1. Of course we are fixing all the bugs that you report. And as soon as all major bug in the bugtracker are fixed the RC2 will be released. You are all doing a great job in testing .8 in various scenarios, with all kinds of modules and so on. We couldn't do that without you. So a special kudo from the development team to everybody who's testing.

2. We are all looking forward to the International Postnuke Developer Meeting in Osnabrück, Germany in September. You are still invited and we will be happy to get to know you. The focus of this year's meeting will the the .8 technologies. We have to spread the knowledge about all the great libraries inside .8 to the community. Thus we will have several presentations and workshops dealing with that. You can still register http://support.pn-cms.de/index.php?module=formicula&form=6 and book a room: http://www.kulmbacher-hof.de

3. There are currently some reorganizations going on within the teams and Postnuke Foundation is working on a nice little surprise - we will have seperate announcements about this within the next weeks.

4. We need your help to build a good documentation. Please look into the wiki and see if you can't improve it: Pick out one of the .8 modules and describe how it works. Look through the articles and improve the descriptions. Remove typos. Find paragraphs that are not clearly enough written and make them clearer.

We could also use some good best practices - if you think you found a clever way to combine this and that module or you have some other special solution - write an article. People will love it.

There is so much you can do. And it's not too complicated. Postnuke lives through it's community. And you are part of that community, no matter how small your input is. Small pieces accumulate to a bigger picture.

This years meeting will not only be in a different location in a different city it will also be slightly different in its organization:

The first day will feature some prepared presentations about several topics.

The second day will be more like an unconference. We are going to collect ideas for presentations and then find the right person to give an introduction then we discuss the topic with all participants. We have all the experts there and we are all experts for something so we can all add our know-how to every workshop.

If you want to attend the meeting we can help you find a hotel and your way to the location. Please register so that we can better estimate the number of attendants. More information can be found at the pnMeeting Wiki.

Links
Registration
pnMeeting Wiki

PostNuke 0.800 RC1 Core Only Download

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PostNuke 0.800 RC1 Full Package Download

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PostNuke 0.800 RC1 ValueAddons Download

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Please feel free to use the article below to publicise PostNuke in any web development communities you belong to. It is also published here on community.postnuke.com.

Simon Birtwistle
HammerHead

About PostNuke

The PostNuke Application Framework provides a high performance, secure and feature complete framework which both website administrators and web developers can use to great effect in creating unique and attractive websites. PostNuke can be used as a CMS, adapted to blogging, ecommerce or community websites, or for more abstract tasks. It is easily adaptible, extensible and can handle situations in which performance and security are paramount. In this way, PostNuke is a reliable and robust choice for any website administrator.

The most recent version of PostNuke is 0.8 RC1, which represents a feature complete 0.8 version. Once the release candidates have undergone full testing and any remaining bugs are fixed a full release will be made available. This release will be suitable for live websites, however in the meantime RC1 is suitable for testing and development work.

Highlights For Website Administrators

The 0.8 release is more polished and up to date than ever before. With the new libraries for developers, new features should be faster and simpler to develop, reducing deployment costs. PostNuke 0.8 can be adapted to almost any need, from blogs to community websites and new third party modules are being developed all the time, constantly improving what PostNuke has to offer.

Additionally PostNuke 0.8 has a focus on the latest standards: XHTML compliance, Section 508 and Accessibility, and further enahncements have been made to both security, performance and usability.

With all core modules now templated, PostNuke 0.8 is designed to be cached, providing a huge performance boost over dynamically generating every page. Furthermore, with the templating system applied to all core modules designers will find it easier than ever to create a unique look to their websites. Gone are the days of standard 3 column layouts - PostNuke 0.8 includes new themes which are CSS, and not table, based. The new Xanthia theme engine is easier to use and performs better than ever before, while including an upgrade feature making it easy to import Xanthia themes from previous PostNuke versions.

For website administrators, this is the best PostNuke release yet, combining compliance with the latest standards and constantly improving features.

Highlights For Web Developers

The 0.8 release provides an Application Framework to allow rapid development of web solutions using the now stable PostNuke core. This allows third party developers to use the wide range of included API and utility libraries to create their own modules and extend the feature set PostNuke already provides.

Of these libraries, one of the most substantial is DBUtil, providing a cross compatible interface to the database. Selecting, updating and deleting data can all be achieved in one line, and DBUtil, combined with ADOdb will automatically create a cross compatible query for whatever database system is in use. PostNuke .8 has been tested with PostGreSQL, and further databases will be supported in future versions.

Other key features are site wide categories, supported through integration with DBUtil, the PostNuke Forms Framework for HTML forms, and other object based APIs. All of these are new since the 0.7x series and ensure third party development is both quicker and easier, and that compatibility with future versions is maintained.

For web developers, PostNuke will provide an attractive option when searching for a framework upon which complex web solutions can be built quickly, easily and with a minimum of effort. This applies even with normally time consuming tasks such as categories implementations, as the PostNuke core already handles many common requirements of web solution.

The Symfony, Typo3, phpMyAdmin, Drupal, Propel, and Doctrine projects have all announced
that their next release after February 5, 2008 will require PHP version 5.2 as part of a
coordinated effort at GoPHP5.org, and have issued an open invitation to any other PHP
projects and applications, both open source and proprietary, that want to participate in the
effort.

Most PHP-based web applications today run in both PHP version 4 and PHP version 5. PHP
4 was released in 2000, and quickly cemented itself as one of the dominant web development
languages. Version 5 was released in 2004 with dramatic improvements in functionality, but
adoption has been slow due mostly to the "chicken and egg" problem that accompanies many
new platform releases.

"Most of the PHP developers I talk to want to use PHP 5 but can't because so many web
hosts offer PHP 4 by default," said Larry Garfield, a Drupal developer and one of
GoPHP5.org's founders. "The hosts won't upgrade until projects do, but projects won't
upgrade until the hosts do. That has made a lot of projects reluctant to be the first to drop
support for PHP 4, so we've decided that we will all be first."

By pre-announcing plans to require PHP 5.2 in upcoming software versions in 2008, GoPHP5
hopes to provide web hosts with the incentive to upgrade their servers to newer, more stable,
more feature-rich versions of PHP as well as sufficient time to do so. Users that are already
using current versions of participating projects won't be left out in the cold, either. All involved
projects will continue to support current releases on PHP 4 for their normal life cycle, giving
both users and hosts time to plan and implement an upgrade.

"The phpMyAdmin project is very enthusiastic to join the GoPHP5 initiative," added
phpMyAdmin's project lead, Marc Delisle. "We see GoPHP5 as a way both to improve our
product's new versions — not always having to add workarounds to remain PHP4compatible
— and improve the experience of our users — by projecting the correct message about the
PHP system itself and its evolution."

PHP 5 offers developers a wide array of features designed to make developing fast, modern
web applications faster and easier. That includes vastly improved XML handling for Web
services, an integrated SQL database called SQLite, better handling of time zones,
dramatically improved security tools, stronger object-oriented functionality, and more.

Many PHP projects already require PHP 5. Encouraging a larger installed base of PHP 5 will broaden the market for those projects as well. PHP is a widely-used general purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development. PHP is one of the leading web development languages in the world, running on a third of the world's web servers. It is the platform of choice for companies from Yahoo to Facebook as well as the most widely available development platform on shared hosting,
which powers millions of web sites world wide.

For more information:

http://gophp5.org/
http://www.phpmyadmin.net/home_page/gophp5.php
http://drupal.org/gophp5

Press Contact:

larry.garfield@gophp5.org

You should have recognized that not only the NOC is available again 24h/7 but that it's also really fast. Developers should also notice that the SVN is now much faster, too.

Enjoy it and give Drak a small (or bigger) donation for his expenses.

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 over what's going on right now. If you are working on something and you are looking for help or you even released it already - write your own article. I am sure it's interesting for all of us.

Already some weeks ago the core team agreed to not close all bugs in the tracker before a release but to prioritize them and only remove the class 4 and 5 bugs. Mark West and Jørn Wildt have been busy on closing one after another. Until yesterday there was only one remaining, which Robert Gasch promised to close. But now Jørn found 2 new ones: Bugtracker

Performance
While waiting for Robert to finalize the debugging of the categories module, Jørn and Mark checked .8 for its performance and found only few major flaws which have been removed in the meantime. As far as I understood Jørn's tests a blank Postnuke .8 doesn't contain more SQL-statements as inevitably needed and though calling a load of PHP functions performs quite well.

If you are able to test Postnuke on different environments - please do so and report your findings.

Language Files
David Nelson had to take a break from overhauling the English language files. But AFAIK he picked up work again and will be done soon.

After finishing the language files and closing all remaining major bugs the team will release a first release candidate.

The Wiki needs input!
If you want to help and you are neither a coder nor a templater you can help us with the documentation! Not everything in .8 is all new - install the current nightly build of .8 and the Value Addons and start writing manuals for all modules. The basic functions of all modules are the same as in .764 and the new functions are easy to learn yourself - so if there's no good documentation for .8 when it's coming out, it's not the core team to blame: You are Postnuke! ;-)

MySql and UTF-8

by: Bernd Plagge
www.choicenet.ne.jp

MySql introduced support for different character sets and collating rules in version 4.1. While this has many advantages databases sometimes need to be migrated and then we have to ensure that the correct character code is set for the new database. We are mainly using UTF-8 and hence you may have to adapt this information to your situation!

What is the problem?

MySql uses as default Latin1, swedish flavour.
How do we check this?

run mysql.
mysql> show variables;

How to check the character set for a particular database?

run mysql.
mysql> show create table <tablename>


The character code can be set in various places - so where is the best place for this?


We always use UTF-8
------------------------
In this case it makes sense to set the character code for the whole server to UTF-8. MySql actually sets the character code at different levels:
server
client
database connection
database

The character encoding for server, client and the connection work hand in hand to ensure that the data is interpreted correctly. It seems that MySql makes no effort to determine the correct character set but will convert data in accordance with it's configuration. This leads to problems for old databases if the database character code differes from the one configured.

The easiest way to configure MySql for UTF-8 is to put the configuration inot the main configuration file (/etc/mysql/my.cnf).
In my.cnf there are different file sections. So you can't put it just anywhere.

[mysqld]
character-set-server=utf8

[client]
default-character-set=utf8


Setting UTF-8 for one Database
--------------------------------------
You can check the default character code for a database either by dumping the data and then changing the schema file or you can do this online.
You use the 'alter table' statement to change the database using mysql.

run mysql
alter database <xvy>
default character set utf-8
default collotion_name utf8-general_ci;

note: you may omit the word 'default'.


It is also worth noting that e.g. mysqldump silently adds the default character code when exporting data!
This can causes problems if the character code defined and the database content are different. In such cases MySqldump will try to convert data to it's default character code!
However, you can disable that by adding the character code option when using MySqldump.
e.g. mysqldump --set-charset.

In the same way you may explicitely set the character set.

mysqlimport --default-character-set = utf8
mysqladmin --defautl-character-set = utf8 create <db>


Setting the character code at server start
-----------------------------------------------------
You can start the server with:
character-set-server
collation-server

The current values can be determined with the command

run MySql:
mysql> show variables;


Values may be changed with commands like:

set character_set_server = utf8;
set collation_server = utf8_unicode_ci


Setting the character code within Applications
----------------------------------------------------------
You want ensure that the correct character code is set when connecting to a particular database.

Connect to the database and issue the following SQL command:

mysql>SET NAMES utf8;


SET NAMES is equivalent to the 3 commands:
character_set_client
character_set_connection
character_set_results


How to run PostNuke in UTF-8
-----------------------------------
Several things have to fall into place for this to work correctly.

1) the database encoding needs to be set to UTF-8
2) the application language needs to be encoded in UTF-8
3) PostNuke needs to be told to use UTF-8

ad 1)
see above for details!

ad 2)
The character code for a given language is set in language/<lang>/global.php (PN 0.76x) or in language/<lang>/core.php (PN 0.8). Search and adjust the following 3 define strings:
define('_CHARSET','UTF-8');
define('_LOCALE','en_US');
define('_LOCALEWIN','eng');

Of course it is not sufficient just to change the _CHARSET to UTF-8. The text strings themselves need to be encoded in UTF-8. This can be done in a number of ways:
a) use 'recode' or 'iconv' on every language file
b) use the pnlwb (PN Language Workbench) to extract and convert all language files

ad 3)
Following the database initialization you need to issue a "set names to 'UTF-8'" command. As this is done in includes/pnAPI.php we need to patch that file.

PN 0.76x
----------

// load security functions.
include 'includes/pnSecurity.php';

// Load our language files
include 'includes/pnLang.php';
pnLangLoad();

//bplagge 2006-01-31 - charset fix for new MySql version
$dbconn =& pnDBGetConn(true);
$info=$dbconn->ServerInfo();
if ($dbconn->ErrorNo() != 0) {
echo "Error: "; echo $dbconn->ErrorNo();
}
// print_r($info);
$c = _CHARSET;
// Mysql uses non-standard name for UTF-8!
if ($c == 'UTF-8')
$c = 'UTF8';
$query = sprintf('SET NAMES \'%s\'', $c);
$dbconn->Execute($query);
if ($dbconn->ErrorNo()!=0) {
echo "Error: "; echo $dbconn->ErrorMsg();
echo "check pnAPI.php";
}
}
// end bplagge - mysql charset adjustment


PN 0.8
-------

if ($stages & PN_CORE_LANGS) {
// Load our language files
pnLangLoad();
}

# bp 2007-06-01
# need to "set names '<charset>' " to ensure correct data handling
$query = sprintf('SET NAMES \'%s\'', 'UTF8');
$result = DBUtil::executeSQL($query, -1, -1, true, true);

Please note that the MySQL character code names are NON STANDARD!

How to check?
----------------
I always found that phpMyAdmin is an excellent tool for MySQL databases. If the data entered in PostNuke is also correctly displayed in phpMyAdmin table browse mode I'm quite confident that everything is fine.

We are upgrading the NOC server to a dual opteron, 4GB with 3 x 73GB SCSI drives using LSI's MegaRAID 320-1 controller. The cost of the hardware is approximately $3500. We would like to encourage all users to make a small donation to the PostNuke Server Fund here.