Announcing CMSMS 2.2 "Canada"
Hello Everybody.
Today, the members of the CMSMS Dev Team are happy to announce that CMSMS 2.2 "Canada" has been released.
The primary focus of the CMSMS 2.2 development project was to support our slogan: "Power for the professional, Simplicity for the end user". CMSMS 2.2 is a feature release, with lots of new functionality, and improvements in existing functionality, for each type of user.
CMSMS 2.2 continues to build and improve on the best open source content management system available. It's fast and easy to use for editors; powerful and infinitely extendable for application builders.
Some of the important new features are:
1. A new file picker module.
Embedded into the core, this module makes it easier for editors to find, select, and upload files and images. It works with the MicroTiny WYSIWYG Editor, with content pages, with News, and will easily integrate into third party addons.
2. A new asynchronous task module and accompanying API's.
This new functionality replaces the old and primitive pseudocron mechanism, to provide true background job processing. This is critically important functionality for apps that have tasks that can take long periods of time but do not require user intervention.
Many core tasks have been rewritten to use this functionality, and it is compatible with the existing mechanism for creating pseudocron tasks.
3. A new Alerts mechanism to display messages to admin users.
This replaces the old Notifications system from the 1.x series and allows the creation of alerts via asynchronous tasks.
4. A faster and cleaner database abstraction library.
The new database abstraction API is largely backwards compatible with the old adodb_lite mechanism. It also allows us to relatively easily adapt to changes in PHP.
5. Reduce redundant entries in the admin log.
A background task runs periodically to remove duplicated entries in the admin log.
6. Introduce the 'assets' concept.
In order to allow application developers, coders, and designers to work the way they like to work and to allow integration with source code repositories, we have introduced the concept of the 'assets' directory. Here all third party plugins, module_custom overrides, and other 'application specific' files can be placed.
Over the next few releases, we will be modifying CMSMS to take further advantage of the assets directory, including third party modules and simple PHP plugins.
7. Improvements to DesignManager usability.
We've made numerous small, but important changes to the way DesignManager works to make it easier to use.
8. Design Manager allows working with templates and stylesheets in files.
Because designers and developers like to work with their favorite editor, and to keep track of changes in stylesheets and templates using a source code repository. Design Manager now allows you to export a template or a stylesheet to the assets directory.
9. Improved template handling.
We no longer check for duplicate content blocks or the default content block when editing a template. This permits more advanced template manipulation.
10. New 'Switch User' functionality.
Along with refactored admin authentication functionality, we have added the ability for an administrator to 'switch' environments to another valid user. This allows administrators to see what their editors and designers see without having to share passwords.
11. A new flexible hooks API.
To replace the limited and inflexible events API a new hooks API has been introduced. It is now much easier for developers to hook into CMSMS functionality, or to communicate with other modules.
12. Re-factored admin authentication.
We rewrote the way admin authentication works. This solves the problem of requiring 'two logins' and makes future growth possible. At the same time, CMSMS is now even more secure than ever.
13. More -
There are a lot of minor changes and improvements in CMSMS 2.2--far too many to list on a document like this. However, the changelog that is distributed with each release contains the detailed list. Please read it at your leisure.
Dozens of issues were fixed in the extensive beta process for CMSMS 2.2 and we thank all of those people that donated their free time to help make CMSMS 2.2 fast, stable and easy to use.
There are no major compatibility issues known between CMSMS 2.2 and CMSMS 2.1.x and upgrading should not be difficult in most cases. Therefore, we encourage everybody to take advantage of the new functionality in CMSMS 2.2 as soon as possible and upgrade.
As always, as the dev team only officially supports the last two stable releases of CMS Made Simple, we now only officially support versions 2.1.6 and 2.2.
Have fun with CMSMS!
