PostNuke

Site search

Search results

Number of hits: 193

OS History   (Content)

See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html for more explanation of the difference between the two movements.

The basic philosophy behind open source is very simple: When programmers can read, redistribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software, the software evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, and people fix the bugs. And this can happen at a speed that, if one is used to the slow pace of conventional software development, seems astonishing.

There are many active Open Source Software projects but some may be thinking you get what you pay for, so if it's free there must be something wrong with it. Sometimes this is true but there are open source software projects providing stable, scalable applications. The key is to know where to look and what to look for when evaluating the stability and scalability.

Here are a few interesting facts and examples of Open Source projects:

Apache is the number one web server at nearly 62% of all installations. Second place was help by Microsoft at just under 27%. (Source: Netcraft)
GNU/Linux is the number two operating system at nearly 30% of all servers behind Microsoft operating system at nearly 50%. (Source: Netcraft)

Sendmail (a mail transport agent) sendmail has become one of the standards of the Internet's infrastructure (TCP/IP, Apache, sendmail).

BIND the Berkley Internet Naming Daemon responsible for mapping domain names to IP addresses ran on 95% of all public reverse DNS servers. (Source: Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California).
MySQL founded in 1995 by two open source veterans, Michael "Monty" Widenius and David Axmark, with the help of Allan Larsson and claims 4 million installations worldwide and 30,000 downloads of the software per day making MySQL by far the planet's most widely distributed open-source database. (Source: mySQL)

PHP is a widely used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML and as of May 2003 it was being used on 12,487,030 domains and 1,321,203 IP addresses. (Source: PHP)

Linux Operating System is over three years old and has grabbed 13.7 percent of the $50.9 billion market for server computers, and that figure is expected to jump to 25.2 percent in 2006, putting Linux in the No. 2 position. (Source: IDC)

SourceForge a site providing support tools and resources for the OSS/Free Software movement recently announced a major two year

Generated on February 27, 2009.

0.7x End Of Life   (News)

From 1st October 2008
PostNuke 0.7x will only be available as a download package from code.zikula.org. New modules and themes for the .7x series will no longer be accepted into the Extensions repository after this date, and devlopers are encouraged to convert their extensions to Zikula 1.0. Any security updates to 0.7x modules will still be accepted in the repository.

From 1st January 2009
Official support for 0.7x will no longer be available. The extensions database and support forum will be archived, and new submissions will no longer be accepted.

On 1st July 2009
Official support for the 0.7x series of PostNuke ends on this date. Security fixes will no longer be provided, though it will

Generated on June 6, 2008.

Development Update, 2008-01   (News)

.8 Final: the next step after RC3
Since the release of RC3, already a lot of bugfixes have been committed to the repository. The developers have agreed to address all new features to the .9 tree, where the two major changes (UTF-8 and gettext, see below) are already in active development. This should result in much shorter release cycles (and earlier release dates) also, and give module developers much more clarification on what to change in order to make their module work under the new major release. If needed, an final bugfizing weekend may still be organised for .8 final.
The upgrade from .764 installations on certain systems has been improved, by increasing the memory_limit to 64M. However, this only works for php version 5.2.1 and above.
Upgrading to .8 together with some 3rd party modules may raise problems when the modules upgrade process is not failsafe for .8 or if the upgrade function uses core functions of modules that are not available yet. Therefore the upgrade of 3rd party modules in general is avoided by following a white list of core modules.
Most site-specific data can already be easily overridden using the /config and /themes directories. The Multisites module however still needs some futher thought on the best way of running multiple sites from a single install. One method having multiple unrelated (i.e. non table sharing) sites of a single install would be to have config/site1, config/site2 etc., this will be postponed to a next release.
The Tour module is now in a state where it can be translated to other languages as well. Just translate the templates and put them in a subdir with the appropriate language abbrevation, all within the pntemplates directory.

MultiCategorization introduction and issues since
As earlier announced, a last fix for supporting MultiCategorization has been added to the core just before the release of RC3. Since those changes, another small fix was then required to be fully backwards compatible. On the module-devs list, the devs have discussed a lot on how to solve these issues. Chances are great that if the new (already committed) patches do not solve the problems, MultiCategorization might be postponed to later versions in order to fully test the new features.
For more information on MultiCategorization, visit this thread in the forum.

DOM extension to use correct paths in JavaScript
Some javascripts, eg. the lightbox, need to know the path to the system and the entrypoint as well (which can be configured in the settings), otherwise they may fail in case of short urls being enabled. Since dynamic javascript creation might be a performance problem, some inline javascript is added to the pagevars to extend the DOM:
- document.location.entrypoint: will be set to what is configured to be the entrypoint
- document.location.pnbaseURL: will point to the result of pnGetBaseURL();
Any ideas on how to make his more unobtrusive are very welcome!

PostNuke Upgrade Distribution
In previous articles and posts, the term '.8 upgrade pack' was used to represent a full .8 package, including 3rd party modules, to upgrade to .8 from an existing .764 installation. However, the term 'upgrade pack' is not quite correct and misleading, because it implies to be an upgrade package with changed files only, while the main parts remain as-is. The transition between .764 and .8 requires a complete exchange of all files, so the so called upgrade package is a complete distribution.
Now it remains what modules should be in an upgrade distribution, to be able to fully upgrade an existing .764 installation, including new versions of 3rd party modules. These include Downloads 2.2, pnMessages, Polls 2.0, bbcode / bbsmile, Weblinks, EZComments and MultiHook at least. This might need some additional testing with certain versions also.

Core changes and additions in the .9 tree
Mark has already overhauled some core API methods and calls. All systems modules are now using the Renderer Class instead of pnRender. Also, a first pass has been committed in changing all pn* function calls to new object method calls. For example, pnModGetInfo is replaced with ModuleUtil::getInfo and pnSecGenAuthKey is replaced with SecurityUtil::generateAuthKey.
For those who did not know: A class pnCompat.php still includes most oldstyle API calls for backwards compatibility.

GetText and Default DB Charset
Bernd is progressing rapidly on integrating gettext in de development tree, and has added po-files for all core modules. The required PHP version for .9 has already been set to a minimum of 5.1.6, and since version 5.0, MySql supports different character sets and corresponding collating orders. To run an application in UTF-8 (unicode) it is not sufficient to change the character set for PN; we needed to set the database encoding (actually server and client) to UTF-8 as well.
A user who wishes to run his site in multiple languages, needs to decide the database encoding at installation time. The default is UTF-8, because the current iso-8859-1 is restricted to too few language combinations. UTF-8 is a 'no-worry' setting because it will work with any language (as long as it is UTF-8 encoded.
This change is $PNConfig['DBInfo']['default']['dbcharset'] = 'utf-8';

To cache or not to cache, that's the question
Also discussed on the devs-list is the current (and future) state of output caching within PostNuke. Why should any application repeat the same processing tasks on a item that hasn't changed?
Not caching anything is fine if one has got infinite resources to throw at a site (and even then there are limits). But in reality there are finite resources and you need to take steps to ensure that those resources are effectively used. One method for that is not wasting precious resources repeating the same tasks time after time.
The key is effective cache management. Currently we put too much load onto the module to handle it's own caching. Once you then

Generated on March 2, 2008.

SEO for postnuke   (News)

Customize title
You can customize the general title of your postnuke, by filling in the correspondant fields in the module "settings". The problem is that, you will have only one title for the whole website ... and that's ugly (and bad for SEO).
A solution was offered by Markwest, in order to personnalize this title, on every pages.the title tag plugin

This plugin allow you to format titles like this
Classic titles
HTML for Module Developers - A Discussion :: pnCommunity :: Support at your fingertips


if you want to have shorter titles like this, you can use the other unofficial version in the comments.

Improved titles
HTML for Module Developers


If you're using pnForum, it will give you title like this

PnForum title



Customize meta "descriptions" and "keywords"
You can customize the meta "descriptions" and "Keywords" of you CMS, by filling in the correspondant field in the "settings" module, but with this customisation, you will have only one "description" and "keywords" fields for all the site.
In order to improve this, there are two plugin on the community repository, one for fixing the descriptions and the other one for the keywords tags.


Notes : As the Search engine were spammed by overloaded keywords tags, for most of them , they don't consider this tags anymore.
If you're using pnForum, it will give you this :

PnForum metas



Activate url rewriting
You can activate the url rewriting in Xanthia, go to the Xanthia module, then check the options "use short urls", and copy paste the .htaccess file from the "doc" folder to the root of you CMS.

/!\ Be careful, live search doesn't url with more than two dashes

Notes : an improved version of the current url rewriting is available in postnuke 0.8.

Duplicate content

Don't duplicate links in your portal, two differents links must not point to the same content. Indeed, some search engine don't like to see multiples versions of the same page on a website (that's called "duplicate content")

To avoid this, you can use a robots.txt at the root of the CMS
Robots.txt
User-agent: *
Disallow: admin.php
Disallow: config/*
Disallow: header/*
Disallow: footer/*
Disallow: pntables/*
Disallow: /images/*
Disallow: /includes/*
Disallow: /adlogger/*
Disallow: /themes/*
Disallow: /pnTemp/*
Disallow: /docs/*
Disallow: /javascript/*
Disallow: *.php
Disallow:module-Forum-viewtopic-topic-*-start-0.html



An other tip, "/index.php", "/index.html" and "/" redirect to the same page so you can add this rule in you .htaccess
.htaccess
RewriteRule ^index\.html$ http://postnuke.com [NC,R=301]
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ http://postnuke.com [NC,R=301]


Text formating

In your articles or templates, try to have a structured layout with H1, H2, H3 tags.


Autolink and intern link
The module "autolink" is interesting, because he allows you to create a large amount of intern links with the same source anchor, this will help to increase your rank on the given word

404 error

When you've got an important portal with a large number of pages , it may be possible some of you ranked pages doesn't exist anymore. When search engine bots come to look for this "ghost" pages, you can redirect them to the home of your website, with an "Error 404" header.

.htaccess
ErrorDocument 404 /index.html


Take off unused metas tags

For most of them, search engine bots don't read some meta like "revist-after", so you can take them of your head tags. It will not help you, but you will have a cleaner header.
xxx.html




This article is a translation from this "how to" released on Postnuke-France

Generated on January 31, 2008.

Developers Love Feedback   (News)

good. And it's not even only good feedback they love! As long as the criticism is based on fact, well argumented and constructive.

Developers can't read you minds and [b]they[/b] know their work, [b]they[/b] can use it. Once in a while I read comments about modules like "Nice start, but there is still a lot of work in it and it's a bit buggy." Well?? If you don't report bugs and if you don't make suggestions on how to improve a module, you can't expect that things will change to your taste.

You are not a programmer? Okay: There are new module releases in the module database now and then - download every module and test them!! That is the least you can do for the community.

Certainly developers won't answer every single PM or feature request you write - but be sure: They will see and appreciate your work.

This is what YOU can do for Postnuke ;-

Generated on January 11, 2008.

PostNuke - A Year in Review   (News)

Following on from that, we had the release of Milestone 3 in February, which we used to clear up many bugs in the .8 codebase.

Next, we saw the first release of Scribite, development of a high quality WYSIWYG solution for PostNuke sponsored by the German PostNuke Foundation (read about the latest, 2.0 release here). We also had the appearence of several 0.8 only modules - MultiHook, pnUpper (now renamed to MediaAttach) and Publish. More and more modules taking advantage of .8 technologies were developed throughout the year, and there is an ever increasing selection of modules ready to run with .8 when we release the final version next year.

PageLock, for managing concurrent edits of a page was introduced to PostNuke .8 in March. The PostNuke Recovery Console made an appearence in May, as a .8 replacement for the Swiss Army Knife. At the end of May, CoType (which our Docs team is using to author the new PostNuke .8 documentation) was released to the public.

Unfortunately, in June we hit the well publicised problems with the NOC, which continued for a couple of months and hit the development of .8, delaying RC1 until July. However, RC1 met with a good response and many bugs were fixed.

In August, a new Steering Committee was elected, and Jorn's new Content module (which just hit the 1.0 release) was announced. The 4th Annual pnMeeting convened in Osnabrück during September and there were many interesting talks and discussions held by the 30 or so attendees.

In October we had our first bug fixing weekend, followed by further problems with the NOC, forcing November to be a quiet month. However, on December the 12th we released RC2, which we wish to test over the Christmas holiday in preparation for RC3 or a final release early in the New Year.

So what's to come? I'll leave that for articles to be published in the New Year, but at the very least you can expect the release of .8 final, the unveiling of our new name and the rebranding which goes with it, further development of .9, and some results from our documentation project.

Finally, all that remains is to wish everyone a happy and prosperous New Year. Thanks for your continued support!


Simon Birtwistle [HammerHead]
PostNuke Steering Committe

Generated on December 27, 2007.

What's going on?   (News)

know the Core team released RC2 of Postnuke .8 - the Steering Committee's report we are just working on will deal with the details.

2. Jørn Wildt released a first version of his "Content" module:
"Finaly I have finished the first version of my new Content module. With this little goodie you get HTML editing, YouTube video, Google maps and more features out of the box. This module was inspired by Typo3 and the never-finished PostNuke module Publish!" -- elfisk.dk

Content is a module that you can use to create static pages. It supports several predefined layouts (1 column, 2colums + header aso) and you can also add your own templates. In the editor you then can drag and drop content items like texts, images, youTube videos or Google Maps around and place them anywhere you like within the layout.

3. Together with "Content 1.0.0" a new version of Jørn's Mediashare gallery is available. Yet it still needs an installed Topics module to run under .8.

4. pnForum 2.7(.1) is finally released. A test version served the German Postnuke community for months and now he fixed the last bugs and made a public release.

5. Sven Schomaker is about to release Scribite 2.0 - It includes openWYSIWYG v1.4.6c as new editor and new versions of Xinha (v0.94), TinyMCE (v2.1.2), FCKeditor (v2.4.3), a lot of new module plugins and languages.

6. Axel Guckelsberger finished his diploma thesis that discussed the use of model-driven software development (MDSD) for Postnuke and resulted in his "ModuleStudio". Although ModuleStudio is far from complete it is way ahead in terms of modern software development. And if it turns out right MDSD is one of the next big things after object orientation (OO).

7. User ftree started work on a new gallery (pnAlbum) some months back and now published an article about his work. In preparation of the gallery he programmed some basic functions which turned out to be suitable for everyone who wants to program a module. If you want to you can take a look at his work.

8. There's a new pnCommerce team in formation: Rüdiger Hahn, Jim Hatfield, Chris Candreva, Bernd Plagge and some others are long time pnCommerce users and all maintained their own fork of the module. Now they are trying to put all their code together and a new version out for public use.

9. Marco Kundert is still working on his .8 follow-up for Pagesetter called Pagemaster. His first release will be 100% compatible to the latest version of Pagesetter so that you can simply import all you Pagesetter content into Pagemaster. Pagesetter introduced many ideas into Postnuke that have now become part of the core: Postnuke .8 has Workflows system and the idea of Pagesetter's form framework (Guppy) can now be found as Forms API in .8 and the WYSIWYG-Editor is now in Scribite generally available - Pagemaster uses all these features and thus can be much leaner.

10. Robert Gasch is working on a commercial shop module. He allowed me to take a look at it and it looks really great. Robert made his living for the last few years by setting up shop solutions for customers and now uses this experience for his new module.

11. Mateo Tibaquirá released a first version of his port of the standalone Relay AJAX directory management application. Includes drag-n-drop files and folders, a dynamic loading file structure, thumbnail views, multiple users & accounts, batch uploads, shopping-cart/batch downloads.

I am sure I forgot some people and I know there's a lot more going on in Postnuke land. But I'd like to leave some news for further articles.

If you are working on a news-worthy Postnuke project please contact me via personal message

Generated on December 22, 2007.

Extensions Database Categories   (News)

Generated on October 21, 2007.

News from "Behind the Scenes"   (News)

Rebranding
The new name and the logo have been chosen, now the lawyers have to do their work in claiming the necessary trademarks. This is more important for Europe as it is for the US. but we will get the trademark worldwide to avoid any future problems. But, as usual, the administrative mills are working slowly, so this needs some more time. As soon as this process has been finished we will decide about announcing the new name, either immediately or together with the final release of .8 (which will in this case be renamed to $newname 1.0).

EasyDist and the extension database
Axel and Simon have written a concept paper of how to connect the EasyDist module (see [url]http://modulestudio.de[/url]) to the extension database on this site. Necessary changes on both sides are identified and will be done in the next weeks. The plan is to have this working together with the release of $newname 1.0. Among other things EasyDist will be enabled to get the latest module or theme information from the database to create up-to-date packages whenever a new version of a module or theme has been released, an admin interaction will not be required.

Release Manager
Although the EasyDist module will become a very powerful tool we still have to supply the usual download packages. For this we need someone to create, validate, upload etc. those packages. In the future this task will be done by Patrick Cornelissen (patrick.c). He will also maintain the SVN module that is internally used on this site to create the daily snapshots for the core and selected modules. Thanks to Patrick for accepting this task.

New Subdomains on postnuke.com
Postnuke.com will get two new subdomains:
- devs.postnuke.com for devs and team members to post tips, news, information etc. This is the official replacement for the old pndevs.com site. Moving this site to a postnuke.com subdomain was planned from the very beginning.
- demo.postnuke.com will be a demo installation of .8 with working admin part, including some selected modules (not yet defined). This will be almost the same as http://pn8.pn-cms.de where the database is rebuilt from a backup every night via a cron job or manually throughout the day if needed.
Both sites will be installed and maintained by Philipp Niethammer (philipp.ni) and Gabriel Freinbichler (gf).

Documentation
We know that .8 is lacking a real documentation and we want to change this. Therefore a group of interested users will be built until beginning of November to take over this part. The Steering Committee will then decide about the project leader for this and ask him or her to work on a proposal for a manual, online help, and wiki structure which should all fit together (this also includes the tools needed to do the job) until mid of December latest (earlier if possible). When this has been accepted, we will talk about an exact time frame for finally writing the docs. Here everyones input is appreciated of course!
The project leader will have to submit a regular report about the proceedings to the SC.

Bug fixing weekend
As already announced in [url]http://community.postnuke.com/Article2862.htm[/url] the bug fixing weekend will start on Saturday, 6th. Mark and Robert also want to join us (virtually) to squish out some nasty bugs, Roberts main target will be the categories module.
Interested users can also join us using Skype. If you are interested, please send me your screen name via mail or private message so that we can invite you.


As you can see, the project is active although some might have thought the opposite. We delegated or will delegate some tasks to users who are able and ready to contribute to PostNuke. If you also want to participate, please contact us, there is always something YOU can do.

If you think you have something that is worth to be spoken about in the next chats, please tell us.

Generated on October 5, 2007.

How to build a distribution   (News)

You are able to point and click your own package - select some modules, chose a theme and there you have your very own package.

The easy distribution system will become part of pn.com and directly access the module database here. So that you are always up-to-date when you download your package. (BTW: They are not up-to-date now - it's only a beta!)

That is pretty cool, if you know what you need and if you know how to tie these modules together properly.

Become a Distributor
If you want to build a package that contains preconfigured modules with custom templates aso you should look into the wiki. There you find a description of a file that contains 2 functions. One function defines the modules that are to be installed and the other function can be used to call modules API function or any PHP function you like.

I this manner you can install your modules, configure them and fill them with demo content.

Finally you can replace the standard themes with some nice custom themes.

These distributions can then be included in Easydist as "Scenarios" or be distributed via your homepage or whatever you like.

Any questions? Comments? Critique

Generated on September 23, 2007.

Page 1 / 20 (1 - 10 of 193 Total)