CMS Made Simple Blog

Geekmoot Update

Robert Campbell — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 23:59:00 -0500

Hello Everybody

As you know our next GeekMoot will be in Northampton UK from March 8th to 10th. The Geekmoot preparations are well underway. The schedule is filling up fast, and the bookings are coming in!

Here's the latest and greatest news:

1. I'm attending. That's right, for the first time I'll be travelling to the GeekMoot. And infact giving a workshop and 2 presentations. This is the first time I will have met any of the dev team or any of the CMSMS users in person. I look forward to having a few beers with you and learning how you use CMSMS.

In fact, one of the presentations I will be giving this year is the keynote address where I will be outlining where CMSMS is, how the dev team works, along with our goals, and principles. As well, I will be giving some information as to where CMSMS is headed, how we plan to work in the future, and announcing some important news. I am sure Ted is very thankful for my relieving him of this chore.

Additionally, in my keynote address I'm going to discuss some of the issues that have faced us over the years, including the workflow debate, and the multi-lang issue. I am looking forward to hearing your feedback and to your understanding our goals.

2. We're stepping it up this time. One of the concerns from the last geekmoot was that we had rehashed some of the same old stuff. Particularly in some of the presentations. We've taken this into account and stepping it up a notch with new presentations including focussing on how you can take advantage of CMSMS In your business.

My presentation on module development will be briefly reviewing the CMSMS Module skeleton, and then focusing on some of the more advanced and technical module development concerns.

3. We're adding material for end-users. If your customers or content editors would like to get more out of their website, would like a better understanding of how their websites (or even websites in general) work, then they will get great information from our workshop day. One room is set aside for a whole day for end user sessions.

4. I'll be previewing CMSMS 1.11 and giving a hint as to our longer technical direction. Even though CMSMS 1.11 is still in development, and the end list of features isn't set yet you will get a sneak preview, and a chance to give us feedback.

5. As usual the GeekMoot will probably be a relatively informal thing. Lots of open conversation, and conversation in the hallways. We're already anticipating a pub night or two. We look forward to shaking your hands, and sharing your CMSMS experiences over a few pints.

Early bird prices have been extended till the end of January, so we encourage you to talk to your content editors or customers, and to register quickly.

Please, read more about the geekmoot, who is speaking, and what we're talking about. To do that, go here: http://geekmoot.com/. There is a registration button at the top of the page, but here it is again for good measure: https://geekmoot.stagehq.com/

CMS Made Simple shares fun and page views with the fans!

Ken Griffith — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 12:50:00 -0500

The "Special Fans Page" honors our fans by listing the sites and pages with the "I Love CMS Made Simple™" image. All who publish this image on their CMSMS (related) site* are given the opportunity to get a share of the thousands of visitors we get at cmsmadesimple.org. It's our way of saying "thank you" to all our community ambassadors for CMS Made Simple™.

Promote the 2012 GeekMoot

The same goes for members of the community who actively promote the 2012 GeekMoot that will take place in March in Northampton (UK). Power to the community!

Get the logos!

To download the logos click here.

Do you want to show the world you're a CMS Made Simple™ fan?

All you have to do is click here, and you too will see how to do it. Just make sure your screenshot contains the logo... :-)

* We hope you understand we follow some rules for decency. Screenshots from sites with offensive content will be removed. The same goes for web sites that clearly have nothing to do with CMS Made Simple™.

CHECK OUT THE FAN PAGE HERE!

Nominations are Now Open for 2011 Geekmoot Awards

Ken Griffith — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 11:40:00 -0500

Every Spring the CMS Made Simple Community recognizes the "best of" the previous year at our Geek Moot Awards Ceremony. We are now taking nominations for best of 2011 in the following categories: Developer of the Year, Design of the Year, Community Member of the Year, Theme Builder of the Year. Read more to follow the link to Geek Moot's awards nomination page.

To nominate and vote visit the awards page, or READ MORE and nominate directly from the links in this blog post below.

Announcing CMSMS 1.10.3 0 - Hyacynthe

calguy1000 — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 14:11:00 -0500

The CMSMS Dev team is proud to announce the release of CMSMS 1.10.3 - Hyacinthe. This is primarily a bug fix release on the 1.10 series, and fixes some important issues related to the wysiwyg editor and other minor inconveniences. We recommend that you upgrade your site(s) as soon as possible.

Although we wanted to release this version in December, We found and fixed some minor, but important bugs in the last few days, and it turns out that the delay may have been a good thing. This version fixes some issues with the MicroTiny WYSIWYG editor, and with syntax highlighter modules. As well, there is an important fix for installing modules via XML. Additionally, there are fixes for the cms_stylesheet plugin, and to the cms_selflink plugin.

We would like to thank all of the community that encountered and reported these issues, along with the members of the dev team who have spent many hours testing, and re-testing this release to ensure that it is stable and reliable.

CHANGES
-----------------------------
- Fixes to MicroTiny when theme uses dark background colors
- Fixes to MicroTiny problems in various modes
- Fixes to MicroTiny styles dropdown.
- Minor documentation fix in contentoperations
- Fixes to cms_stylesheet plugin regular expressions
- Fixes to cms_http_request
- Fixes to cms_selflink
- Fixes problem with login when homepage is set.
- Minor enhancement to the setlocale stuff.
- Fixes issues with get_module_instance
- Fixes create_textarea for syntax highlighters
- Fixes minor issue wrt home page in user preferences

2011 Year In Review

Robert Campbell — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 12:30:00 -0500

Happy Holidays, Seasons Greetings, and an early Happy New Year to all the dedicated CMSMS web professionals out there. The CMSMS dev team would like to take this time to thank you for your continued support of your favorite open source content management system. We thought that since it is almost the end of 2011 that we should take some time to review what has happened in the past year and outline some of the things that are coming up.

In 2011 the CMSMS Dev team began some transitions. Some people have left the dev team, while others have joined. We've formalized our processes a bit more, and worked on having a good, working relationship amongst ourselves. We are developing effective methods of communication. We've learned a great deal more about developing and supporting an industry leading, award winning product with a volunteer team that has diverse schedules and priorities, and (believe it or not) lives. We have formalized our membership and communication processes a great deal in the past year, and dramatically improved our workflow. And, we've made some mistakes along the way. All of this will make for better information flow, less confusion, a better team, and in the end a better content management product.

The goal of many of the decisions that the dev team made this year was to simplify our efforts, improve our communication with the community, and to focus on core needs as much as possible. To that end, we have discontinued any support for the 1.6 series of CMSMS, removed support for Postgres, announced a plan to phase out PHP 5.2 support, and announced that we had ceased efforts on the 2.0 project as it was known. We've firmed up our support policies, strengthened our relationship with our authorized language partners, and significantly improved our marketing and communication techniques. Though some of these decisions were unpopular, they will allow us to better focus on the needs of the vast majority of our user community.

Additionally, the list of stale, empty, abandoned, or non-working projects in our forge was a common concern by our user community. Recognizing that the dev team could not, and would not assume responsibility for these projects we debated what to do; and came up with a policy. That policy led to a project where we removed a large amount of stale projects from the forge. Later this year we formalized our forge project rules with the intent to minimize this problem on an ongoing basis, and will try to make the forge cleanup an annual process. The entire user community will benefit from this project by knowing which addon modules are actively developed, and maintained. Additionally developers will have a firm set of rules to work by.

This year we released numerous patch versions of CMSMS, and one primary functionality release: CMSMS 1.10. The 1.10 version marks a significant step forward in technology. It introduced concepts such as preview and lazy loading for modules, and generated significantly improved performance. Without a doubt most of our releases have met with significant success. This is indicated by the fact that The various packages of CMSMS have been downloaded over 150,000 times this year alone.

As with most functionality releases, the 1.10 release did not come without its problems. There were the expected and announced problems with module compatibility. There were also a few significant issues that were just not detected during the beta process. This is all inspite of the fact that the dev team put extra effort towards announcing the known potential difficulties well in advance, communicating frequently, and by having a longer than normal (and public) beta. We can say that everything didn't work out as well as we had hoped. Theere are important lessons to learn in this, and although we cannot say that we will never again make changes in the core that cause compatibility issues, we will try to adjust how we do things keeping these lessons in mind. It was a great learning experience for us, and we are moving forwards.

Because the majority of the team members are geeks at heart we had ideas for the future. Work CMSMS 1.11 has already started and is well underway. Even in the last few days of the year we have come together to do alot of great planning and great work on CMSMS. This is where we shine, and we are all happy to contribute to CMSMS and proud of our accomplishments.

2011 has been a great year for CMSMS. Not only in the technology, but in the steps we have taken, and the lessons we have learned. We will be applying those lessons in our future endeavors, and we have some great things planned. I am sure that 2012 will bring many fantastic changes to CMSMS and to the development process, and the business of CMS Made Simple.

If you would like to know more about what features and changes are planned for CMSMS 1.11; when it will be released; along with our goals and medium term plans, we encourage you to attend the Northampton Geekmoot from the 8th to 10th of March, 2012. We'll be previewing CMSMS 1.11 there, and reporting some other great news. We can't wait to see you there.

Best wishes for 2012 from the CMS Made Simple dev team.

Have fun with CMSMS!

Forge Project Rules

Robert Campbell — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 10:24:00 -0500

The CMSMS Dev team recently discussed some difficulties that appear from time to time with projects registered on the forge. Individually they are minor problems to the Dev team but can accumulate as we have seen in the past. Also, these problems may have major implications for our user community. To that end we as a group have come up with some rules for forge projects that are in effect as of now. In the past there have been no rules for projects in the forge, and therefore the result has been some confusion from time to time. The following document will soon be inserted as rules to read when registering a new project in the forge. Additionally, in the coming days we will also be sending an to all registered project administrators.

Introduction

The Forge is a website and application software hosted by CMSMS (all rights reserved) and written by Ted Kulp. Its purpose is to provide a space where third party developers can develop, manage and distribute add-on projects for CMS Made Simple in a non-interfering and cooperative manner.

The forge provides (amongst other things)

Source code repositories (svn or git), including browsing of source code.

A bug and feature management system

A file release and distribution system

CMSMS Forge Project Rules:

Copyright and License:

1. Only projects relating to CMSMS will be permitted. Projects that are not modules, plugins, themes, documentation, or translations for CMSMS will not be accepted. Additionally, we do not host websites. All projects submissions must be approved by a forge administrator.

2. Only open source projects released under the GPL (Gnu Public License) or another compatible license will be permitted. Additionally, all projects must be distributed with their source (i.e: no encrypted source files).

3. Special rules apply to translation projects which are distributed with the CMSMS core. Forge administrators may add or otherwise manage the people that have access to the project in order to foster participation in the translation effort.

4. All projects must retain proper copyright permission and give proper copyright credit for included or forked projects.

Account Information:

5. Contact information (email addresses) etc. must be kept accurate at all times. The CMSMS Dev team will use this contact information in the event of a concern about a project owned by that user, or for occasional email updates about forge projects and the forge status. The contact information will not be published in any machine readable way on the forge. If the contact information for a forge account is not accurate it may lead to the account and all related projects, bug reports, feature requests or other input being removed.

Responsibility and Warranty:

6. The CMSMS Dev Team assumes absolutely no responsibility or warranty for the working state of any project, its reliability, security, or compatibility with any version of CMSMS. Projects are managed by their individual developers and the CMSMS Dev team (other than instituting guidelines, rules, and policies) has no responsibility for the code or documents housed within the project.

The purpose of the forge is to serve as a convenient place for contributing authors to house, manage and distribute projects related to CMSMS. It in no way indicates that the CMSMS Dev team is in any way responsible for the working state or accuracy of the projects housed within.

Project Cooperation:

7. Projects that require their users to modify the source code of the core or of any other projects will not be permitted. Projects should install and work properly using the officially supported distribution and installation methods (XML files, or zip/tar files) and require no modification of any other files, particularly files created by another project. Where possible special requirements such as required php extensions, or php configuration limits for the project should be listed in a place that can be easily read by the user before downloading and installing (for modules putting this information in the help or about information is sufficient).

8. No projects that directly modify the data or preferences of any other project or of the core will be permitted.
This means that Project B when installed should not be adjusting preferences or directly writing to the database tables managed by project A or of any core data structures or preferences. Project B must instead use the documented and public API’s of Project A or not interface with the project at all.

Exception: The author may access or modify the data of another project ONLY if they have responsibility and control for the other project. For example, if an author owns the copyright for, and maintains two modules that work cooperatively together then he may write code in one module that directly modifies the preferences and data of the other.

9. No projects that use undocumented or private API’s of another module or of the core will be permitted.
When writing project B that will depend on project A, an author frequently looks through the source code of the other project to find functions he can use to accomplish his tasks. The author should not use any undocumented or private methods within the other project.

If a function exists but is private, or undocumented, or does not exist the author has two options:

Work with the author of the other module to enhance the documentation or the API’s to solve the problems required.

Fork the module (thereby assuming responsibility for the code), see the forking rules, below.

Stale or Inactive Projects:

10. Projects that have no commits or releases within the first three months after approval will be deleted without notice.

11. Projects are marked as “Stale” after 12 months without commits or releases. Projects that have no commits or releases for 24 months may be deleted, this will be judged on an individual basis.

12. The CMSMS Dev team will at no time use its administrative access on the forge to allow another community member access to a project to which he is not otherwise entitled.

i.e: There is no way for a community member to ‘assume’ responsibility over a stale project.

The original author(s) will retain copyright rights, and ownership in perpetuity.

Language and Distribution:

13. Projects that install as a third party add-on into CMSMS must display in the module manager and in other distribution mechanisms in English including the description, and install and work correctly in English. Additional translations may provide for the ability for the project to display its information in other languages, however the English version must always be present.

Forking Rules:

Open source projects may be forked at any time. Forked projects can be hosted on the CMSMS forge as long as they follow all of the above rules along with:

14: Authors of project forks must change the contact information in the modules help and about information, and clearly describe that the project is a fork of another project.

15. Forked projects should be able to exist cleanly on the same CMSMS Install as the original project and should not interfere with it in any way.

Enforcement Policy:

The CMSMS Dev team will not actively review the source code for each project, or the state of each project. Individuals are asked to report their concerns via email to forge@cmsmadesimple.org. Concerns will be handled on an individual basis. When a concern is reported a member of the CMSMS Dev team will review the reported project and may decide to take further action.

If the concern is regarding a stale project, and the project has not had commits or releases for 24 months the Dev team will at its discretion either attempt to contact the administrator of the project, or delete it.

In other cases the Dev team will make a reasonable effort to contact the administrator of the project in order that the concern can be rectified. The administrator will have thirty days to respond to the email and begin to rectify the concern. We are not as concerned about time frames as we are about effort. If the administrator has responded to our concern and indicates that they will correct the problem within a reasonable period of time, we may have no further contact with them, and consider the issue closed, or continue to monitor the issue at our discretion.

If within 30 days we have no contact from the administrator, the Dev team may decide, depending on the severity of the concern to delete the project or to remove the project from public view as the technology on the forge permits.

The Dev team will make all reasonable attempts to assist the administrator in correcting the problem, by providing guidance or specific technical recommendations where possible. However the Dev team as a whole will not accept responsibility for the effected code or the accuracy of the recommendations.

Thank you for your time and cooperation.

Donations Needed - Geek Moot 2012

Robert Campbell — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 12:33:00 -0500

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 12:33:00 -0500 http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/2011/12/Donations-Needed-Geek-Moot-2012/
Since the members of the Dev team all volunteer their efforts to CMSMS, we need to raise some funds to allow some of the team members to travel and participate in the conference and to personally meet you. We are looking to sponsor at least two developers from north america and to assist a couple of others with expenses for the three day conference. We are looking to raise $6000 USD by March first. The money will go towards airfare and hotel fees for the dev team members. We know that our community can come together to make this happen.

We will of course be listing all donations on this page on a weekly basis. Furthermore, all donations over $200 will be listed on the geekmoot program, and all donations over $500 will also have the opportunity to post a suitable rotating banner on our websites (rotating banner on equal priority with the other contributors and partners) for two months and a posting on our monthly newsletter.

So lets come together and make this the best Geek Moot yet

Amount Raised to date: $1309USD!!

Update 1: December 30, 2011

  - Dec 11 - Jos $50
  - Dec 11 - Two in a Room Studios $20
  - Dec 19 - Sanjay Cherubala $100
  - Dec 19 - Thomas Petersen $500
  - Dec 20 - poloDesign $100
  - Dec 25 - Martin Rotman $15
  - Dec 26 - Doctype Media, LLC $35
  - Dec 27 - Lukas Hehn $10
  - Dec 29 - Charles Shader $20

Update 2: January 17, 2012

  - Jan 4 - Sugna Design LLC: $20
  - Jan 4 - Jan Andrejko of Foliovision: $100
  - Jan 6 - Webuseful Solutions Ltd: $50
  - Jan 6 - Ibrahima Fodé NDIAYE
  - Jan 6 - Hans Birger Eriksson: $139
  - Jan 8 - Justin Brower: $10
  - Jan 9 - marc gobes: $50
  - Jan 15 - Swan River Web Design, Inc: $10
  - Jan 16 - harald brandner: $50
  - Jan 17 - Lukasz Bigoszewski: $10
  - Jan 17 - JLK Ventures, LLC: $20

Many thanks to those that have already contributed, and lets keep up the great work!]]>

Call for Speakers - Geekmoot 2012

Robert Campbell — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 12:22:00 -0500

Hello CMSMS Professionals. We don’t often reach out to professionals, because like us you are often busy working on your next greatest project. Your coffee is often cold and you’re working way too late with pressing deadlines and interesting challenges. You are always moulding your favourite content management system to do something different; solving a problem you know would be difficult with other packages.
Well, here is your opportunity to share some of the things you have learned, the techniques you have developed and maybe a few of your secrets with your colleagues. Here’s your opportunity to make yourself known!

Geek Moot 2012 is coming! We are looking for CMSMS Professionals like you for presentations and workshops.

For example..

- you have just developed the latest and greatest viral marketing campaign using CMSMS;
- you want to share techniques about developing mobile friendly and SEO optimized websites;
- you have techniques about combining modules to build the newest social website;
- you want to share tricks and techniques about smarty with respect to cross browser layout;
- you have developed tips and techniques in CMSMS that you would like to share,

Your community would like to hear about it.

Give a little and get a little. Not only will your standing in the CMSMS community be raised, but there are a number of other benefits that we’ll give you to make your contribution worth your time and effort.

- Free day! Give either a presentation at the conference or a workshop on the pre conference workshop day, and we will give you one conference day for free! That’s a saving of £75.00
- A listing in our conference program
- A listing on the Geek Moot Website
- Mentions in the active Twitter and Facebook marketing campaigns.
- Plus of course a great experience at the Geek Moot!

The Geek Moot is in Northampton, UK in March 2012. Workshops will be held on the 8th of March in two separate rooms, and presentations on the 9th and 10th of March in one larger room. Workshops run for about 90 minutes, and presentations range from 45 minutes to an hour. Spots are available for both workshops and presentations. If you are interested in sharing your knowledge about a CMSMS related topic at our GeekMoot in Northampton UK in March 2012 then we would like to hear from you. So fill in the form at http://www.geekmoot.com/2012/call-for-presentations right now!

The dev team will review the proposed presentations and work with you to find the best time for you to strut your stuff. We will work with you to help you fine tune your presentation, answering any questions that you may have so that this will be the best experience possible.
This is a win-win situation. And be sure to hang out with us after the conference there surely will be a fair amount of "networking" happening at the end of each day.

So, what are you waiting for? Fill in the form at http://www.geekmoot.com/2012/call-for-presentations right now!

GeekMoot 2012 announced

scotch33 — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 11:40:00 -0500

It's that time again. The developers of CMS Made Simple have finalized plans for our yearly user conference. On Mar 9th and 10th, 2012 CMS Made Simple will host the third public Geek Moot event at The Lime Trees Hotel in Northampton in the UK, with a preceeding workshop day on the 8th. There will be plenty of presentations by the devs and other members of the community, events, networking and just general geeking out. There are plans for evening events in the works and they will be announced soon. Come spend time with the CMSMS devs and other people just like you for a few days of fun with the system you love. For more details on the event, see http://geekmoot.com/2012.

Presentations We are looking for people to do talks and presentations on CMSMS related and web development topics. If you'd like to do a presentation (and promote yourself as a CMSMS know-it-all or your company), please contact us here. Proposals are due by 15th December.

Workshops We are also looking for people who want to host a workshop on the 8th of March. Workshops will be an extra fee and even after covering the cost of the room, should easily pay for the trip for a half of day's worth of work. We'd like to get this setup as quickly as possible, so if you would like to host a workshop, please contact us so we can see if it will work and book a time slot. Once these are setup, we will announce them to the community and beyond.

Sponsors In addition, we are looking for potential sponsors. We've created several sponsorship packages, but of course, if you have other ideas for sponsorship, let us know. Sponsorship details are found here. We would love to get several sponsors if possible.

Donation Drive We will also do our yearly donation drive in a month or so. The money for this will go to paying for several devs to travel to the conference, as they normally wouldn't be able to. We'll announce that when we're prepared to handle the influx of funds -- and figure out who needs them.

Early Bird Discount Register by 30th December and receive a discount! We'll have some other deals as well as we get details. Stay tuned! Thanks! We hope to see you in March!

Announcing CMSMS 1.10.2 - Casa Pilote

Robert Campbell — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 12:04:00 -0500

CMSMS 1.10.2 is more of a ‘smoothing out the rough edges’ release. Only one of the issues we addressed could be called ‘critical’.. but some of them were rather annoying and caused confusion. As well, some were old issues that we finally addressed. So it was time to get them out of the way.

Perhaps the biggest thing we changed was with the way we generate the release scripts. We now force all english variants to go into the english package. This fixed the problem with MicroTiny not working if you had just installed this package.

Secondly we fixed a harmless but disconcerting error message generated by Module Manager. Also, we addressed an issue with MicroTiny for single line input where just a module is called. And a minor issue with the urlparam argument to cms_selflink. There were also some problems with the CmsPrinting module, and some styling issues fixed in the admin themes (Many thanks to the people that contributed the changes). We also fixed a minor issue with editing content when the page alias was blanked out, and an issue with CopyContent. None of these could exactly be called ‘exciting’.

We intend now to focus our efforts on development of CMSMS 1.11.

We still recommend people to backup, then upgrade to CMSMS 1.9.4.3, and to make sure all modules are upgraded and working properly before upgrading to the 1.10.x series.

Enjoy

Announcing CMSMS 1.10.1 - Le Lorrain

Robert Campbell — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 12:42:00 -0400

Here we are again, straight out of a major functionality release, with a new point release for a significant bunch of bug fixes. Named 1.10.1 - Le Lorrain (pronounced one point ten point one), We had hoped that our longer, public beta process would have caught most of the issues like this. However, as they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. C'est La Vie.

The prominent bugs we fixed were with respect to inactive content pages, and with respect to module functionality. We also fixed the summarize modifier, and even a postgres compatibility issue. As well, we added some help where it was missing, and managed to squeeze in some minor optimizations too. Some missing help was added, and/or improved in some modules, and the translations should be much more up to date.

We encourage everybody to upgrade their website(s) to CMSMS 1.10.1 As soon as possible, as this release marks the end of support for the 1.9 series of CMSMS. As well, there are some important bug fixes for ALL users of CMSMS 1.10.

There will be a diff package for this release, but only from CMSMS 1.10. It is still recommended that you ensure that your modules are compatible with CMSMS 1.10.x before upgrading your production sites. And always have a verified backup before doing any upgrades. If you don't have a backup, there isn't much we can do to help you if things go bad, except to shake our heads.

Thanks go out to all of those that found these issues and to the members of the dev team who have again spent many hours testing, fixing and re-testing issues.

Have fun with CMSMS 1.10.1

Issues we Addressed:
- Fixed a problem with improper HTTPS detection in the metadata plugin
- Fixed a problem with modules not being loaded properly for admin stylesheets
- Fixed a minor problem with microtinyconfig
- Fixed a minor issue in event handlers.
- Adds one more error check into MenuManager wrt to GetContent on inactive objects.
- Fixes a problem with GetAllContent() which effects the parent dropdown stuff.
- Fixes a problem with deleting inactive content.
- Fixes the summary modifier.
- Replaces the cms_tree_operations::load_from_list() method with a simpler, recursive function.
- Minor optimizations to the cms_content_cache class to reduce database queries when there are deactivated pages.
- Inactive pages now show up in order content, and in a different color.
- ModuleManager - minor improvement to the is_connection_ok method.
- adodb_lite - get rid of some files that are not needed (xmlschema, config etc).
- Fixes a problem with uninstalling deactivated modules.
- Fixes sorting for page_image and thumbnail dropdowns
- Fixes call to GetParameters in the module API that would hide parameters from the help if the module was using the new InitializAdmin method.
- Fixes postgres compatibility issue.
- Fixes pagination bug in news admin interface when category is selected.
- Minor fix to upgrade in News.
- Fixes minor problem with Pageinfo class.
- Fix to the GetModulesWithCapability method.
- Adds help for MicroTiny.
- Adds more help for the {content_module} tag.
- Fixes a problem in the Redirect method of the module api if a value of a parameter was 0
- now extend time limit in the module manager for time intensive operations. (some hosts may not allow this).
- Fixes some minor template issues in News.

Announcing CMS Made Simple 1.10

calguy1000 — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 07:13:00 -0400

The dev team is proud to announce that CMSMS 1.10 (one point ten), the latest stable version of CMS Made Simple is now ready for download. This version continues the development of the 1.x series with some exciting new features that enhance the admin experience and make maintaining a site an even more efficient process. Our focus for this release has been to make CMSMS faster, lighter, and stronger.

The development team has once again contributed many hundreds of hours of their time to create, enhance and rationalize the features and systems of this version. We are confident that as we push this release out the door that all the work that has been done during the development and beta processes will make CMSMS 1.10 the best version of this software yet.

This version of the software has gone through an extensive beta process that resulted in 4 beta releases, lasting about two months. The various beta releases have been downloaded well over one thousand times by members of our community, which represents a great deal more hours of testing and contributions by our valued user community. We hope that this open beta will make CMSMS 1.10 the most stable release yet.

By far the biggest changes in this release include adding support for lazy loading of modules, dropping TinyMCE in exchange for MicroTiny, A complete revamp of the module downloading code, and exchanging the Printing module with CmsPrinting. These changes have resulted in a dramatic reduction in the download size of CMSMS 1.10.

Module Lazy Loading is a huge feature that will reduce system requirements and improve performance of your website. It means that modules that are not needed on a page will not be loaded (modules must undergo a few minor modifications to support this). Lazy loading also occurs in the admin interface. The admin navigation is cached for each user so that after the first request memory requirements are much smaller.

MicroTiny as the default WYSIWYG. MicroTiny is a faster, stripped, and trimmed down version of the tinymce editor, optimized for the functionality that is needed by content editors on a majority of sites. The full TinyMCE module will continue to be available from the module manager as a third party module.

CmsPrinting module which provides similar functionality without the bloat of the tcpdf library that proved to be used by only a small percentage of users. PDF Printing capabilities will continue to be provided by the use of a third party module.

ModuleManager (and it’s partner server component ModuleRepository) have been significantly revised to use a RESTFUL interface rather than a SOAP interface (sorry for the geek talk). Which results in a dramatic reduction in memory requirements for downloading modules from our forge. Additionally, the XML parsing functionality has been rewritten to use memory more optimally, and there are functionality improvements as well. As a side benefit to this effort we were able to completely remove the nuSOAP module from our distribution.

Another huge feature for 1.10 is the new preview functionality in the News module. Here you can select a page, and a template to use for the preview. This will be huge for the sites that use the news module extensively and provide a reference so that module developers can implement similar features into their modules.

To modernize the core system and streamline we have removed a series of old elements including: the depreciated {literal}{stylesheet}{/literal} plug-in, stylesheet.php and the associated preference. Sites using the old {literal}{stylesheet}{/literal} plugin should continue to operate fine, however it is no longer available for new sites built with CMSMS 1.10. Similarly, the adsense plug-in and startExpandCollapse/endExpandCollapse plugins have been removed from the core.

1.10 is also now fully compatible with MySQL 5.5 which solves any database issues as your server hosts upgrade.

For ease of site and admin maintenance we have improved many features. We have reworked the installation process layout for better theme consistency. The installer itself (and the system information page) has been updated to issue warnings instead of errors for E_STRICT and E_DEPRECATED. Finally we’ve made modifications to the installer to better handle modules.

General enhancement of the admin interface has been a priority, starting with the login page. If you try to access an admin page when logged out, you will be auto-returned to that page upon login – great for those times your admin times out. Failure to login correctly now issues a login failed’ event to allow for custom handling (email notifications maybe) of failed login events. For our international users there is now the ability to view module help in english in the event that the translated help for a module is not up to date, or not clear. Additionally, the Systeminfo page has been redesigned for better readability

The auditing system has been significantly improved, we’ve rewritten the interface in smarty, added filtering, and IP address tracking for actions undertaken by a logged in administrator. Additionally there are now preferences for the lifetime of the admin log so that the history doesn’t grow extraordinarily large, and ensured that most significant actions in the admin interface generate audit entries to ensure that the information in the audit log is more useful.

For security we have added support for a separate admin URL that supports SSL, and added the ability to salt passwords for your admin users. As well, we’ve modified all cookie commands to ensure that the secure param is managed properly on SSL pages.

JavaScript support is further improved with the {literal}{cms_jquery}{/literal} tag to include the jquery provided with CMSMS, and we’ve updated the JQuery and JQueryUI that is distributed in the core.

The {literal}{cms_stylesheet}{/literal} tag has been improved to combine all stylesheets into one cached .css file by default, thus under normal circumstances reducing the number of requests to the server required by the browser to render a page. Combining stylesheets will only occur if the media types for all of the stylesheets attached to a page are identical.

There have also been a lot of improvements in content. In the page edit screen “page URL” is moved from “Options” tab to the “Main” tab. The cms_selflink tag now allows for width and height parameters when using images. The content tag now allows for a max_length parameter so it is possible to control how much content can go into any given area. The parent dropdown now optionally uses the menu text as opposed to the longer title that was showing. We have also revamped the content permission mechanisms, User Defined Tags now contain a description area just like Global content blocks, so you can include notes as to what they do. Global content blocks themselves now show the description in the summary listings for fast reference.

Along with a slew of bug fixes, we have also undertaken a number of housekeeping tasks to further improve the system and its efficiency: We have taken effort to minimize the core XXXXX.module.php files to result in less memory requirements for most actions. Version check now uses a new cms_http_request class to get past the allow_url_fopen limitation on some hosts. All distributed plugins have an assign parameter for better use in smarty. The NuSoap module has been removed as a core module.

We have also cleaned up a large amount of classes to facilitate growth, enhance security, and manage performance going forward. This includes getting rid of the last of the deprecated callbacks from the module class itself, getting rid of a number of member variables that are now redundant ($gCms→modules and the module→cms and module→smarty etc members). We have cleaned up the content classes a fair bit, and additionally ie6 relevant conditional styles and inline JS has been removed from the distribution. Unfortunately, this means that we have broken some compatibility, and may cause difficulty for people in the upgrade process.

Recommended Upgrade Procedure:

Users wishing to upgrade to CMSMS 1.10 should follow two similar, but different paths depending upon their sites current version of CMSMS.

It is always important to have a backup of your site, including the database and all relative files before proceeding with an upgrade.
If the version of CMSMS is less than 1.9.3:
a) Perform an upgrade to CMSMS 1.9.4.3 and verify that everything is working fine.
b) Backup your site again. It is always important to have a known-good-backup.

For all users upgrading to CMSMS 1.10:
c: Upgrade all modules to the latest available version.
d: Look at all of the third party plugins you have installed into your sites plugins directory and ensure that they should be compatible with CMSMS 1.10 (you may need to refer to the information below or to the forum for this).
e: Look at all of your User Defined Tags (UDT’s) to insure that they should be compatible with CMSMS 1.10. See the technical information below to see what has changed.
e: Ensure that each module that your site requires is compatible with CMSMS 1.10. As some modules have needed revisions to be compatible. If your site is using some older or less used modules, you may have to contact the modules author or enquire in the CMSMS forum to see if the module is compatible.

What We Broke (Technical Stuff):

1: Removing $gCms→smarty, use cmsms()→GetSmarty() instead.
In older versions of CMSMS the $gCms object contained a reference to the global smarty object. The global smarty object is now a singleton to ensure that it cannot be instantiated more than once.

2: Removed the $gCms→config, use cmsms()→GetConfig() instead.
Similar to the Smarty object, the config object is also a singleton. Therefore that method of accessing the config object has been removed.

3: Removed the $gCms→modules array. use cms_utils::get_module() instead.
The public modules array, a throwback to the days of php4 has been removed, and replaced with a complete api (see the ModuleOperations class). A simple method to obtain a module object reference has been (since CMSMS 1.9) the cms_utils::get_module() method. This may effect your UDT’s the most.

4: Revised the content objects
In CMSMS 1.10, as the first step in revising our object interface for the sake of efficiency we have revised the Content object to ensure that all member variables are private and that accessors exist for each data member. The most prominent of these is the ‘mModifiedDate’ member of the content object, which was public but had no accessor method.

5: The CmsObject class is now final and a singleton.
In CMSMS 1.10, the CmsObject class (aka the $gCms variable) is now a final, non-extendable class.

6: Removed deprecated callbacks from the module api.
The last of the long deprecated callbacks were removed from the module class as they have been replaced by events for a long time.

7: Private, Protected, and final methods in the module API.
Our first step in the cleanup of the module API was to clean up the interfaces for this class. We have declared most methods to be public or protected. Some methods are also final and cannot be overridden. We have also deprecated the Redirect methods of the module API.

8: Replaced, but deprecated some members of the module class.
The smarty, db, and config members of the module class (which were references to the global versions of those objects) have been removed, and replaced with access methods. Though this should not break compatibility the following is now deprecated:

$this→smarty – when $smarty is not provided to you in scope, you should use cmsms()→GetSmarty()
$this→db – when $db not provided to you in scope, you should use cmsms()→GetDb();
$this→config – you should use cmsms()→GetConfig();
$this→cms – When not provided in scope, you should use $gCms = cmsms();

Thanks:

As always, massive amounts of effort has gone into creating this release, freely donated by the members of the development team and other volunteers. Special thanks to:
Ronny Krijt, Rolf, Jeremy Bass, René Helminsen, Jeff Bosch, Robert Campbell
John Scotcher, Ted Kulp, Samuel Goldstein, Morten Poulsen, Goran Ilic
Mark Reed, Anne-Mieke Bovelett, Keith Lauchlan and to Jean-Claude Etiemble (jce76350)

Also, The Dev Team cannot forget to thank the hundreds of members of our community that have volunteered their time to participate in the beta program to make their favorite content management system even that much better. Without their help CMSMS 1.10 would not have been as stable. Keep up the good work.

© Copyright 2011 the CMS Made Simple Dev Team. All Rights Reserved.

Announcing CMSMS 1.9.4.3 - Security Release

Robert Campbell — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 13:10:00 -0400

Sat, 27 Aug 2011 13:10:00 -0400 http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/2011/08/Announcing-CMSMS-1-9-4-3---Security-Release/
This issue has been around for a long time, and only recently came to light. We recommend that everybody upgrade their CMSMS installs as soon as possible.

There is no database schema change in this version, therefore we have provided 'patch' versions to make this easier for those that are running a recent version of CMSMS. You should be able to download the appropriate 'diff' package, and upload it directly to your site(s).

Thank you for your time and consideration.

We would like to thank the people that reported this issue in a professional and mature manner.
]]>

Announcing CMSMS Version 1.10 Beta1

Robert Campbell — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 10:45:00 -0400

The dev team is proud to announce the latest version of CMS Made Simple is now in beta. This version continues the development of the 1.0 series with some exciting new features that enhance the admin experience and make maintaining a site an even more efficient process. Our focus for this release is to make CMSMS Faster, Lighter, and Stronger. A number of old and redundant elements have been exchanged or removed to further streamline your favorite software.

The development team has once again contributed many hours of their time to create, enhance and rationalize the features and systems of this version. We are confident that as we turn this version over to the Beta testers that all the work that has been done will make CMSMS 1.10 the best version of this software yet.

By far the biggest changes in this release include adding support for lazy loading of modules, dropping TinyMCE in exchange for MicroTiny, and exchanging the Printing module with CmsPrinting.

Module Lazy Loading is a huge feature that will reduce system requirements and improve performance of your website. It means that modules that are not needed on a page will not be loaded (modules must undergo a few minor modifications to support this). Lazy loading also occurs in the admin interface. The admin navigation is cached for each user so that after the first request memory requirements are much smaller.

MicroTiny as the default WYSIWYG. MicroTiny is a faster, stripped, and trimmed down version of the tinymce editor, optimized for the functionality that is needed by content editors on a majority of sites. The full TinyMCE module will continue to be available from the module manager as a third party module.

CmsPrinting module which provides similar functionality without the bloat of the tcpdf library that proved to be used by only a small percentage of users. PDF Printing capabilities will continue to be provided by the use of a third party module.

A huge feature for 1.10 is the new preview functionality in the News module. Here you can select a page, and a template to use for the preview. This will be huge for the sites that use the news module extensively and provide a reference so that module developers can implement similar features into their modules.

To modernize the core system and streamline we have removed a series of old elements including: the depreciated {ldelim}stylesheet{rdelim} plug-in, stylesheet.php and the associated preference, The adsense plug-in and startExpandCollapse/startExpandCollapse from the core, (due to a potential license violation).

1.10 is now fully compatible with MySQL 5.5 which solves any database issues as your server hosts upgrade.

For ease of site and admin maintenance we have improved many features. We have reworked the installation process layout for better theme consistency. The installer itself (and the system information page) has been updated to issue warnings instead of errors for E_STRICT and E_DEPRECATED. Finally we’ve made modifications to the installer to better handle modules.

The ModuleManager module has been significantly revised, to allow installing older versions of modules, install multiple modules with one click, reduce system load, and install modules with one click after completing a search.

General enhancement of the admin interface has been a priority, starting with the login page. If you try to access an admin page when logged out, you will be auto-returned to that page upon login – great for those times your admin times out. Failure to login correctly now issues a login failed’ event to allow for custom handling (email notifications maybe) of failed login events. For our international users there is now the ability to view module help in english in the event that the translated help for a module is not up to date, or not clear. Additionally, the Systeminfo page has been redesigned for better readability

The auditing system has been significantly improved, we’ve rewritten the interface in smarty, added filtering, and IP address tracking for actions undertaken by a logged in administrator. Additionally there are now preferences for the lifetime of the admin log so that the history doesn’t grow extraordinarily large, and ensured that most significant actions in the admin interface generate audit entries to ensure that the information in the audit log is more useful.

For security we have added support for a separate admin URL that supports SSL, and added the ability to salt passwords for your admin users. As well, we’ve modified all cookie commands to ensure that the secure param is managed properly on SSL pages.

JavaScript support is further improved with the {ldelim}cms_jquery{rdelim} tag to include the jquery provided with CMSMS, and we’ve updated the JQuery and JQueryUI that is distributed in the core.

The {ldelim}cms_stylesheet{rdelim} tag has been improved to combine all stylesheets into one cached .css file by default, thus under normal circumstances reducing the number of requests to the server required by the browser to render a page.

There have also been a lot of improvements in content. In the page edit screen “page URL” is moved from “Options” tab to the “Main” tab. The cms_selflink tag now allows for width and height parameters when using images. The content tag now allows for a max_length parameter so it is possible to control how much content can go into any given area. The parent dropdown now optionally uses the menu text as opposed to the longer title that was showing. We have also revamped the content permission mechanisms, User Defined Tags now contain a description area just like Global content blocks, so you can include notes as to what they do. Global content blocks themselves now show the description in the summary listings for fast reference.

Along with a slew of bug fixes, we have also undertaken a number of housekeeping tasks to further improve the system and its efficiency: We have taken effort to minimize the core XXXXX.module.php files to result in less memory requirements for most actions. Version check now uses a new cms_http_request class to get past the allow_url_fopen limitation on some hosts. All distributed plugins have an assign parameter for better use in smarty. The NuSoap module has been removed as a core module.

We have also cleaned up a large amount of classes to facilitate growth, enhance security, and manage performance going forward. This includes getting rid of the last of the deprecated callbacks from the module class itself, getting rid of a number of member variables that are now redundant ($gCms→modules and the module→cms and module→smarty etc members). We have cleaned up the content classes a fair bit, and additionally ie6 relevant conditional styles and inline JS has been removed from the distribution.

The Beta Program

Our efforts to make the system faster, lighter, and cleaner come at a cost. We are aware that we have broken compatibility with some modules, plugins and user defined tags. Particularly modules that create content types, and those that use the $gCms→modules array which has been discontinued. We hope that module developers will take advantage of the beta period to update their modules for 1.10 compatibility. Also, although we have taken a lot of time and effort in testing and development to minimize problems, we are hoping that our users will take advantage of the beta cycle to assist us in weeding out any difficulties, upgrade issues, and other bugs that may remain.

I am also sorry to say that we will not be entertaining feature requests during the beta cycle. We feel that introducing new features in the middle of a testing cycle may impede our ability to release the final version of CMSMS 1.10 in a timely manner.

We encourage people to test this product at length, and to start building their new websites with this product. However, we cannot support people that decide to use a beta product on a production site, so please to minimize stress on yourself, the community, and the development team please only use this version on sites you are building, or for evaluation purposes.

Thanks

As always, massive amounts of effort has gone into creating this release, freely donated by the members of the development team and other voluneers. Special thanks to:
Ronny Krijt, Rolf, Jeremy Bass, René Helminsen, Jeff Bosch, Robert Campbell
John Scotcher, Ted Kulp, Samuel Goldstein, Morten Poulsen, Goran Ilic
Mark Reed, Anne-Mieke Bovelett, Keith Lauchlan and to Jean-Claude Etiemble (jce76350)

CMSMS 2.0 Project Shelved

calguy1000 — Thu, 26 May 2011 11:01:00 -0400

Today we have an announcement about the future direction of CMS Made Simple. After extensive discussion amongst the development team regarding our roadmap, we’ve made a decision which we know is the best way to continue ongoing development of the software. This decision relates to the development and release of “CMSMS 2.0”.

The CMSMS 1.x series has been extremely popular. Through developing the core of this series we have come to appreciate a number of things that were not so apparent at the time of first conceptualizing “CMSMS 2.0”. The 1.X series has continued to get more users, features, capabilities and modules, including some of the ideas from the "2.0" branch (though implemented differently). All of this has resulted in the fact that the "2.0" branch as originally thought out has become outdated.

“CMSMS 2.0” was to be the next generation of content management systems for everybody going forward. It would include things like content versioning and workflow stuff for enterprises, multi-language capabilities, a hierarchical permissions manager, an extensive ORM (object relational mapping) tool for developers and much more.

We envisioned slowing the development on further CMSMS 1.x releases at around the 1.3 stage and focusing primarily on “CMSMS 2.0”.. At that time we knew we would be facing a complete rewrite and a daunting task with module compatibility. However we knew that we would be able to overcome these issues and given enough time we could solve these problems. Of course we knew that the 1.x series would have a long life even after "2.0" came out, but envisioned slowly fading out support for 1.x as modules caught up.

However at this time it has not worked out. The development of the 1.X series, where we’ve been able to provide solutions at a fairly fast rate has, by necessity, been more important. After all, that is the software that’s being used. Plus of course, as this is an open source and voluntary project, we have to share our time on it with paid work, families and life in general!

As a result the of the ongoing development of 1.X we have found time and time again that the starting efforts we had made on “CMSMS 2.0” required re-doing due to changes in the underlying framework, or to lessons we had learned in the 1.X stream. Eventually three or more years had gone by, slowly working on the foundations of “CMSMS 2.0” and steadily improving 1.x. Yet we were still facing a ‘complete rewrite’ for "2.0".
As mentioned at the start of this announcement the Dev team has discussed all of these issues extensively many times and again at our most recent Dev team meeting. We knew that the community could not be kept hanging indefinitely.

Thus we have come to the decision that our time and resources are best used by continuing to evolve the 1.X series. At this time we are officially shelving the “CMSMS 2.0” project as it was described.

The good news is that all of you that have invested thousands of person hours and thousands of dollars into developing websites for, modules for, and web applications in CMS Made Simple can rest easy that your investment is sound. We have not lost faith or momentum in the Content Management System that we all know and love. Instead of writing a whole new CMS we will evolve it over time to accommodate the features that we want and still maintain our original focus and goals.

The best ideas and lessons learned from the "2.0" experiment will be migrated into the 1.x series over time. We are evolving towards a more modular, better performing system allowing third party modules to tie further into the system, or even replace some of the functionality. Features like centralized module templates and better content flexibility will slowly move from the "2.0" experiment into reality in the 1.x series. We will continue to implement more ideas, optimizations and features that we find useful that we never thought of when "2.0" was born such as better support for mobile devices and admin side search. Our next release CMS 1.10 is a step towards implementing some of the changes planned for the "2.0" series.

We are sure you will understand the reasoning behind our decision. We hope you look forward to a ongoing investment in your favorite content management system, just as we look forward to continue to work with you.