Just wanted to make a quick comment about the number of releases in the last couple of weeks. We've basically had 2 major security releases in a matter of a week, and I'm sure that raises a red flag with some of the more established users. I just want to emphasize something... this is a good thing. Sure it takes you several minutes to update your sites to the latest version and there isn't an automated way of doing that yet. But as we gain users and gain popularity (very, very quickly I might add), more and more people are banging on the system and deconstructing it... finding these great obscure bugs that some hacker might've found first. And I make sure that we as a group jump on them as soon as I can. Instead of just sitting on them and waiting for a bunch to come in and bundle them up like Microsoft does, the group does all they can to get a new release out and get the word out quickly. This has become a philosphy for us and luckily all of the devs support it. Annoying? Sure. Responsible? Definitely. We're trying out best to make a great, safe product with the little team that could. And sometimes this is the best we can do. Thanks for you patience! Someday this gig will be fulltime for us and we can put a lot more time into making this the great app it should be.

Sorry to have to report this, but a new security issue was brought to our attention today. Ted had it fixed in just a few minutes, and released version 1.0.8. This vulnerability could result in unauthorized access to your CMS, so we strongly recommend that you update any CMS Made Simple installations you have on the open internet. Thanks to [dren] and Rift for bringing the problem to our attention.

Due to a few potential security problems that were brought to our attention, we decided to release 1.0.7 even before 1.1 was ready for prime time. We suggest you update to this version AS SOON AS POSSIBLE (again you say!, yeah we know, but it's better to fix these problems and get the fixes out soon rather than sit on them.) Here's the changelog:

Version 1.0.7 "Kahoolawe" -- Jun 11 2007 ----------------- - Fixes potential security issue with processing of smarty templates - Added a few missing permission checks to core modules

Yesterday we held a developer conference in IRC. I'll post a transcription of it as soon as I can get it together, but here is the rundown... 1.1 We are going to do an rc3 version. This is mainly because of some translation issues (mostly in French for some reason) and also because TinyMCE wasn't in the rc2 build (my fault). The idea is to release rc3 today, and then have 1.1 out in the middle of next week. We just need some quick user testing to make sure everything is correct now. Dev Team Additions ThomasM and Reneh (both of their IRC nicks) have been added to the dev team. Both have been a great help to the cause, especially on IRC. We will update the About Us page soon. We also realized that DeeEye isn't on the About Us page either, so we need to correct that. 2.0 The dev team is committed to finishing up 1.1 and moving that into maintenance status. At that point, the trunk will be changed over to the 2.0 code and the others along with myself will start working on it. While not said in the meeting, I'm still hoping for a beta in the September timeframe. Forge Rewrite As stated previously, I'm in the process of rewriting a simple gforge replacement. I just gave a quick overview of what is there and what is needed for launch. Hoping to beta that in about 2 weeks. Dev Team Meetup This was kind of the big topic we wanted to discuss. Basically, the dev team wants to finally meet face to face later this summer. We've set a date of the weekend of September 8th in Copenhagen, Denmark. We've chosen this location because 1) we have a team member there who has an apartment we can do some work in, and 2) because it's pretty central to several people on the team. Of course, for those of us in North America, it's pretty darn expensive and will probably require some fundraising, but we'll get there. Luckily, it's only 3 of us. Plans for what we're going to do while there haven't been fleshed out. I'm hoping for a decent social/work mix, but it's going to be kind of up in the air in order to keep everyone content. Though, it does seem like the 2.0 beta will hopefully be poking up it's head around that time, so there will probably be stuff to discuss/work on. Conclusion Another productive meeting. We took right around the allotted 2 hours and got a lot accomplished. We agreed that we wouldn't probably meet again until after 1.1 is released and it was time to start figuring out the 2.0 duties for the devs. The transscription (with some email addresses and urls removed to not promote spam) can be found here: http://cmsmadesimple.org/uploads/devmeeting-2006-06-06.txt

Hey all, Sorry if I haven't been around as much lately. As least with the forums, blog and working on 2.0. It's just been a hectic month. However, I do have some good news. We're in for a few infrastructure changes onver the next few weeks. Here's the quick rundown... I've purchased a new server. In fact, this blog has been running on that new server for about a week now. It has double the memory, way more than double the hard drive space and is MUCH faster. The existing server is really struggling with the increased traffic load we're received over the past few months, so this should help get rid of some of that down time. I'll be moving the main site, wiki and forums over tonight (sometime around 4 to 5 AM GMT -- May 20, 2007). The downtime should be minimal, and it's pretty much the slowest traffic time of our entire week, so I'm not TOO concerned about it affecting too many people. If I see a problem and have to abort, I will. In fact, I was going to do it last week, but mediawiki wasn't having any parts of it, so I gave up. The issues are resolved now, so it should be good to go. Gforge (dev.cmsmadesimple.org) will not be making the move, unfortunately. Gforge is great and all, but it's entirely too much system for what we do with it. The mailing lists are annoying, it's creating all kind of users and directories on the server, it's cron jobs are taxing the system, etc. Instead, I've rewritten a minimal gforge replacement in ruby on rails and figured out how to migrate the data. The rewrite isn't complete yet, but it's very close. I should have something working in another week or so, at which point I'll be asking people to help to beta test and work out the kinks. Then when it's time for it go live, we'll just do a final database migration and shut gforge off forever. :) After the first version goes live, I'll be looking for people to help add some new features, so stay tuned for that. After all this is done and the old server is off... the summer will be spent on 2.0. I'll have another announcement regarding that soon, but the dev team and I have to work out a few scheduling issues before I'll announce what it is. I'll make sure I post an update to this message after the migration is complete, for the curious... Thanks! Ted UPDATE -- The sites are moved. Everything seems to be working correctly. Let me know if something isn't.

Ok, so Featured Site Of The Week is just two months late, sorry Singapore kept me busy :) As I came back from Singapore and started browsing through new sites mentioned in cms show off forum I was greeted with tens of great sites all around the world. Great job everybody. Todays site Petersburg.ie comes from Ivan with the usual questionnaire. tsw) Who are you and where are you going to? Ivan) We are The Design Tribe, small creative web design studio based in Galway City on the West Coast of Ireland. ‘The Design Tribe’ consists of a three person team, Ivan who is responsible for all design and CSS, Alan the PHP/general ‘code monkey’ & Sue-Anne in Admin/Accounts. As a team, our main objective is to diver web design/solutions that are well designed, easy to use and functional. tsw) What is this site all about? Ivan) Petersburg.ie is a website for an Outdoor Education Centre in north Galway. The centre provides outdoor education courses to all age groups. The aim of the site was to promote the centre and to excite potential visitors about the possibility of using its facilities. We designed a site that used the strong bold colours often associated with the outdoor clothing industry. The site also features a one minute long ‘Petersburg Adventure’ flash animation that quickly shows the viewer where the centre is located in Ireland and also gives them a flavour of what awaits them in a days’ activities. tsw) Why did you choose CMSMS? Ivan) Having evaluated several open sources CMS’s - we chose CMSMS as it (A): had a beautifully designed end-user interface and (b): it allowed us great flexibility in delivering a perfectly tailored solution to each clients particular needs. CMSMS is just perfectly positioned in terms of functionality & features - it’s neither to simple nor to complex. I could go on all day listing out the various reasons why we like CMSMS – but basically - it allows us to produce multifaceted, well designed sites, relatively easily. tsw) How do you create your designs? Ivan) The design phase of any project starts with listening to the client and trying to ascertain their needs, tastes and wishes. All our designs start as a blank page in Photoshop so we boot it up and start determining the layout & colour schemes that best suits our clients’ needs. From here the design can go anywhere but the objective is always the same – a well designed usable site. Our designs are always a mix of eye-candy & functionality. Websites are meant to be used by users - so in our opinion usability comes a first, followed closely by eye-catching design. tsw) What have been your major problems with CMSMS? Ivan) Debugging can be slow. We've made a some modifications nearly creating our own development branch, but this means that we can't upgrade our base install without a lot of work. tsw) What has been good about CMSMS? Ivan) The framework that it provides, initially the learning curve is a little steep, but once you figure it out you can customise any site & provide great functionality quickly. The entire package is well engineered, big kudos to Ted and his army of helpers. tsw) Did you use extra modules? Ivan) Yeah, used Album & feedbackform, hacked one together and we have a nice beta Property Manager on the way - which may be good enough for the community (good enough for the community to hack apart anyway J ) tsw) How did the site launch go? Ivan) Flawlessly – after the launch the client had a few changes/additions – CMSMS made them a walk. tsw) In your own opinion what's good about this site and what's bad? What would you do differently? Ivan) We could have done with a bit more time to configure the album layout for the Gallery module. Otherwise we were very happy the project. tsw) Thank you very much on taking the time to answer these questions. Now, what would you like to say to fellow CMSMS'ers. Ivan) Dia daoibh! & CMSMS rocks! Nicely done site, Thanks Ivan! Hopefully I will have more time to write these articles more often during the summer!