Announcing CMS Made Simple 1.8 – Madagascar
Posted: Sun Jul 04, 2010 12:53 am
Onwards and upwards we go. The dev team is proud to announce the latest version of your favorite content management system. This version is primarily aimed at rounding out some of the rough edges that our primary audience (experienced, professional web developers) have experienced with CMS Made Simple. There are a number of new features to enhance performance not only of the website itself, but to make doing some mundane tasks faster and easier. As well, we've added some power for the contributing programmers, and fixed quite a few nagging bugs. We will now have a lot more to talk about at the GeekMoot in Amsterdam this September.
The development team, and our beta testers have contributed countless hours in testing each and every change under as many different environments as possible. They've found a lot of issues, and tested each and every fix.
Stylesheets
We've deprecated the {stylesheet} tag in favor of a {cms_stylesheet} tag. The replacement works by grabbing the content of the individual style sheets and passing them through smarty before writing them to uniquely named files in the tmp/cache directory. This is a huge feature. Processing the style sheets (individually) through smarty means that you will no longer have to search through each of the style sheets for individual colors, you can give them names. There are a lot of other cool possibilities as well. Additionally, developers can now be confident that browsers will be able to cache the style sheets properly to improve performance, and to reduce bandwidth. There is however a trade off. Because the style sheets are stored in the tmp/cache directory, the relative directory of the style sheets is not the same, users should use the [[root_url]] smarty tag in their style sheets to force absolute references to images that are specified in style sheets.
Bulk-copy pages
We've added the ability to bulk-copy pages. This means that if you have a page structure that you want to duplicate it becomes much easier. This is a big time saver for people who have multiple similarly structured groups of pages.
New {content_module} tag
There's a new {content_module} tag that allows modules to provide different types of content blocks for use in Content pages. This is a huge feature, it means that a module developer could write a specific type of content block to provide specific type of content, and that content is stored with the page, not with the module (so copying the page will still work etc). Currently the CGContentUtils and Uploads modules support the {content_module} tag, but soon enough more modules will support it.
SSL support
Our half-baked attempt at getting SSL support built into CMSMS was re-visited. We've fixed the {stylesheet} and {metadata} tags, and made other improvements to ensure that once you've specified that a page is secure, all of the CMSMS generated URLS are secure.
Updated documentation
We've gone through the libraries and cleaned a bunch of unused code, and updated the documentation (the api doc stuff will be regenerated shortly after the release of CMSMS). This should help all of the budding module authors out there, however we still think that looking at a clean, well working module as a reference is the best way to learn how to do things. The API doc will only tell you what functions are available and what parameters they take, but not necessarily the context they should be used in.
Removal of deprecated callback methods
We have also removed some of the very old, long deprecated callback methods from the module API. We now require that developers use the equivalent events that replaced them when events were introduced. These callbacks have been deprecated for a long time so therefore should not break any modules. However, if you are using some modules that haven't been maintained for a long time...
Clean up of language files
We've also cleaned up the language stuff a bit. This should provide a modest performance improvement in the front-end, and in the admin.
Module Manager improvements
Module Manager has gotten a lot of attention in this release. We've listened, and now it should be much easier to install or upgrade modules, including all of their dependencies.
Other
There are a lot of bug fixes, some of them related to stuff introduced in 1.7.x, and some very old ones. We hope that CMSMS 1.8 will be a very stable release. Please note that there will be no diff releases this time.
We did it again!
There have been hundreds of hours of development, testing, and documentation effort put into this release, proving once again that the CMSMS user community is active, strong, and cooperative. We would like to give a big thanks to the following users:
Ted (The Benevolent Dictator)
calguy1000 (Project Manager)
RonnyK (leader of the QA Project)
reneh (leader of the translation team)
Rolf
DrCSS
JeremyBass
Silmarillion
Nuno
tyman00
_SjG_
Utter
ajprog
Nullig
Peciura
jce76350
Duketown
The development team, and our beta testers have contributed countless hours in testing each and every change under as many different environments as possible. They've found a lot of issues, and tested each and every fix.
Stylesheets
We've deprecated the {stylesheet} tag in favor of a {cms_stylesheet} tag. The replacement works by grabbing the content of the individual style sheets and passing them through smarty before writing them to uniquely named files in the tmp/cache directory. This is a huge feature. Processing the style sheets (individually) through smarty means that you will no longer have to search through each of the style sheets for individual colors, you can give them names. There are a lot of other cool possibilities as well. Additionally, developers can now be confident that browsers will be able to cache the style sheets properly to improve performance, and to reduce bandwidth. There is however a trade off. Because the style sheets are stored in the tmp/cache directory, the relative directory of the style sheets is not the same, users should use the [[root_url]] smarty tag in their style sheets to force absolute references to images that are specified in style sheets.
Bulk-copy pages
We've added the ability to bulk-copy pages. This means that if you have a page structure that you want to duplicate it becomes much easier. This is a big time saver for people who have multiple similarly structured groups of pages.
New {content_module} tag
There's a new {content_module} tag that allows modules to provide different types of content blocks for use in Content pages. This is a huge feature, it means that a module developer could write a specific type of content block to provide specific type of content, and that content is stored with the page, not with the module (so copying the page will still work etc). Currently the CGContentUtils and Uploads modules support the {content_module} tag, but soon enough more modules will support it.
SSL support
Our half-baked attempt at getting SSL support built into CMSMS was re-visited. We've fixed the {stylesheet} and {metadata} tags, and made other improvements to ensure that once you've specified that a page is secure, all of the CMSMS generated URLS are secure.
Updated documentation
We've gone through the libraries and cleaned a bunch of unused code, and updated the documentation (the api doc stuff will be regenerated shortly after the release of CMSMS). This should help all of the budding module authors out there, however we still think that looking at a clean, well working module as a reference is the best way to learn how to do things. The API doc will only tell you what functions are available and what parameters they take, but not necessarily the context they should be used in.
Removal of deprecated callback methods
We have also removed some of the very old, long deprecated callback methods from the module API. We now require that developers use the equivalent events that replaced them when events were introduced. These callbacks have been deprecated for a long time so therefore should not break any modules. However, if you are using some modules that haven't been maintained for a long time...
Clean up of language files
We've also cleaned up the language stuff a bit. This should provide a modest performance improvement in the front-end, and in the admin.
Module Manager improvements
Module Manager has gotten a lot of attention in this release. We've listened, and now it should be much easier to install or upgrade modules, including all of their dependencies.
Other
There are a lot of bug fixes, some of them related to stuff introduced in 1.7.x, and some very old ones. We hope that CMSMS 1.8 will be a very stable release. Please note that there will be no diff releases this time.
We did it again!
There have been hundreds of hours of development, testing, and documentation effort put into this release, proving once again that the CMSMS user community is active, strong, and cooperative. We would like to give a big thanks to the following users:
Ted (The Benevolent Dictator)calguy1000 (Project Manager)RonnyK (leader of the QA Project)reneh (leader of the translation team)RolfDrCSSJeremyBassSilmarillionNunotyman00_SjG_UtterajprogNulligPeciurajce76350Duketown