It’s that time of year again. Geek Moot 2009 was a huge success, even if just on a small scale. We sold out, traded a lot of great info and stories, and had a great time. Because of that, we’re doing it all over again, except we’re making room for more of you. While we don’t have all the details together yet, we have a location and a date. This year, we’re going to descend on Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, around the weekend of 18 Sept, 2010. This, again, will be a two day conference, most likely on Saturday and Sunday. Furthermore, on Friday evening, we’re going to try and put together a meet-and-greet type event at a local bar, which we assume most of the speakers will attend. Our goal this year is 150 attendees, so we’re going to have to think a lot bigger this time around as far as facilities go. A new addition this year will be several paid workshops. These will either happen the day before or the day after the event. The idea is that we will give high quality training by experts at decent prices. Plus, for the trainers that decide to take part, it should cover the cost of the trip for them. If you host a workshop you will get a good piece of the proceeds, with a percentage going to pay for the facility and ticket sales fee. So, even though the details aren’t totally sorted out yet, we wanted to get the message out that it’s coming and to start planning. The last moot was £50 GBP, which basically covered the location and coffee. Though we have no details made yet, our best guess is that we’re looking at €120 to €150 Euro this year, though this is totally dependent on the location and amenities. We want to keep it affordable, but make it a comfortable experience for everyone. If you’re planning on coming and would like to give a presentation, start thinking about what you’d like to do. We’ll start taking proposals when we give the official announcement and get the Geek Moot site up and running. Also, if you’re an expert in a particular field of CMSMS usage and would like to teach others, we’ll take workshop proposals as well when we get the site running. If you’re a company and would like to sponsor the event, get your business’s name out there, and help a great cause to the CMSMS community, please contact Ted and we’ll see what we can do to work that out. There’s plenty of room for sponsorship this year, and there should be a large number of people that will see your involvement. Last but not least, if you’re a native to Amsterdam, and have some suggestions for a bar, outing, event, or a large facility around the Leidseplein area, please contact Ted as well. We already have a great facility for the workshops (and possibly the meet-and-greet) in this area, and would like to center everything else around it if possible. We’re looking to make a formal announcement with all the details later this month, so stay tuned for that announcement.

Well, our little prank worked well... we hooked alot of you guys who just weren't quite sure if this was a prank or not.. and even a couple of you that forgot the dates. We managed to get this spread throught the inter-web as well, and the traffic on the server has been going nuts today. It's amazing how quickly news can travel with twitter and RSS. CMSMS is not being acquired by intuit, we're continuing on as normal. All of you that got tricked can now breathe. Happy April Fools Everybody. ------------------ Intuit a provider of on-line and off-line solutions aimed at the small business owner is pleased to announce the complete acquisition of the award winning web content management system 'CMS Made Simple (CMSMS)'. In an entirely cash transaction Intuit gains all rights and ownership to the CMS Made Simple source code, websites, ancillary software, images, documents and reference materials. Negotiations have occurred with key members of the open source packages development team that constitute the experience and knowledge base of CMSMS to allow an easy transfer of knowledge to the new corporate environment. Intuit feels that CMSMS's design goals of providing a web content management system designed to allow business owners a simple and easy way of managing their online presence is an ideal fit with its portfolio of products (both online and off-line) aimed at small business owners. The knowledge and techniques that have been integrated into CMS Made Simple will assist Intuit in providing additional services to their target customers. CMS Made Simple will be migrated to become an essential component of Intuits hosted solutions. Tentatively named 'SITES Made Simple' the package will continue provide small business owners with a simple, easy to use, secure, reliable, and flexible mechanism for providing a complete online presence for their business. As part of their web presense solution package Intuit will be offering reseller programs, training instructors, and offering a certification program for website developers within the year. Intuit will continue to operate the CMSMS forums, to support the CMSMS user community, and to provide security fixes, bug fixes and enhancements for the foreseeable future. Intuit sees the open source model that has been successful for CMS Made Simple as essential to providing a stable, quality product for those that prefer a hosted, problem free, low cost solution. For an undisclosed sum, Ted Kulp has been retained on a part-time basis as a technical advisor. He will assist in training Intuits staff with CMSMS's designs, API's and methodologies. During this period Ted wishes to spend more time with his family, and may even go back to some recreational welding. As well, Robert Campbell author of the popular FrontEndUsers, CGCalendar, CompanyDirectory and other modules, has sold to the new owner of CMS Made Simple an unlimited right to use for all of his modules. Robert will continue to develop the modules and support CMS Made Simple after he returns from a nice long, much overdue vacation in Asia. Ted had this to say about the acquisition: "A great deal of effort has gone into CMSMS. It's a mature product in use on tens of thousands of websites around the world, I'm proud of it. It's also been six years now that I've been doing this, and I feel that it's about time to try some of the other things I am interested in. I feel good about Intuit and their team, they'll be able to take the package to places I just didn't have the time or energy to go. I'm looking forward to seeing it in a year or two." When asked his opinion Robert responded: "I've used some of Intuits stuff in the past, they know what they're doing. And I see where they're going with the on-line web presence stuff. I think CMSMS will be a good foundation for them, and it'll be great for the product. Hopefully the certification program will help keep some of the wannabe web developers from asking dumb questions on the forum... then the signal to noise ratio can go back up and we'll have a good team of professionals providing quality service instead of the hap-hazard stuff we've seen to often". All interested parties have made commitments to retain the image of easy to use software and applications that both CMSMS and Intuit have diligently maintained. The rapid growth and forward thinking of CMS Made Simple coupled with Intuit's tenure and industry leading software is expected to take site development and content management to the next step.

This version marks a milestone for CMSMS, and although the changes in the code are minor, the ramifications are significant, so please read this article in it's entirety. As of this release we no longer support PHP 4.x - This means that you cannot upgrade your site to CMSMS 1.7 if your host is still running PHP 4.x. We encourage you to upgrade to PHP 5.2 or PHP 5.3 as soon as possible. This allows us to move forward with PHP and also as developers to take advantage of many of the new features in this programming language. If you could see me right now, you'd see me doing the dance of joy... PHP 4.x and PHP 5.x compatibility have been a thorn in our side for a long time. Also, we now require PHP 5.2.4 as a minumum and recommend PHP 5.2.12 or PHP 5.3.1 and higher. Why these specific versions you ask? Well it's a matter of experience. We have learned through much difficulty, and many days of debugging that some of the earlier versions of PHP 5.2.x were buggy, but have had reasonable success with version 5.2.4 and onwards. Additionally some users using some of the newer released modules that take serious advantage of some of the advanced features of PHP 5.x (like my modules) will experience some (often strange) difficulties unless you are running a later version of PHP 5.2 or PHP 5.3. In order to support PHP 5.3 in CMSMS and to release it as soon as possible, we did the minimal amount of changes required to get our functionality to be stable. This has some ramifications, particularly for those running the latest and greatest software in a development/testing environment. Specifically we require that E_STRICT and E_DEPRECATED be turned off from your error reporting. E_STRICT: As we stated above we did the minimal amount of changes required to get the functionality stable in PHP 5.3. Some of the core functionality still assumes PHP 4 and does some strange things that are against the model of PHP 5.3's syntax. As well, some of the libraries that CMSMS uses for things like ajax do not support E_STRICT. We are also sure many of the add-on modules do too. Therefore E_STRICT must be disabled. Note: E_STRICT is not included in E_ALL, however it may habve been turned on by your provider and may need to be overridden. E_DEPRECATED: Some modules (even some parts of the core) use functions that are valid in PHP 4, and in PHP 5.2.x, but are not valid in PHP 5.3. And to ensure that all of the functionality works as intended you will need to disable warnings about usage of these functions. Therefore E_DEPRECATED must also be disabled. This only applies to PHP 5.3.x php.ini settings for PHP 5.2.x The recommended value for error_reporting in your php.ini is: error_reporting = E_ALL .htacces settings for PHP 5.2.x The error reporting value in a .htaccess file has to be specified as an integer. php_value error_reporting 6143 error_reporting set directly in PHP If none of these options work, you may have luck with this line in your config.php: error_reporting(E_ALL); php.ini settings for PHP 5.3.x The recommended value for error_reporting in your php.ini is: error_reporting = E_ALL & ~E_DEPRECATED .htaccess settings for PHP 5.3.x The error reporting value in a .htaccess file has to be specified as an integer. php_value error_reporting 22527 error_reporting set directly in PHP If none of these options work, you may have luck with this line in your config.php: error_reporting(E_ALL & ~E_DEPRECATED); Changes Along with PHP 5.3 support, a handful of other changes and a sprinkling of minor bug fixes have been thrown into this release. The description of them follows: Version 1.7 - Cape Verde ------------------------------------- - We now support php 5.3 Note: Minimum PHP Version required is 5.2.4 though we recommend PHP 5.2.12 - Users that are using many of the newer modules that take advantage of PHP 5's OOP features may experience strange problems when using earlier versions of PHP 5.2. It is therefore recommended that your PHP version be updated frequently. Note: We do NOT support E_DEPRECATED or E_STRICT at this time. Note: We no longer support PHP 4.x - The installer no longer performs smarty caching - Improvements to TinYMCE - Now not depending on admin-theme's icons anymore. Thanks Nuno - Updated to Tiny 3.3-final - Added an option to generate cms-compatible thumbnails when uploading files though the filepicker. - Search 1.6.2 - Adds the detailpage param (can be overriden by modules) - ModuleManager 1.3.3 - Minor improvements... mostly for PHP 5.3 - Remove the long-deprecated ImageGallery plugin - Various small bug fixes Thanks We would like to thank all of the dev team members (including JeremyBass our newest member) who spent hours making the appropriate changes and testing them. We hope you enjoy this release, and feel free to use PHP 5.3 now.... Let the parties begin.

I'm proud to announce the first published book on CMS Made Simple. Written by one of our upstanding users, Sofia Hauschildt, and published by Packt Publishing, the book covers some of the following topics:

• Develop powerful, engaging, effective, and easy-to-use CMS websites for businesses, clubs, or organizations Implement your own design or any HTML /CSS template into CMS Made Simple with step-by-step instructions
• Integrate an e-commerce shop with PayPal checkout
• Easily implement YouTube videos into templates or pages
• Create custom forms of any complexity with individual fields using a builder
• Integrate a photo gallery or newsletter feature with ready-to-use modules
• Build print-friendly PDF versions of your sites on the fly
• Develop protected pages available only for members and manage visitor logins with a sign-in form
• Build your own functionality with module maker
• Much more...

You can find more information on the Packt Publishing site.  Since this is a book for an open source project, Packt sends us a percentage of the total sales to further the project. I've received a couple of copies of the book and started reading it over.  It covers a lot of great topics and answers questions that are asked repeatedly on our forums.  It should be a good resource to new users and veterans alike. Congratulations to Sofia on the publishing of this book. Let's hope it's a big seller and the first of many.

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 .

This is a security release, with the bonus of having some feature and bug fixes as well. It's recommended that you upgrade as soon as possible, since this flaw has been published and could possible be being exploited as we speak. Thanks to Beenu Arora and 0x6a616d6573 for testing and pointing out the flaws. Below is the full list of changes. Enjoy! Version 1.6.7 - Teremba Bay ----------------------------- - #3999 Upload a file with apostrophe make problem - #4137 small text typo in admin/login.php - #4192 Extra Page Attribute's are listed in the wrong order - #4208 Don't show inactive template in the page 404 - #4431 UDT names not validated when being edited - Improvements to XML module generation - Fixes to prevent possible remote file inclusion vulnerabilities - Minor improvements to the News module - New version of TinyMCE - Improvements to File Manager and Image Manager - Improvements to Module Manager; upgrade now possible from the "Available Upgrades"-tab - Adsense-plugin modified, to accept the ad_slot parameter