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pnMeeting 2007: Mark West's Keynote
(News)
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RC1 - RC2 is supposed to follow within the next few weeks. We did a redesign of the NOC and appointed a new Steering Committee.
Postnuke is now in the process of a rebranding. A new name has been chosen by the Postnuke Foundation and as soon as all legal issues are solved the new name will be presented to the community.
Mark's next topic were the central features in Postnuke .8 which are also the main topic of this years meeting. The German Postnuke Foundation tried to assemble a panel that explains all the new features to the broad community.
Believe it or not - .9 is already in the planning. There's already a branch in the SVN and we decided to make it PHP5 only. The Object Library will become core. The language system will get an overhaul - other systems will be evaluated. .9 will deliver UTF-8 and it should be possible to really have multilingual content.
Mark West pointed out the power of the Postnuke permission system - but also the problems with its complexity. Frank Schummertz volunteered to work out the next generation permission system.
If you want to help, Mark asks you to work on the wiki, do some testing, report bugs, submit patches or develop your own Postnuke extensions.
In the following discussion, Frank Schummertz reported the experience some users made with the UTF-8 conversion of Postnuke.
Generated on September 8, 2007.
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PHP Projects Join Forces To Go PHP 5
(News)
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The Symfony, Typo3, phpMyAdmin, Drupal, Propel, and Doctrine projects have all announced
that their next release after February 5, 2008 will require PHP version 5.2 as part of a
coordinated effort at GoPHP5.org, and have issued an open invitation to any other PHP
projects and applications, both open source and proprietary, that want to participate in the
effort.
Most PHP-based web applications today run in both PHP version 4 and PHP version 5. PHP
4 was released in 2000, and quickly cemented itself as one of the dominant web development
languages. Version 5 was released in 2004 with dramatic improvements in functionality, but
adoption has been slow due mostly to the "chicken and egg" problem that accompanies many
new platform releases.
"Most of the PHP developers I talk to want to use PHP 5 but can't because so many web
hosts offer PHP 4 by default," said Larry Garfield, a Drupal developer and one of
GoPHP5.org's founders. "The hosts won't upgrade until projects do, but projects won't
upgrade until the hosts do. That has made a lot of projects reluctant to be the first to drop
support for PHP 4, so we've decided that we will all be first."
By pre-announcing plans to require PHP 5.2 in upcoming software versions in 2008, GoPHP5
hopes to provide web hosts with the incentive to upgrade their servers to newer, more stable,
more feature-rich versions of PHP as well as sufficient time to do so. Users that are already
using current versions of participating projects won't be left out in the cold, either. All involved
projects will continue to support current releases on PHP 4 for their normal life cycle, giving
both users and hosts time to plan and implement an upgrade.
"The phpMyAdmin project is very enthusiastic to join the GoPHP5 initiative," added
phpMyAdmin's project lead, Marc Delisle. "We see GoPHP5 as a way both to improve our
product's new versions — not always having to add workarounds to remain PHP4compatible
— and improve the experience of our users — by projecting the correct message about the
PHP system itself and its evolution."
PHP 5 offers developers a wide array of features designed to make developing fast, modern
web applications faster and easier. That includes vastly improved XML handling for Web
services, an integrated SQL database called SQLite, better handling of time zones,
dramatically improved security tools, stronger object-oriented functionality, and more.
Many PHP projects already require PHP 5. Encouraging a larger installed base of PHP 5 will broaden the market for those projects as well. PHP is a widely-used general purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development. PHP is one of the leading web development languages in the world, running on a third of the world's web servers. It is the platform of choice for companies from Yahoo to Facebook as well as the most widely available development platform on shared hosting,
which powers millions of web sites world wide.
For more information:
http://gophp5.org/
http://www.phpmyadmin.net/home_page/gophp5.php
http://drupal.org/gophp5
Press Contact:
larry.garfield@gophp5.org
Generated on July 10, 2007.
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The Road to .8 - Where are we, and where are we going?
(News)
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The modules included in .760 which are templated, and taken direct from the .8 CVS are as follows:
Admin
Admin Messages
Autolinks
AvantGo
Blocks
Censor
Credits
Ephemerids
Groups
Header_Footer
Legal
Mailer
Members List
Messages
Modules
Permissions
pn_bbcode
pn_bbsmile
pnRender
Quotes
Ratings
RSS
Sniffer
Typetool
Xanthia
This represents a significant percentage of the .8 code, but there is still more to do. The aim of this article is to try and outline some of what remains to be done before we can consider a release of .8.
Six Main Projects for PostNuke Development
We have identified six main sub projects vital for a release of .8. These projects cover wide areas, and each are at different stages of completion. The six projects, in no particular order, are:
Integration of Open Star object library and Database Utility
Integration of Open Star category management
Installer
Xanthia
User management
Finishing of content modules
This article also includes a little information on some of the other new code to be introduced with .8 this is at the end, where we look at EZComments and the Error Handler.
Integration of Open Star Object Library and Database Utility
The new Database layer reuses the existing pntables information to provide an
object representation of database rows. The advantage of this approach is that
it allows you to basically remove manually coded SQL statements and replace
with what's typically a 1-line statement. Some sample invocations of such code
are shown below:
[code]
$myObj =& DBUtil::selectObjectByID (, $id);
$myObj =& DBUtil::selectObject (, $where);
$myObjArray =& DBUtil::selectObjectArray (, $where, $sort);
DBUtil::insertObject ($myObj, );
DBUtil::updateObject ($myObj, );
[/code]
These functions all return an associative PHP array, or in the case of array
functions, an array of arrays. The fields in this array are cleaned up in
the sense that any field prefixes have been removed. This DB API also
gives you the ability to have generate associative (object) arrays, expanded
arrays with other table fields joined in (which means that you can save SQL
lookup calls) as well as store/retrieve dynamic attributes without altering
the underlying table structure. Together this provides a highly flexible API
which can take care of all storage & retrieval operations.
On top of the DB layer sits the Object Layer. Objects provide a component model
which features transparent persistence facilities. Objects/Classees are loaded
though the Loader API though
[code]
Loader::loadClassFromModule (, 'foo') //
Generated on November 3, 2005.
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PostNuke 0.750 Gold Release Candidate 3 and XTE 5
(News)
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7) Setting for controlling loading of legacy code (also XTE5); note: some modules
may have a problem with this setting being off - results largely untested.
8) Adodb was updated to 4.22 so PostNuke should work in php5 environments
9) Queryutil.php (some kind of pre-adodb database abstraction) has been deprecated
- all corresponding sql-statements have been rewritten
10) Bugs that have been reported are fixed.
11) The credit for the idn-class goes to Matthias Sommerfeld
12) Improved section 508 / WCAG / BITV compliance for the frontend (mostly label,
tabindex etc).
13) Theme Pack - Addition of homepage templates with center blocks only in this
template, so centerblocks are only on frontpage if wanted.
You can find further information about the PostNuke 0.750 Gold release
here.
Please report any bugs using the bug tracker found on the "Development"
block on every postnuke.com page.
Downloads Details:-
PostNuke-0.750-RC3
XTERC
5, XTEThemePack RC5 and Example RC5
PostNuke Team
Generated on June 12, 2004.
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PostNuke .750 - The Gold Release
(News)
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increasing number of modules that use the templating environment, and that the caching and other features with XTE now come as standard.
Second, the Visual Editor will be modularised and updated to Typetool version 8.0. Although released previously as a separate module, the Typetool required the replacement of core files. Now, the new Visual Editor (which is cross-browser compatible) comes as a core module.
Next, core enhancements made to the PostNuke .8 series CVS have been backported to the .750 release. These changes greatly improve performance, especially on high traffic websites, and users of PostNuke in such environments should notice a marked increase in performance.
ADODB, has been updated to the recent latest release (4.21) to allow for upcoming PHP5 compatibility. Full details of improvements can be found at ADODB’s homepage - http://php.weblogs.com/ADODB.
Strict HTML compliance and XHTML compatibility has been achieved in the .750 code base. Building on work made on the .726 release, strict HTML compliance and XHTML compatibility has been achieved. This is of course theme and module dependant, however all core modules now render compliant to HTML and XHTML guidelines.
This compliancy fix has some side effects. To achieve this level of compliance and compatibility all instances of the image tags border=”0” attribute have been removed. This means that images may now display with a border, which on some sites may be undesirable. To prevent this problem occurring, a simple fix to the style sheets in the theme used can be applied. The fix is as follows:
IMG {
border : 0px;
}
This simple change should make certain that unwanted borders on images do not appear.
The Mailer module, which is currently in .8 CVS will be available as part of the .750 release. A problem sending e-mails using the existing .7x releases has been present for a small number of users, since the mailing feature in PostNuke is not customizable. The addition of the Mailer module makes it possible to change mail settings, and specify an alternate mail server, if required.
The template module has now been replaced with the example module. This change has been made to avoid confusion with the Xanthia Templating Environment, as the module can be used as a ‘template’ to build existing modules from.
In a separate improvement, the example module now uses pnRender (part of the XTE package) to display all module output.
The addition of XTE and the backporting of PostNuke .8 core enhancements will see a change in the minimum requirements for PN. PN .750 will have a minimum PHP requirement of a 4.1x build or above. This is due to the use of PHP 'superglobals' throughout the code.
Finally, many bug fixes have been applied to the .7x code as they have appeared. This should make the .750 Gold Release well wort
Generated on March 25, 2004.