CMS Made Simple 1.5 is in development

[odo]

b) Improvements to content management
    i)  The ability to copy content pages

ok now, I'm willing to do some heavy betatesting on this featrure - I've been missing this since day one
is beta available for public? If not then I guess will just have to wait...
calguy1000, I hope you readjust your focus off from paid job soon hehe

br.
o.

[calguy1000]

Okay, here's an update

a) TinyMCE now has different profiles for the frontend and backend... so you can have different toolbars on each
b) more bulk actions have been added to copy content
c) I've tentatively added a {content_image} tag
    - it can be placed one or more times into your page template, and when editing a page that uses that template
      an image dropdown will be displayed to allow you to select an image.
    - Currently no uploading capabilities
    - I'm still not sure of this implementation, so I may rip it out and start again, and do something with a new module
      so that I can more easily add uploading and watermarking capabilities.
d) Copy Content works great

Still To Do:
e) A site help page
f) An 'About' page under the CMS Page
    * This will be un-removable and will contain credit information for the contributors to CMS made simple.
g) A Searchable attribute on pages
h) The ability to associate a thumbnail, and an image with a page so that you can esily build image menus, etc.
    but I'm not stuck on this, I may do something that depends on the stuff in c above.
i)  (undecided) add a {global_content_select prefix='...'} tag
    - This will allow page editors to select an item from a list of global content blocks to insert into a specified position
      allowing easier building of similar, but slightly different pages by page editors.
  -  I may add the ability to include UDT's in this list too.
  -  Though it'd be really nice if we could have a description associated with each GCB/UDT
      and have some funky javascript stuff to allow browsing the GCB/UDT's easier to describe what they do when selecting one.

[calguy1000]

Oh yeah, I forgot:

i) We've also gone through the installer again, and the system info page to make the tests better, and more consistent.
ii) We've added a 'notifications' sections to the top of the admin content area, with all of the normal notifications that appear in the admi.
    As well, modules have the ability to add items to the notification area. 
        for example, authorized admin users will be able to see that there are N news articles that have not been
        approved for frontend display, etc. 
  This functionality is just beginning, and currently the only module that uses it is News, but it'll grow quite quickly
iii) There's a new dashboard page for displaying dashboard type items.
iv) A whole shwack of bugs have been fixed and long standing issues either closed, fixed, or implemented.

[nhaack]

Wohoo... these are great news calguy100 . My absolute favourite is the content_image tag. A feature I have been desperately longing for. Currently I use one-line content-blocks for that... for me that is ok, but from a editorial point of view it's really nasty .

I think if it is possible to access regularly uploaded images, it will make it a lot easier already.

Best
Nils

[tinhat]

c) I've tentatively added a {content_image} tag
    - it can be placed one or more times into your page template, and when editing a page that uses that template
      an image dropdown will be displayed to allow you to select an image.
    - Currently no uploading capabilities
    - I'm still not sure of this implementation, so I may rip it out and start again, and do something with a new module
      so that I can more easily add uploading and watermarking capabilities.

Awesome. This would be very useful. Right now, I just create a normal content block, for example {content name="location_map} which gives the user the entire WYSIWYG just to pop an image into. It would be important, IMHO, that the new {content_image} feature would allow the user to enter alt text. Very important for SEO (as well as accessability).

Sounds great.

[Nick Smart]

I can't wait.

Thanks to the whole team for all their time and effort.

Nick

[Pierre M.]

Hello Calguy, thank you for this update.

iv) A whole shwack of bugs have been fixed and long standing issues either closed, fixed, or implemented.

Of course we like and enjoy new features. Squashing bugs and long standing issues is worthfull for me in the long run. Thx again.
Pierre

[calguy1000]

One more feature thrown in.

MenuManager, News, and any of my modules that are derived from CGExtensions will now use the users selected syntax hilighter when editing templates...  when 1.5 comes out of course.

[calguy1000]

The 'Site Help' feature has been potentially dropped because of that evil character the 'Feature Creep'.

I scoped out a 'UserHelp' system module that would provide an additional 'User Help' link on each admin page that would provide a popup window where customizable help could be given for each module.

Authorized site administrators would be able to create help content for each module, and for each action of each module.  And possibly in multiple languages.  Each page would be edtiable via a wysiwyg so that flash videos, smarty tags, images, etc. could be embedded into each page.

Administrators would be able to mark a certain page as 'default help' for that module, incase help for a specific module action didn't exist.

Possibly administrators would be able to export and import their help content so that they could transfer the content to different sites, and then customize it for the particular install.

This would require writing a fairly extensive module, and some minor changes to internal classes... and perhaps a preference or two in the system.

Because of this, and because I'm already busy with other stuff for the next month or two, and the fact that we probably don't want 1.5 to wait that long before the beta starts... I've decided that this feature will probably wait.

[anivision]

If I read your last post right CalGuy, we can expect a beta in the near future now? 

The most wanted feature for me is the ability to limit the tools in TinyMCE for the end users...
I'm really looking forward to this release

[calguy1000]

Well, beta is probably a couple of weeks away yet.... there are one or two open issues we want to correct.  Unfortunately, they will take some time to implement.

I also expect the beta cycle to go for about a month before we release the official version of 1.5

[Pierre M.]

Hello,

I want a pony
but may I ask for sqlite support again ?
Even as [red]alpha-red-warning[/red] level only ?

Trying on 1.4.1 :
-one line to uncomment in the installer
-one 50K folder (much less when compressed) to add to the adodb_lite SQL drivers folder
-then some glitches in the core
-and of course issues with modules.

I mean :
-MySQL and PostgreSQL officially supported
-SQLite NOT supported but ready for people to step in and provide fixes ("[red]Don't ask for support for SQLite, submit the fixes![/red]").

Pierre M.

[calguy1000]

Sorry Pierre.

SQLite isn't in the scope for 1.5

but I'll seriously consider it for a 1.6... I'm a fan of SQLite... and I think it would seriously improve our market if the changes wouldn't be too dramatic.

[Pierre M.]

I understand the scope of 1.5 can't be that broad. I was fearing you wanted to just drop inclusion of SQLite. I'm happy with consideration for inclusion in 1.6
I agree with you it can bump CMSms adoption.

Have fun with 1.5

Pierre

[anivision]

Well, beta is probably a couple of weeks away yet.... there are one or two open issues we want to correct.  Unfortunately, they will take some time to implement.

I also expect the beta cycle to go for about a month before we release the official version of 1.5

Well, a couple of weeks is for me in this context a short amount of time.

This is great news anyway