arrival of CMSMS 2.0.

So gather your friends and colleagues get voting!!

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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

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We will meet up in downtown Philly on Friday night for dinner and discussion. The formal meeting will take place in the Fairless Hills neighbourhood on Saturday and Sunday and will be available *live* via Mogulus starting at 10.00 EDT/14.00 GMT on Saturday 23rd.

The formal discussion agenda over the weekend looks like this.

1. Manpower issues
2. Documentation
3. 1.5 vs. 2.0
4. Open bugs for 1.x
5. 2.0
6. The *New* Forge
7. Roadmap: 90 day, 180 day, year, long term
8. How to “sell” CMSMS — marketing and attendance at tradeshows such as SXSW, the MySQL conf, etc.
9. Bug squashing and doc writing session (if time allows)

The group will also host a live Q&A Session (also over Mogulus, see above) for an hour from 14.00 EDT/18:00 GMT on Saturday. Feel free to join in the discussion and ask anything that’s relevant.

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Well, between vacation and some life changes, I’m a little behind on everything CMS related. Luckily, things are getting back to normal (I’ll post as to why next week)… but I’m now playing catchup on a lot of things. In fact, here is one thing I should’ve done 2 weeks ago.

The CMS Developer Geek Moot 2008 is next weekend. I’ll be having 6 people come to my house for the weekend to talk all things CMSMS. With that, I want to show people a good time.

Furthermore, we’ve discussed the idea of putting the meeting up on a broadcasting site of some sorts for the community to watch and interact with. We also want to video conference in Calguy this year properly. However, to do that with some kind of decent quality, I need to get some equipment.

Here’s what I propose…

I’m looking to raise $700 in less that a week. $350 of it will be for a 10 channel USB mixer and 6 lavaliere microphones. The rest will be used for beer, steaks, and potentially a nice dinner for the group. I want to handle this like last year.

Donators will be added to this post on a daily basis and moved over to the donations list on the main site. I might be a bit slow on updating today and tomorrow, as I’ll be driving from South Carolina to Philly to conclude my vacation. But the rest of the time, I’ll update the previous day’s donations the next morning.

Assuming we raise the money in time, I’ll post the broadcasting details later this week along with pictures of the setup and probably run a few tests to make sure it’s all working correctly.

What do you guys think? I know it’s a little last minute, but I think we can pull this off and have a really great developer’s conference this year again.

Thanks!

To make a donation, click the Paypal link:

Sorry for the delay posting Friday and Saturday — Saturday was a VERY long day!

Friday
Gustavo Fanger - $10
Mathias Linden - $7
Rob Lee - $150
David Nägele - $10
Ronny Krijt - $50
Alex Hertz - $100
Noel McGran - $50

Saturday
Cybercom Software - $100
Jordan Hlebarov - $5
Einar Povl Abrahamsen - $5

Sunday
Tatu Wikman - $60
Turner Technology, Inc. - $50
Suspire Media - $50
Data Concepts Unlimited, Inc. - $50
Concept Factory Pty Ltd - $100

Monday
emotion - http://www.emotion.lt - $100
Marten Wilmink - $50
http://lonejacobsen.dk - $100
Tony Sandland - $150
Jan Oliver Waldeck - $20

Tuesday
Richard Wallace - $175
Maine Webworks - $25

Wednesday
Benjamin Sion - Studio Circa - $50
Stephan Krause - http://vipstephan.de - $30

Total: $1497

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Version 1.4.1 “Spring Garden”
—————————–
- Fixes an issue with the “name” parameter being broken on the stylesheet tag
- Fixes an issue with changing group permissons on windows hosts
- Fixes an issue with group assignment
- Fixes a hard-coded table prefix in the css associations stuff
- Fixes a problem with REQUEST_URI not being set on IIS hosts (stupid windows)
- TinyMCE: Fixed problem with cmslinker not allowing to select parentpages
Fixed a small bug which could cause invalid relative urls to be generated
- A couple more small things…

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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// will work just as well as
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.

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We’ve cleaned up the Search module a bit, added some enhancements to assist people in dealing with the new template processing order, and tweaked the installer some more.

I expect this beta to last for about a week (or maybe till the 2nd of August). And I hope that this beta will be the last one in the 1.4 series. Then we can focus on 2.0 work for a while.

The first beta was downloaded in excess of 200 times (not including language packs or checksum files)… and I would really like for this beta to meet or exceed that total. The community has been doing great work with testing here, please keep up the good work.

I’d like to also thank the members of the dev team and the community that have put in considerable time in developing, testing, finding bugs, confirming them, then testing, and confirming the fixes, and sometimes even fixing the bugs themselves….. The community we have is growing stronger by the day, and everybody benefits from the active participation that these people give.

I’d like to thank these people (and I hope I didn’t leave anybody out, because this release has had contributions from a large amount of people.):
RonnyK, Reneh, Nuno, Silmilariion, Alby, _SjG_, tyman000, Cyberman, and of course Ted.

Now, another important note: A long standing issue with links in translatable strings appears to have been solved (many thanks to _SjG_)…. this means that people will have to go through and review all of their translations, and update any strings that have links in them… please, make the effort to go through everything in the core, CMSInstaller, and any core modules.

I still would not recommend using this beta (just because it is beta) on a production site, but if you are in the middle of a development project, or starting a new site… please feel free to use the beta. We are in feature cutoff (we have been since the first beta came out)… and plan that the changes from this point forward will be minimal.

Of course, you can download the files from here

Again, thanks to everybody…. what a fantastic community this is.

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