Anyway, enough of the warnings, on with the fun stuff and explaining the changes and giving credit where credit is due. I'll try to briefly touch on the changes in the system, but as always I will manage to forget about 50 changes and 50 people that need to be recognized. My apologies in advance for that.
-- Permission System -- Jim McDonald. The new system gives you unlimited depth to "user groups". Gone are the days from having the separate admin and users system. The new system unifies these and allows you to give or deny special access to any user. You can deny certain areas of your site to an unregistered user, or the entire site altogether. You can also set your groups so that even when a user registers, they have to have their group access upped by a site admin. There are really quite a few possibilities now with the user system, that will only get better by the end of the Rogue Cycle.
Note, most third party plugins will need to be upgraded to the new system, hence the need for the preview. Any third party plugin that uses the admin will definitely need to be upgraded with the new permissions.
-- DB Abstraction -- Ryan and Pablo -- Ryan did the hard part with the original abstraction in PEAR, and then we changed directions and went with ADODB. The abstraction is done in a very professional manner and does not add much weight to the script. As Ryan went through the original time he also cleaned many of the queries that we were using, which has improved performance greatly! Pablo is now the ADODB expert, and has also written a great guideline for developing with ADODB and is posted in the sections on this site. We are hard at work to make the install file ADODB compliant as well, with Rogue.sql's coming for supported DB's very soon.
-- Multi-Sites -- Sebastien -- The long talked about MultiSites mod is here. What this does is allow you to run a single codebase with several different domains. We run it on this site, and it works quite well! All of the support sites and postnuke.com all run off the same single instance of postnuke codebase. This allows for very quick updates, and global changes through sites. It's also an excellent tool for ISP's or small companies that would like to offer hosting. Read the docs in the multisites module. Great work on this one!
-- Language tool -- Pascal -- For those of you that work hard on the translations for your PostNuke site, there is a new tool for you. The language module goes through and finds the missing defines in your language files and generates a report and a temp directory for you. It's a great tool, and I have just begun to play with it.
-- Wiki and bbcode -- Sebastien -- Still working on this a bit, but you can now use wiki code formatting with your article submissions.
-- Install writes to config.php -- Scott. A long asked for feature. The install file now writes to the config file during installation. This only works for fresh installs currently, but we will get it working for upgrades as well. With the install writing to the config file, we have also encrypted the SQL password and username, to harden security a bit.
-- MD5 Passwords -- Alley -- Now all passwords in the users table are encrypted with MD5. This is a much tighter security for you windows folks out there, and better than the old crypt method as well. Now with the admin table gone, your admin users have their passwords encrypted.
-- index.php redirection -- Tim (I hope I didn't forget who did this!) -- As you notice, the index page now doesn't redirect to the modules start page, it simply loads it. You still have the option of selecting your start page.
-- New admin schema -- Pascal -- Still a work in progress, but we are moving away from the multiple links / case / module files for admin modules. An example can be found in the language module.
-- Better theme arrays -- Jim -- I posted the doc on this yesterday, but take a look at the PostNuke theme for them in action. Very elegant code!
-- user.php modularized -- David. The new system is very much like the current admin system. David did a great job in modularizing the user.php file so now you can have custom user modules.
-- MPN Upgrades -- Michael -- Upgrades from MyPHPNuke now available, along with upgrades from PHPNuke 5.2 and 5.3.
Damn, I know that I am forgetting a ton of new features (Probably big ones!) but my fingers are killing me now. Documentation on the permissions can be found in the online help screen in the admin. Be careful setting up your permissions! Documentation for developers for Rogue themes, modules, etc can be found on the sections in this site and Steve has also been adding documentation to the official documentation site. Enjoy the preview!
The ChangeLog can be viewed
here