PostNuke

Flexible Content Management System

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PostNuke .750 - The Gold Release

Contributed by on Mar 25, 2004 - 04:11 PM

First, the Xanthia Templating Environment. This will be a part of the .750 package, providing the superior templating and display features currently available with XTE as core. This ensures that you will not need to install XTE to take advantage of the increasing number of modules that use the templating environment, and that the caching and other features with XTE now come as standard.



Second, the Visual Editor will be modularised and updated to Typetool version 8.0. Although released previously as a separate module, the Typetool required the replacement of core files. Now, the new Visual Editor (which is cross-browser compatible) comes as a core module.



Next, core enhancements made to the PostNuke .8 series CVS have been backported to the .750 release. These changes greatly improve performance, especially on high traffic websites, and users of PostNuke in such environments should notice a marked increase in performance.



ADODB, has been updated to the recent latest release (4.21) to allow for upcoming PHP5 compatibility. Full details of improvements can be found at ADODB’s homepage - http://php.weblogs.com/ADODB.



Strict HTML compliance and XHTML compatibility has been achieved in the .750 code base. Building on work made on the .726 release, strict HTML compliance and XHTML compatibility has been achieved. This is of course theme and module dependant, however all core modules now render compliant to HTML and XHTML guidelines.



This compliancy fix has some side effects. To achieve this level of compliance and compatibility all instances of the image tags border=”0” attribute have been removed. This means that images may now display with a border, which on some sites may be undesirable. To prevent this problem occurring, a simple fix to the style sheets in the theme used can be applied. The fix is as follows:



IMG {

border : 0px;

}



This simple change should make certain that unwanted borders on images do not appear.



The Mailer module, which is currently in .8 CVS will be available as part of the .750 release. A problem sending e-mails using the existing .7x releases has been present for a small number of users, since the mailing feature in PostNuke is not customizable. The addition of the Mailer module makes it possible to change mail settings, and specify an alternate mail server, if required.



The template module has now been replaced with the example module. This change has been made to avoid confusion with the Xanthia Templating Environment, as the module can be used as a ‘template’ to build existing modules from.



In a separate improvement, the example module now uses pnRender (part of the XTE package) to display all module output.



The addition of XTE and the backporting of PostNuke .8 core enhancements will see a change in the minimum requirements for PN. PN .750 will have a minimum PHP requirement of a 4.1x build or above. This is due to the use of PHP 'superglobals' throughout the code.



Finally, many bug fixes have been applied to the .7x code as they have appeared. This should make the .750 Gold Release well worth upgrading to, as the number of enhancements and improvements is very high.
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