Spring Update (for some) and thanks!
Published 9 months ago
We've been busy working away - me in Paris and Konny back in Sydney - the result is a big Spring clean.
Released into trunk are a number of changes - over the next few days we will be testing and hope to have a pre-packed sandbox ready early next week. If you feel brave, take a look at the svn trunk version for an "edge" of your seat ride into the latest revision. Meanwhile, here are some appetisers.
Thanks To The Curious
But before I continue, a huge thanks to those who have taken the time check our first release. With the questions, comments and suggestions have been a huge help. Thanks so much!
Now on with some update details!
New Default Theme
The first default theme design was just that - so after a few long nights we have a new default theme. Of course it has been implemented right down to the admin generation, so scaffolding looks like this right out of the box.
A quick rundown of the changes:
- Well the overall look and feel of course. With this new design come a refactor of space usage and colour scheme. Menus areas have a more neatly defined area with a new upper menu for profile and i18n items. This gives the existing menu much more room for you to add your own application menu items. Second level menus are gone....
- Second level menus now sit in drop-down menus. This gives users the ability to jump to all areas in CMS with a single click.
- New menu designs for the afore mentioned navigation menus, but also for the icon menus.
Testing the new theme is an ongoing task, but we have it working perfectly in IE7, Firefox and Safari. IE 6 only has some rendering problems with the alpha transparencies on the .png's at this stage, but we will have that sorted shortly.
Simplification of Interfaces
Interfaces for editing posts, blogs, events and calendars have all been simplified both visually and also functionally. Additional logic now handles many default values, moving their manual control down into an "Advanced Setting" area. This leaves users with a more refined and simpler editing interface.
These changes are part of a larger refactor of how users update and edit data in Steer CMS. Next in line is the steerCMSCorePlugin which handles pages and static files. More news on that shortly.
Various Fixes and Updates
Along with a huge array of general fixes and code refactoring, a number issues highlighted in our first release have been corrected:
- [fixed] Warning messages in cli builds have been fixed
- [fixed] Datetime format errors in search tables in some MySQL installs
What's Next?
Well, I've already mentioned the continued simplification if the interfaces and work-flows, but there are a few other very cool pieces on the horizon:
- Introduction of sfPropelMigrationsLightPlugin as part of the future update process. Very important for moving forward.
- New archive extraction and file-system synchronisation feature. Soon you will be able to upload an archive and have Steer CMS unpack it - creating the entire node structure. You will also be able to use ftp, then synchronise the form the file-system, instantly making Steer CMS aware of the changes.
- Further work on i18n integration for sfPropelVersionableBehaviorPlugin and getting the patch integrated into the project. We're nearly there with test passing, however there are still a couple of dirty hacks we need to get rid of. Propel i18n behaviour can be tricky to work with in a behavioural context.
- Large enhancements for both Blogging and Events.
- Better implementation of text filtering with more advanced helpers, and wider support for various filter types.
- Multi-site support is just round the corner. With full support for domain binding, this will be a great feature we are very keen to have implemented.
