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Friday, July 30. 2004
Syntax CMS now lives on Tigris, which we'll be using to coordinate and communicate with other developers. We're pleased to announce that we are releasing Syntax CMS 1.0.0.
Friday, July 30. 2004
James Robertson is starting what should be an interesting series of postings on Content Management System myths. This particular article, CMS Myth #1: Installing a CMS must be hard, highlights what a client or CMS user should expect when setting up a new system.
Nowadays, however, many organisations have pretty simple needs. They want to publish a website, containing mostly static content with a handful of extra features (such as secure login, online events calendar).
If you fall into this category, then you can reasonably expect CMS products to install out-of-the-box. That's not to say you won't need some vendor assistance during the initial project, you will. What you won't have to do, though, is customise the product.
While we can't claim that Syntax CMS is super easy to install out-of-the box, once it is up and running, I think we hit the majority of the do's and don'ts he highlights. Out-of-the box you get the authoring interface, publishing system and can start creating your own pages and putting content on them. You would still have to update the templates to give your site its own particular design.
Wednesday, July 28. 2004
It might be good to use the thumbnail generating class at http://phpthumb.sourceforge.net/ as the thumbnail processor available. It has a number of features that would be nice to enable via parameters or wrapper processors:
- A border (configurable color & width) can be applied.
- Thumbnails can be a fixed dimension regardless of source aspect ratio and background filled with configurable color.
- Border corners can optionally be rounded (independant horizontal & vertical radius)
Tuesday, July 27. 2004
Most of the time when you're building a web site, you are pullng information from a database according to some criteria and then formatting for output, usually HTML but it could be RSS or XML or something else entirely. The way to handle this in Syntax CMS is to create a list capability within a module. You'll probably end up having a module per datatype to handle the various individualities of working with different datatypes. This tutorial shows you a general approach to writing flexible, reusable, and powerful list capabilities that can then be called from section templates or even other modules.
Continue reading "HOWTO: write a powerful list capability"
Tuesday, July 27. 2004
We are very close to releasing a usuable tar file of Syntax CMS. We've tested and documented the installation and setup of a website using it and are confident we've worked out the bugs. However, we've also recently decided to move the project collaboration tools from Sourceforge to Tigris. We are currently waiting for tigris to approve our project profile.
Thursday, July 22. 2004
Some of the Syntax CMS plugins (web image type validator and image resize processor) check the content-type of uploaded images. However, they check for image/jpeg and not the newer progressive JPEG content-type image/pjpeg. I have fixed these in CVS, but if you have problems uploading JPEGS on older Syntax sites then just update the appropriate plugin file from CVS.
Friday, July 16. 2004
O'Reilly has a concise look at the major features of PHP5: new Object Model, improved MySql support, exceptions, SimpleXML, and SQLite.
Upgrading Syntax up to take advantage of the new features of PHP5 is not planned at the moment, although there are probably numerous places where the readibility of the code would benefit from the newer OOP model, specifically abstract interfaces, and the change to passing objects by reference instead of value.
Tuesday, July 13. 2004
Would be nice to have "created by" and "last updated" as standard attributes of any content type.
Thursday, July 8. 2004
Through discussions at work, we've decided to target some additional improvements to Syntax for this quarter.
Restructuring Metadata
Though we have cached metadata already for the 1.0 release, our improvements were a hack. We're going to try to ease our transition to 2.0 by restructuring the metadata classes to have a central class that manages metadata collection and communication. This change should be invisible to the application author as well as be backward compatible with existing databases, so we're putting it in the 1.0 branch and not the 1.1 branch. They will require database changes to support, most likely, so we'll be incrementing the version number to trigger the upgrade script. However we're committed to keeping them backwards compatible.
Improving Filtering Performance
Actually, I'm pessimistic we can achieve that much here. I already have a design for a new, more optimized search class, and the changes we're making to metadata should help. However, it's a big project and it won't be easy. Additionally, it will be a new, coequal search class with some real limitations. The tradeoff will be increased speed for 80% of the work we do. This will also probably go into the 1.0 branch for 1.01 or 1.02, as it should be just an additional API for searching and filtering. No existing sites should break, but new code won't be back-portable without upgrading.
I've seen some other low-level things in the API that I think could be improved by not trying to be quite so general. There is a preg_match() and a eval() that get performed with alarming frequency in every syntax instance, and I'm not 100% convinced it's necessary, certainly for PHP 4+. Plus it annoyingly ties in Syntax data to the global scope, and that is always a Bad Thing. Fixing this will start us on the way to being able to root out the dependencies on register_globals that sadly exists in 1.0. Anybody interested in looking into it can examine the pxdb::import() and pxdb::import_var() methods.
Braindump complete.
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