CMSMS 2.2 in Development

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calguy1000
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CMSMS 2.2 in Development

Post by calguy1000 »

Okay. It's been a while since there was any discussion about where CMSMS is going in the near future. Therefore I thought I'd provide an update.

We are working on a CMSMS 2.2 release, and in conjunction with that working on a brand new forge. These are two huge projects. But writing the forge using CMSMS 2.2 allows us to (sorta) kill two birds with one stone. Particularly with respect to testing.

So here's a list of some of what's happening specifically for CMSMS 2.2
- A new database abstraction library to replace adodb_lite.
adodb_lite was at the time a trimmed down version of adodb. but was still heavy and expensive in the way it did things (multiple inheritance via eval tags). It has not had an update since 2004, and over time we have had to fix bugs, and trim it down even further... but it was still a relatively large and expensive library.

So we're replacing it with a home-brew abstraction library that is functionally compatible, documented, has new features, and is easier to extend.

Before you ask: No, this does not mean we will be supporting PDO in the near future, but we can. The reason we're not supporting PDO at this time is that from our research. using PDO to talk to a mysql database has no significant performance boosts over the mysqli interface.

Our goal with this project was to improve maintainability, maintain compatibility, and have a documented abstraction library that we were in charge of. Early tests indicate that we may also have managed to eek out some performance gains.

The new Database abstraction library has been in place in the 2.2 branch for a few months already, and is looking to be stable. The nice part is we have not noticed any incompatibilities or problems with existing modules.

- Responsive and accessibility tweaks to the admin theme.
We are in the process of revising the admin theme and various admin pages to make sure they work relatively well on tablets and other medium sized devices, and that accessibility is reasonable.

- Design manager usability tweaks
In the name of ease of use we have tweaked DesignManager a little bit to make it easier to use. Mostly in the layout of controls and things.

- A new file picker
We will be implementing our own new file picker, with some upload capabilities for 2.2. The file picker will be a module and will be able to be swapped out with another module that is API compatible. It will work with content pages, the WYSIWYG editor (MT anyways) and will have an API to allow modules to use it. This also means we will be removing the dropzone from the admin theme.

- A new asynchronous job manager, and pseudocron
For module developers out there this will be very useful in that it will allow you to easily create a job that can be handled asynchronously via a queue, or at an approximate, regular time.
We will be using this in the forge to manage larger jobs (like generating reports, etc)...
We are also looking at revising the Search module to do it's re-indexing asynchronously. This would be a huge help for larger sites.

Additionally, there will be the normal set of minor feature requests, and bug fixes and under-the-hood improvements.

There is no set date for the release of 2.2 yet. We are still in active development, and then there will need to be a public beta period.

But we will keep you posted.
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