Hello again from the CMS Made Simple Dev Team. Lots to talk about this time!
In this newsletter we are bringing you a note about the new version of CMS Made Simple released recently, some updates from the Dev Team including our change to a non-profit corporation. Also, if you have ever had to deal with content posted into CMS Made Simple from Microsoft Word, you will appreciate our pre- and post-filters article.
2.2.10 Released
We have just released version 2.2.10, "Spuzzum". Recent updates have included numerous incremental fixes and updates. The core now operates properly in PHP 7.2, and has some improvements to the way modules are initialized when they are loaded. The latest jump to 2.2.10 is to fix a vulnerability and fix some bugs in ModuleManager, amongst other things. Please see the blog post for full details.
Fun fact: The settlement of "Spuzzum" is in British Columbia, Canada. It is on the Trans-Canada Highway and is 50km north of the community of Hope. Hence Spuzzum is sometimes referred to as "beyond Hope"! Talking of names...
Naming Conventions
In the 1.x series, CMSMS releases were named for tropical islands, tying in to our palm tree logo and theme. When it was time to discuss a naming theme for the 2.x series, we wanted to explore more of the globe -- especially countries where many of our users and Dev Team called home. We decided that each major point release would be a new country, with each minor release a city or town in said country. There's no official process for choosing a country or town, other than the countries should be alphabetical. The developer cutting the release gets to choose the town, and often goes for a fun or obscure place.
What the Dev Team Has Been Up To
Forge 2.0
This has been a long time coming, but we're really excited by it. Robert, our lead developer, has put in countless hours to completely rewrite the Forge (our file-release and bug tracker platform) from the ground up.
Non Profit
In the Autumn of 2018, CMS Made Simple became a non-profit corporation, registered in Canada.
Major Release 2.3
CMS Made Simple version 2.3 will include more features, a sleeker core, admin theme improvements, and much more.
Slack
After fifteen years, we have retired our IRC channel and have migrated to Slack.
GSuite
Another benefit of being a non-profit is free access to many Google products. In January we transitioned all of our mail services and groups over to GSuite.
Read more about all these improvements in our news update blog post.
Smarty Pre- and Post-filters
Guest post from our Project Manager, Matt Hornsby
While upgrading some old 1.x websites recently I encountered a couple of problems that needed a quick and simple solution. Like most things related to CMS Made Simple, there are many ways to tackle a problem, but I thought this would be a fun opportunity to look into Smarty pre- and post-filters.
Problem 1: Content pasted from Microsoft Word
When an editor pastes in content from Word without cleaning it up first, it often includes a lot of extra formatting code. For this particular client, the code included curly braces "{mso-style-name:..." in hundreds of pages. Certainly I could have done a database find & replace, but why not try something different this time?.....
Read how Matt solves these issues in our filters blog post.
Sponsor Highlight
Established in 2009, Aire Libre is a small French web company focused on providing efficient and easy to manage websites to its small-to-mid-sized business clients.
"We chose CMS Made Simple for its great admin panel for the end user, and the flexibility of Smarty which allows us to create designs without any constraint. Our 100+ editors using it are really happy with it!"
- Mathieu Muths, Aire Libre
Does your business utilize CMS Made Simple, or just want to support open source in general? Consider becoming a partner.
Patreon Donations
Did you know you can donate to the CMS Made Simple project and help contribute to its costs? If you use Patreon to donate you can give from as llittle as US$3 per month. Please consider supporting your favourite CMS if you can!
Find out more: CMS Made Simple donation options.
Until next time!
Your CMS Made Simple Development Team
https://www.cmsmadesimple.org/about/team/
