Hello Everybody.

It's been two or three months since the latest stable release of CMSMS (v1.9.4.1) and all seems to be going relatively well on that front. So I thought I'd tell you about the efforts that are ongoing and our plans for the next great version of CMS Made Simple.

The CMSMS Dev team has been working on a version 1.10 hopefully for release in the late summer / early fall. Already a few things are done in the new release, and there is a long list of things on the list. Here are but a few of them.

- Memory Optimizations
- Clean up the module class (Get rid of the last of the long deprecated callback functions, and replace the smarty, db, and cms members with accessor methods)
- Introduce module lazy loading on the frontend. This will be an 'opt in' process for modules, and will not work initially for modules that handle routes, or a few other conditions, but for some modules this could be implemented providing for a significant reduction in memory requirements on many pages.

- General 'Under the Hood' Improvements
- Add more events to allow for a proper multi-language addon module
- Rewrite the config.php stuff to provide a sparse config.php file at the start, with just the minimum amount of stuff necessary to get started. Other variables, if not specified in the config.php file will be calculated dynamically. This should minimize config problems.
- Provide a seperate SSL admin path
- Cleanup of the Content Object (private/protected members/methods etc).
- Cleanup the $gCms class to do better take advantage of the autoloader and have less members....
- Cleanup the $gCms->modules public array. We'll probably make this an object of sorts as it needs to be really cleaned up for the possibility that a module may be installed in the database, but not exist in memory.

- Module Manager Optimizations
- Get rid of nuSOAP in the distribution and replace it with a generic rest interface.
- Memory optimizations for Module Manager when downloading or expanding packages.
- Better handling of dependencies when upgrading

- {cms_stylesheet} changes
- Change it to combine stylesheets into a single css file by default. unless there are stylesheets with mixed media types attached to the template.
- Improve support for SSL

- Admin Interface Changes
- We're hoping to provide an admin side search capability to search inside pages, GCB's, templates, stylesheets, etc. This will be handy for solving the 'where is this called' problems.
- We're planning on adding a new page to handle various admin tasks like clearing the cache, repairing database tables, doing table optimization, cleaning up content, etc.
- A preference for the default content type when adding new content
- A new (again) permission called 'Reorder Content' that will allow for people to have limited ability to re-order their own pages.
- We're planning on writing and slowly introducing a replacement to listcontent to get past our scalability and memory issues. We'll see how much time we have though.
- Salted MD5 Passwords (for the uber paranoid).
- Re-work of the Admin log to provide filtering, sorting, and better pagination, and automatic cleanup.

- General smarty Items
- A drop in replacement for the {html_date} plugin that will use jquery to provide a popup calendar.
- A review of all plugins to ensure that the assign parameter is available where it needs to be.
- A new plugin to automatically generate the tags to use the JQuery provided with CMSMS inside your templates.

The 1.10 version will need to go through a beta cycle when it is ready and we will be asking for testers around that time. Development is sporadic right now, (everybody seems soo busy) so our schedule may have to change a bit, and/or we'll drop features.

As usual, we HIGHLY DISCOURAGE and WILL NOT SUPPORT people using the svn stream directly, unless they are part of the development team. This is because the software is in a state of flux, and cannot be considered ready for production. And we just don't have the time to support people that just want to kick the tires.

We will keep you posted.

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wonderful !

and what about the css minimizer ?

There are many library that can compress the CSS

I understand that everyone did not necessarily want, so why don't offer an option in the stylesheet: "compress this stylesheet: yes / no "

You just made my day!
Greetings from Germany,
Alex

We have something very similar to a CSS compressor. When using {cms_stylesheet} you can wrap your CSS in smarty {strip}{/strip} tags to eliminate white space. Just need to use [[ ]] instead of curly brackets:

As you said... it's not something everybody wants... the advantages vs. effort of compressing javascript and compressing stylesheets are very much like a religious debate. Besides, as described in mww's post there are other ways to do it.

However serving as many stylesheets in one request as possible is not.
It is directly related to site performance on ALL CMSMS sites. So therefore it's something we're going to do

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thank you mww for this trick !



Sorry my English isn't perfect and i don't understand this sentence. Can you repeat it

And you're assuming mine is?

Anyways... I meant that combining stylesheets, and thereby minimizing requests is obviously not something subject to religious debate... it is directly related to perceived website performance.

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from a Canadian, I hoped

okay this time I understood. Anyway the mww's trick is a perfectly valid answer to my question.

@bess

There are already great solutions in Forge like ScriptDeploy and FastCSS and as mww mentioned, therefor there isn't real need for that to be included in the core.

Also you can use gziping through your htaccess.

Combining files reduces http requests as CG said which is great improvement.

I totally agree with these points uniqu3. I am also aware of good practice. But as scriptdeploy is excelling, as I prefer to have small (native?) features than a large module, even it is excelling.

I prefer the mww's trick than installing a new module to compress css files.

I do not claim that my method is the best, everyone has his experience and humor that plays on our habits

FYI:

In our last dev team meeting (May 3rd)
The team voted on and agreed that in CMSMS 1.10 we will:
a: Remove the full (and bloated) TinyMCE from the core and replace it with MicroTiny a much smaller module with a reduced feature set which we feel will better suit the needs of most users who do not need a full featured text editor. The full blown TinyMCE module will be available as a third party module.
b: Replace the Printing module with a new, lighter weight version without PDF support. This is because we have learned that the PDF support is a feature not generally needed by the masses. The old printing module will be available as a third party addon, and the module author is also working on a newer, much more powerful version.

These changes will probably serve to reduce the size of the download package significantly. Should make configuration simpler for many sites, and conforms with our principle that the core should be 'small, tight, efficient, but easily extended'

Additionally, I've undertaken to analyze where, if possible, I can convert some of the core functions into php classes so that we can better take advantage of the php autoloader. The autoloader loads classes as required making it so that we don't need to 'include' a bunch of php files just in case we need the functions in there. This exercise gives us a more stable, linear memory usage pattern, and cleaner code. And will hopefully reduce memory requirements on the frontend for many requests.

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These will all be great enhancements. I especially like searchability in the Admin, combining stylesheets and the option to add TinyMCE only when warranted. I'll be happy to do some beta testing if my skills are up to the task.

Penny

maybe i am missing something but what are the advantages of combining stylesheets to one file?!
anyways… i am very excited to see the next release. sounds good!

According to YSlow and PageSpeed combining stylesheets (or JS script for that matter) and reducing the number of files that should be loaded, could make the site marginally faster.

I'm looking forward to the new release!

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Every browser has a limited number of http reuqests it can make at once, means more files you load more requests are needed, resulting in slower load time.
Actually the same reason as "sprite" images in css.