Announcing CMS Made Simple 1.4 "Jamaica"

Announcing CMS Made Simple 1.4 "Jamaica"


Posted: August 3, 2008 by Robert Campbell

Here 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 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 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.