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GSoC Interview: Carlos Mauro
(News)
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2. What attracted you to the Google Summer of Code as a programme, and PostNuke as a project?
I looked at Google Summer Code as a great challenge. But I do not dare. Until this year, if I did. I applied to several projects related to the topic of usability. And because apply to PostNuke some years ago I work as freelance. Develop some portals for small businesses in my country using postnuke and other CMS. PostNuke is attractive because this was installed in a single attempt. I was surprised. So I think support.
3. Tell us about your project, and how you hope it can benefit PostNuke?
I'm copying what we present in my proposal:
The criteria for the evaluation usability are:
Comparison of controls on Good Practices or patterns Usability on the Web.
Include improvements within the Framework.
Create a guide to improve and documenting findings to the community PostNuke.
a. Usability
To improve the usability of Postnuke i will work graphical interfaces suggested some of the modules and the framwork which are used in the forms. Attempts to put in these modules some good practices and standards for Web usability.
I will Work with what is necessary XHTML, CSS, Ajax whether it is possible to implement and methodically.
b. Accessibility and conformance
For the accessibility i take the the Guidelines and techniques(6). After the programing process. I will make a list for test usability. I will Choose 6 to 7 cms users to test usability with the corrections. The proceeds will help create iterations for each test.
c. Maintainability
Maintenance may accelerate taking intoaccount that at the end of the draft the conclusions will be made in the form of best practices for Web usability postnuke. I will help in the incorporation and supporting of usability guide line in other modules PostNuke.
In the forums I will clarify the tasks of the project and also its scope.
4. What do you personally hope to gain from participating in the Summer of Code with PostNuke?
Many, many experience in knowing more about how a community of developers interested in do make a good product. Learning from good programming practices and especially knowing more about web usability. Of course Social Recognition.
I want postnuke as a milestone in the renewed Internet.
5. Can you see yourself contributing your talents to Open Source projects following the SoC? Will you continue to work with PostNuke in some capacity after the programme has ended?
The GSOC ends after a month of my graduation from college. I hope to finish that time almost all my tasks in the project. I would like to leave a module to test usability. I feel a duty to contribute to the community. I am confident that the project can achieve more significant improvements in its next release and then create or generate support the development of future lines. It should not be discouraged postnuke which has short market ... we see the top, be with them and then jump to heaven.
6. Is there anything else you’d like to say now, as the programme begins?
I would like to see other issues as the framework and its implementation in business or insert google app into the framework. I would like to make a strategic planning for IT postnuke. Devising strategies to make the best CMS, simply: Easy.
Not only is needed to schedule some things to achieve a well-accepted product.Need to know that is what the user wants in the next 5 years and venture into that vision. So I count on your support to work with postnuke .... And of course do my project as realistic as possible in these 3 months in the hope that is of benefit to all.
Lastly, thanks for your time – we in the PostNuke team are excited about the Summer of Code, so thank you for taking part and choosing PostNuke!
We are going ... postnuke to make the Best CMS, the easiest. GEN a social network that seems to make FaceBook a grain of sand in our seas.
I will continue reviewing more documentation and adjusting the project to postnuke with the help of my mentor Steffen Voß and
Generated on April 27, 2008.
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OpenID for PostNuke
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If you haven't read that yet and is interested in OpenID then please read it here - it will explain the whole OpenID background.
For those of you that haven't heard about OpenID yet, here is the very short explanation: OpenID is a relatively new web-technology for managing your online identity. It's primary purpose is to facilitate Single Sign On across independent websites. This means you can create yourself an OpenID identity and use that for login in to different websites without having to retype your password over and over again.
When I wrote the last article I promissed to deliver an OpenID implementation for PostNuke, and, well, here it is! You can now download OpenID from the NOC OpenID project page.
By installing this module you enable your users to:
Register an OpenID with their PostNuke account and login with this OpenID. The OpenID manager page can be found in the user account panel (Profile).
Create an account on your website using OpenID's registration process.
The OpenID module requires PostNuke version .8 from SVN (april 15th) - and probably also PHP 5.x since a required extension "domxml" is not delivered with PHP 4.x.
So don't hesitate - get your website OpenID enabled today and save yourself (and your customers) the hazzle of managing multiple user accounts.
Intra-web usage
You can use OpenID for Single Sign On between closed "intra-webs". For this
you must have a trusted OpenID Identity Provider (IP) - either your own or an
external one. Then you add a filter on the OpenID admin pages - this filter
should allow access from your trusted IP and deny access from any other
provider. In this way only users from your trusted IP will be allowed to access
your website.
Read more
You can find lots of information about OpenID around the web. The most obvious place to start is of course openid.net. But at openidbook.com you can get a free copy of the 200+ pages OpenID book from Rafeeq Ur Rehman. This should satisfy even the most curious people
Enjoy, Jørn Wildt
Generated on April 16, 2008.
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Meeting 2008 - Announcement and invitation
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discussions for users and developers to take place at the same time. A workshop is in consideration as well, to diversify the agenda.
At this time we are still at the beginning of planning, but will delve into it during the next weeks and give an account of it in regular intervals. We have several ideas, especially due to the large feedback from last year. For instance, we are up to start a shuttle service as designated by multiple people. There will certainly be a supporting programme again - how this will look like and if proportionate costs, in form of a fixed amount, which has to be carried by the participants themselves, will incur thereby is still open though. But we will make an effort to keep this amount as low as possible (less than 25 Euro). It is also not certain yet where and in which form the traditional prelude event on Friday will be.
Since there were already three companions last year, we want to organize a secondary agenda which is going to happen parallel with the primary conference and is being overseen by my girlfriend. However, during the complete supporting programme, for example the dinner on Saturday, both groups will be together.
Many other details like possibilities for arrival as well as accommodations and the program itinerary will be recorded in the Wiki [5] (German only). Also preliminary suggestions for lectures, workshops and discussions can be handled there. In coincidence of The Rhineland Palatinate's State Garden Show [6] happening simultaneously, a shortage at close hotels may arise. We will put several addresses and alternatives into the Wiki this very day. Please take care as soon as possible for corresponding reservations. If there should occur any problems, I am within reach and of help at axel@zikula.org.
We are looking forward to a large attendance [7].Registrations are without commitment, but exceedingly helpful for our organization, particularly as we must roughly estimate the total amount of persons. Also the information how many people are going to bring along their partners, is very important for the planning. The first meeting which is all about $newname is hopefully going to become an exciting and innovative performance with active participation.
Links:
http://www.bingen.de/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bingen_am_Rhein
http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1066
http://www.fh-bingen.de/
http://camp-zikula.info/wiki/
http://www.landesgartenschau-bingen-2008.de/
http://camp-zikula.info/contact/
Generated on April 1, 2008.
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Development Update, 2008-01
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.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.
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PostNuke 0.8 RC3 Released
(News)
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PostNuke 0.8 RC3 Upgrade Pack Download
Download (ZIP)
MD5: 02629a822154f9f88a72ebea7f562470
SHA-1: 7ca9de7e7285778122e3d711c1b48f9ee4342396
Download (TAR.GZ)
MD5: eaf730995aec0acebca26f62a9f5ec98
SHA-1: 2245191875cb66d4c2cbda769321b3f0ccb7dc33
PostNuke 0.800 RC3 Core Download
Download (ZIP)
MD5: 95000958fa40f442a40282db5aae1799
SHA-1: aaa57406204bdc1220a6768d6de2021736ffe1cc
Download (TAR.GZ)
MD5: e563098769d0ce448c31a39a92f9b0ab
SHA-1: 5fe83c58707de118a28ba0dd8c72138706d90388
PostNuke 0.800 RC3 ValueAddons Download
Download (ZIP)
MD5: 195a63ac59c1ddce7507ad50b21032d1
SHA-1: 8f64584642ea3959b13a98b1649dfe50921ffa31
Download (TAR.GZ)
MD5: f7436f01187f81f34eb80c4959d46d37
SHA-1: 5ebce8c82fa1599ad81b3bce771d418b6e496329
Release Highlights
There are a number of improvements in RC3 over RC2, these include an enhanced upgrade script, the new Tour module and some last minute categories module improvements.
New Upgrade Script
The two upgrade scripts, upgrade76.php and upgrade.php have now been combined into a single file. In addition to this, a number of interface improvements have been made to make the process of upgrading your .7x series websites simpler and more reliable. The new script also solves some long standing bugs with the update proceedure, so we invite anyone who had problems with the upgrade proceedure previously to try again with this new version.
Tour Module
In an attempt to reduce the learning curve when first starting with PostNuke, a new module has been developed to introduce you to this new release of PostNuke. It provides a first time tour of PostNuke, introducing you to common terms like block, module and theme with which new users may not be familiar and also gives some basic hints and tips on where to start.
For more experienced users, there is a 'New In PostNuke 0.8' section, where you can discover more about this release of PostNuke, and a distribution tour, where authors of distributions can describe the purpose of their package and how it benefits you as a site administrator. The distribution tour page is stored in docs/distribution/tour_page1.htm, and an example is included in this release. This file is not intended to be viewed outside the Tour module, as the Tour module adds navigational elements around the page.
Finally, module and theme developers can include tours for their module, to introduce users to key features, or help them familiarise themselves with the basics. It is intended to serve as a crash course for all modules - be they complicated (such as pagesetter) or more simple (such as the Pages module). Certain modules have hidden features about which a user may not necessarily be aware, and we hope that the tour module will allow module developers to better promote the features their modules contain.
The tour module supports multipage tours for all modules - simply store tour_page1.htm and any subseqeuent pages in modules/yourmodule/pndocs/, or themes/yourtheme/docs.
Categories Improvements
The categories module received a few last minute improvements in SVN just before the release of RC3. These improvements are aimed at developers using categories in their modules, and especially multiple categorisation scenarios. Further details will be available shortly, but those interested can read the patch submitted for the issues at the NOC.
Generated on February 20, 2008.
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Short Status Update
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upgrade's usability - and he merged the .7 upgrade and the .8MS upgrade into one file. So there's only one upgrade.php for all.
Simon Birtwistle together with some guys from the support team wrote a tour module that is supposed to explain the basic functions to first time Postnuke users.
All this is now in the SVN and will be release as RC3 ASAP.
As we are all pretty busy these days, I won't promise it for tomorrow but ASAP. ;-
Generated on February 13, 2008.
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SEO for postnuke
(News)
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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.
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PostNuke Project Update
(News)
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Bug Fixing for RC3 / Bug Fix Weekend #2
Many new bugs have been submitted since the release of RC2, but as always, to improve the quality of 0.8 final we are looking for more. Please submit any bugs you find to the NOC. Meanwhile, RC2 bugfixing is in full swing, and the number of bugs in the bug tracker is steadily reducing. In preparation for RC3 early in the new year, we've scheduled a new bug fix weekend for the first weekend of January (plans are still to be finalised). For this weekend a Skype chat will be set up. If you feel you could offer assistance over the weekend, either through testing or coding then we invite you to join us. More details to follow shortly.
International Communities Request
In preparation for the publication of the project's new name we're looking to get in contact with those running local community support sites. To ensure active local communities are able to get international domain names the project is accepting applications for those currently running established communities. If you are interested in applying for a local domain name, please use the contact form to contact the Steering Committee.
Teams and Call for Volunteers
A separate article will shortly be posted asking for volunteers for a number of new sub teams within the projects. We're looking for people with some time to donate to the project in one of a number of different roles in an exciting time for the project. If you could be one of those people, please watch this space.
Module Developer's List - A Reminder
A list is available for module developers to ask questions and share expertise. Currently being discussed is the future of pnCommerce. We invite all those with an interest in PostNuke development to subscribe to the list - to do so, please PM Steffen (comment #1).
New on 0.9, Language System Redevelopments
Part of the list of features for 0.9 is a new languages system. Bernd Plagge is focused on this new system and is about to start working on the PostNuke-devel branch in SVN. We'll post more news on this system in a future article, but if you're subscribed to the commits list then look out for his work as it rolls in.
Web Links Module Needs a New Home
Unfortunately, Klaus Petzka has given the Web Links module up for adoption as he lacks the necessary time to maintain the module.
Generated on December 24, 2007.
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.8 Bug Fixing Weekend
(News)
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9 too). One slot is still available, if someone is interested in joining us, please contact me for details. Maybe Jorn can make a short stop when coming back from his holidays :-).
We did this several times before when working on pncommerce and out of our experience we know that such weekends are really productive and a valuable source for creativity.
For those who want to support this we will either create a Skype conference or an open IRC chat (not sure yet which one will make it), this will announced on time. So we can coordinate our efforts with those of other developers and you, the user.
Now is the time to check out .8 and see what is not working as expected. You can either add bugs on NOC as usual or, if you are not sure, tell us about this in the chat.
See you (or read you) on Oct. 6th/7th.
Generated on September 26, 2007.
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New Shop, New Calendar - Postnuke Community gains speed again
(News)
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New Community Modules
Have you seen Florian Schliessl's modules? The central module is pnProfile - an alternative profile module similar to the new core module or AdvProfile (which actually has become the new core profile module ;-) ). pnProfile offers dropdowns, textfields aso.
Demo: technobilder.de.
Another nice community module is Florian's UserPictures. It allows users to keep their own personal gallery.
Demo: technobilder.de
I personally very much like Florian's ClickedMe which displays all the people who checked out you profile. Every user can choose for himself if he wants to be seen or not.
Download: ClickedMe.
To cut a long story short: Florian has released a bunch other modules. A list can be found in his NOC profile.
PostBuddy is a module that copies a very popular function of mySpace aso - you can make people your friend and display a list of your friends in your profile. Cool, eh?
Has anybody tried pnConnections? It sounds like a cool module.
Shops!
Did you see that Bernd Plagge adopted pnCommerce and released a working version? Contact him, if you are interested in cooperating with him! pnCommerce could use some cool new templates.
And pnCommerce has a young competitor! The development team has released a first beta of ShoppingKart. They are very active and keen on making ShoppingKart a cool module. IMHO their templates also lack beauty - but it's a first beta. ;-)
New Calendar
Robert Gasch and a user named "bones" announced to start working on a successor for PostCalendar - I'm really looking forward for that one.
But the grandmother of all calendar modules also has a competitor: crpCalendar. A neat little modules that's made to display a list of event dates - if you don't have too many of them it could fit your needs.
What else?
Did you see that Treverj is working on a cool Postnuke based Web 2.0 community site? Read: Project Updates.
The Spanish community released a Karma Addon for pnForum. You only need dpGraph for it.
Mark West released a new version of EZComments and added Akismet support. Akismet is the spam detection API of Wordpress. So EZComments sends all comments and trackbacks through Akismet to find out if it's spam or not. If you are working on any module that's been spammed - check out the Akismet module API and integrate its features into you module.
InvalidResponse released a first final version of his ElementBB forum. It's a nice and slim forum with great templates. Check it out at his homepage.
Jørn Wildt released a new content module that keeps content in a book like way and is made for team work. It's called CoType and should also serve as an example for a .8 implementation.
Hilope's Scribite is not only a module that adds the WYSIWYG editor of your choice to Postnuke modules. If you look deeper into the possibilities of for examples Xinha you will certainly never work on any site without this module. BTW: The initial development of Scribite was sponsored by the German Postnuke foundation. ;-)
Forgive me if I forgot your cool new module - this article wasn't meant to be complete. I wanted to give a little overview o
Generated on June 7, 2007.