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Friday, April 28. 2006
Announcing the release of SyntaxCMS 1.3, a flexible, content-object-based Web content management and application development platform.
Among the key features and improvements:
Developer Tools
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Content type element labels can now have descriptions
Infrastructure
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PHP 5 and Apache 2.0 Compatibility
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Elimination of PHP Notices
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Delete uploaded files when a record is deleted
Usability
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DBasis Interface Improvements
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Admin filters and search integrated
Admin Features
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Admins can pick among list of templates for Site Sections
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Reporting:
Content Summary Dashboard
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rewritten Site Section management area (3x speed increase of listing)
Module Standardization
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RSS module
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New calendar module
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Generic detail template supports related content
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Email this document
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Blog module
Download the tarball or update from CVS. Updated documentation is posted at the SyntaxCMS project site.
Thursday, April 6. 2006
We are just quashing the last couple of annoying bugs and enhancing the portability of SyntaxCMS. Watch this space for the announcement. Among the new features:
- RSS module: publish and subscribe to RSS feeds
- Blog module
- Default detail template now auto-generates links to related content and allows emailing uploaded documents
- Much faster Site Section administration
- Basic reporting of site content
- Pickable templates for Site Sections
- PHP 5 and Apache 2.0 compatibility
- Uploaded files are deleted when content items are deleted, to save disk space
- Much, much more
We definitely want to release this when it's ready, as opposed to on a schedule--but we're close to ready.
Sunday, February 19. 2006
In preparation for the long-anticipated and feature-packed SyntaxCMS 1.3 release, we've declared a feature freeze. Our effort from now until the 1.3 release will be to eliminate all known bugs, and test thoroughly for any unknown bugs.
Right now, I'm working through the issue tracker on Tigris to get to Zarro Boogs and fixing anything else I see along the way. If you'd like to help, check SyntaxCMS out from CVS, install it, test it, and report any bugs on the issue tracker.
Tuesday, January 3. 2006
We were alerted to this "less critical" Secunia advisory on a possible cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in versions of SyntaxCMS from 1.2.1 forward (the most recent release). We have patched this in CVS, so if you're running that version and are concerned, just update private/modules/search/results.php from CVS.
If you didn't check out your installation from CVS, just add these lines after $search_query has been defined:
/**
Patch XSS Vulnerability
SFS
*/
$search_query = strip_tags($search_query);
$search_query = htmlentities($search_query);
$Request->setVar('search_query', $search_query);
Tuesday, December 6. 2005
In case you've been wondering what we've been up in terms of improving and enhancing SyntaxCMS, I've put together this overview of new features and fixes we've committed to CVS since the last release.
Continue reading "CVS Changes Roundup"
Wednesday, August 10. 2005
Heres a quick run down of new features sitting in CVS as we make progress towards our next realease: 1.3.0
- Revamped Event Calendar module with a new monthly grid view. It correctly handles events spanning multiple days/months. The Event object also has a convenient method to pretty print the start to end dates. So if you're event is only one day it writes August 18, 2005, multiple day events within a month show up as August 18-22, 2005 and month spanning events in a year correctly show just the month and days. See CGD's Calendar of Events
- A module that can read and write RSS feeds.
- Admin Section Navigator: significant speed improvements and the option to work within a specific part of your site's navigation tree. This cuts down the clutter and scrolling needed to build out a part of your site.
- PHP5 compatibility
Friday, December 17. 2004
In anticipation of a 1.2.0 version of Syntax CMS, we have checked in an upgrade to how Sections work.
Previously, every section had to have a unique URL ID. This meant if you had a series of top level sections like "Marketing", "Tech," and "Consulting", you couldn't have "/marketing/about/" and "/consulting/about/" simultaneously. We had to resort toURIs like "/marketing/about_marketing/" or "/consulting/about_consulting/".
If you check out the latest CVS files, however, you can have "/marketing/about/" and "/consulting/about/". The only restriction, invisible to the user, is that you can't have two sections with the URL ID "about" under the same section...i.e., you can't have two sections with the URI "/marketing/about/". Now Syntax CMS will handle this case by creating "/marketing/about/" and "/marketing/about1/"...and "marketing/about2/" and "/marketing/about3/" and so on, as needed.
If you're upgrading, bear in mind it does require a database upgrade. Anything that relies on the assumption that a section's URL ID will be unique may break. However, anything using the standard SectionNavigator classes should still work unless you are passing a URL ID for any reason (these should now be the full URL path, which actually includes the URL IDs of every section from the top-level section down to the current section).
Affected files include:
/private/lib/syntaxcms/F1CMS.class.php
/private/lib/syntaxcms/functions.lib.php
/private/lib/syntaxcms/Section.class.php
/private/lib/syntaxcms/SectionNavigator.php
/private/lib/syntaxcms/SectionNavigatorOptimized.php
/private/lib/syntaxcms/Site.class.php
/private/lib/syntaxcms/Request/SectionRequest.class.php
/private/lib/ext/PxDB/classes/content/input/pxdb_commit.php
/private/lib/ext/PxDB/classes/events/pxdb_event_dispatcher.class.php
/private/lib/ext/PxDB/events/syntax_section_handler.class.php
/private/lib/ext/PxDB/config/initialize.php
/private/lib/ext/PxDB/config/install/mysql-upgrade.php
/public/admin/db.php
/public/admin/modules/navigation/lib.php
Friday, December 3. 2004
We've rolled up another release of Syntax CMS. Sandy went on a cruft cleanup rampage and we've integrated a number of new features we've been working on. A lot of work has gone into making it possible to share the content repository among multiple sites and segregate parts of the repository among sites and/or user groups.
Public Website
- Added a Sitemap and an improved Search Module.
- Bundled templates use solely CSS to control layout and appearance.
- Removed leftover test datatypes and testing code
- For authentication of registered users, you can enable saving the user's login to a cookie.
Site Administration
- Various layout fixes to the interface.
- If sharing the content repository (database) among multiple sites, you can now control what content types show up in each admin instance explicitly.
- Section Navigator can be configured to automatically add new sections to a default section. Added a button to add a new section as a child of an existing section, instead of having to add it and then specify the parent.
- Section Navigator can be configured to only show below a specific section, instead of showing all sections.
- Removed dependecy on register_global being on (finally).
Under the Hood Enhancements
- Settings & Installation testing: makes it much less painful to get a site up and running by helping diagnose the hard-to-find show stoppers.
- Event Handling and Notification. Adding, editing, and deleting records triggers event notifications which are sent to custom Listeners. It's not actually used out-of-the-box but it provides a facility for running custom code on your own installation. We're using it to sync database records with a 3rd party e-commerce package on a client site.
- Section Navigator and all section related code respects the NAV_ROOT_EL constant when building out site navigation.
- Cleaned up template and php-code generators. Added a generator to make a simple detail template for a content type.
- Added a more advanced relationship picker widgets. Instead of forcing users to scan a huge list of SELECT OPTIONS, shows options in an iframe which is filterable.
Monday, November 22. 2004
In the upcoming release of Syntax, I've started to address the difficulty associated with getting an instance installed and up and running from the archive file. It's still doesn't work straight out-of-the-box but the new installation tests will save you hours chasing obscure and frustrating bugs. Some features, such as file uploading and Smarty templates, depend on the web server process being able to write, or outright own, specific directories. Because of that, we'll probably never get to a point where Syntax will work without some setup time.
Once you have extracted the Syntax files and setup your webserver to make the public directory available over http, you can access the installation tests at admin/testing/. The testing script goes through a handful of php scripts that output settings and test the connection settings to your Syntax CMS database, check ownsership of key directories, and checks that necessary symbolic links exist. Where possible, the script will try to correct any errors by itself but if it cannot, it shows the exact commands you need to execute to fix anything. The screenshot below is an example of output with an error found.
This was previously mentioned installation tests when I checked the instalation tests into CVS.
Tuesday, November 2. 2004
I've just checked in to cvs a suite of testing scripts that check to verify that you're Syntax site is setup correctly. At Forum One, we've had an internal deployment script to use for setting up a new site. But if you're installing Syntax on a foreign server, you've had to hope that the planets are correctly aligned, that you've followed the installation instructions correctly, and that we didn't leave out a critical installation step. This script, which I've placed in the public/admin/testing directory checks the following:
- availability of smarty and Adodb.
- connection to the database specified in config/db.conf.php.
- Syntax framework initialization
- critical directories are writeable by the web server
This will be a part of the next Syntax release but until then you can check out the module ( syntax-cms/src/public/admin/testing ) from CVS on tigris.
Tuesday, October 5. 2004
I just checked in a new type of pick table that will be available in our next release. Just in case you are wondering, in Syntax a pick table is a simple database table of id, name pairs that are used mostly for categorizing other records. For example, you could have a picktable for topics, regions, and countries and use those across all your content types - people, documents, events, etc. Until now, these have been flat lists, and in truth they still are, but by adding a field called parent to a picktable, they can be displayed as a tree of options to users.
In the site administration application, child picks are drawn indented underneath their parent and sorted alphabetically. Also, you can not delete picks that have no parent ( parent=0 ) or that have children.
In an input form, if you use the pick_tree widget with a pick table with a parent column, they will be drawn as a hierarchical set of options for the user to select.
Wednesday, August 4. 2004
This post is mostly to test is the Images feature of serendipity is working. Below is a fuzzy screencap of the latest version of Context, the admin tool used in syntax cms. It has come a long way from ugly html table hacked layout to more CSS friendly layout. I particularly like the fact that content types with content waiting to be approved are bolded ala email programs. Of course, that may be because I added that feature.
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