Version 7.2 progress report, part 2
Posted by webmaster on 06 October 2008 07:37:39

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It's been a few months, and altough it is the holiday season, it doesn't mean there is no progress.

We have spend a lot of time in optimalisation and further bug fixes:

• Country information has been moved from the GeoIP table to the locales table (so they can be localized)
• When a module is detected as not-compatible, a reason will be given (if the module supplies it)
• Forum code has been revised. It now supports proper URL detection and parsing, the IMG BBcode tags work more reliable, and the automatic wikiword detection has been improved
• Forum has a new code parser, which uses Geshi to provide syntax coloring, and has a download button so the code can be downloaded without the need for cut-and-paste
• Fixed an issue with the captcha image in the password reset module
• When validating a users email address, we now try to handle mailservers utilizing greylisting
• Fixed out-of-memory issues when SQL logging was activated, and a task was started which produced lots of queries (for example the installation of a new language pack)
• Optimized a lot of queries to speed up the website
• Updated the RSS feed module to be more compliant with all kinds of standards and readers
• When replying to a message in the forum or personal messages, you van toggle a preview of the original message
• Modified the way the config file is found, so it can be placed outside the document root for enhanced security
• GeoIP information is added to the user, pm and posts records, so lookups have to be done only once
• GeoIP code has been optimized so that for every IP and every country code, only one query is executed, and the result cached
• Improved the isURL() function to be more standards compliant
• All CSS font definitions have been updated to better support non-Windows platforms
• Detection of the browser language settings can now be disabled by the administrator, so a specific language can be forced, even if the users preferred language is installed. Often used when the site must be localized, but users visit with a browser set to English (which is always installed)
• The visitorscounter and the Wiki hits counter now try to detect bots and crawlers, to make the counters more accurate
• The login panel no longer shows a link to the registration page if that link is already present in the menu
• Ajax calls have been introduced to load the smiley's block on request (when the user presses the toggle button)
• Ajax calls are now used to update the new posts and new private message indicators in the theme header (if present) and the user menu. They will popup in real time, no need to reload the page to check for new messages

Besides these, some changes have introduced new functionality:

• New wiki functions have been introduced, to delete and rename wiki pages, and to generate notes, warnings and tips boxes
• A new system generated wiki page gives an overview of the hits per page
• A new module called Download_Statistics has been introduced. This module provides code to run separate download servers, a system to gather and consolidate download statistics from these servers, reporting functionality, a download side panel with quick-links, and a Google Maps implementation on which the downloads are projected, based on users IP address
• TinyMCE has been upgraded to version 3.0.1. Also, an image browser has been added to TinyMCE, to make it easier for users to upload images that can be used in the editor
• The advertising module now has the option to place a banner at the top or bottom of the panel, or both
• Introduced a new reporting module. Reports are plugins that can be available in the core code or provided by an installed module. Group rights can be assigned to a report by the administrator
• As of version 7.2., new language packs will be added to the core code, instead of separate downloads. Currently, English and Dutch are available. We are in the progress of making a translation module, to make it simple for users of ExiteCMS to localize it
• Introduced a new search module. Searches are plugins that can be available in the core code or provided by an installed module. Group rights can be assigned to a search by the administrator, and the result will be filtered according to the users rights to see information. Searches are optimized by utilizing MySQL's fulltext search were possible
• Updated the user module to allow multiple authentication methodes, optionally with a fallback to the local user database. The first method implemented is OpenID, but we're working on LDAP and Active Directory