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0.8.0.0 Milestone 1 Release   (News)

Download
0.8.0.0-MS1 ZIP
0.8.0.0-MS1 GZIP
CVS Dailies (use these to keep up to date with changes to CVS)
Checksums

ZIP
MD5: cef2b3187327963d15d723a93c47b982
SHA-1: bc0847001c90a7821463750e23c646580574460f
TAR.GZ
MD5: 3988d58e71fdf091b04b46793a06566c
SHA-1: 3af10fdbf986a50c50f0fd66d35a353a76fad54b

Third party module support in .8-MS1
Due to changes in the blocks module table structure for .8, Autotheme will no longer work with this release. Until Autotheme is updated, site administrators can use the Extralite theme in CVS, or any of the new themes with the included theme module.

Additionally, modules from elfisk require the legacy Topics module to be installed to satisfy a dependency introduced in the .7x series of PostNuke. The Topics module is depreciated in favour of the Categories module, however in the interests of keeping .7x modules compatible with .8-MS1 the Topics module can be downloaded seperately.

There are also other problems with non-API compliant modules that access PostNuke tables directly due to the substantial database

Generated on April 13, 2006.

AutoTheme Stand-alone released!   (News)

theme system for any PHP application (with some modifications) or as the theme system for your custom PHP application or pages.

This is temporarily free of cost but under a restricted license and can not be redistributed.

Go to the Spidean Downloads

Also, I have a beta version of AutoTheme for WordPress. Any serious beta testers that are very familiar with WordPress, please contact me via the Spidean site.

Thanks!
-Shaw

Generated on March 3, 2006.

AutoTheme Stand-alone version   (News)

pages to do what you need. AutoTheme runs by itself, yet allows you to "include" it and use all of the AutoTheme themes available!

Also, it is easily used as an HTML Theme System for other PHP applications that you may have acquired/downloaded. Just add some include statements to the header and footer files and you're using AutoTheme and the thousnads of themes that have been designed for AutoTheme.

I can release it at this moment, but am soliciting feedback to see who would want it and what the applications would be. Post a comment and let me know!

Thanks!
-Shaw

Generated on December 18, 2005.

Get Involved: Get Your Name in Lights!   (News)

Get Involved
We are looking for volunteers for several positions listed below:
PostNuke CMS Module Reporter
Responsible for testing and reviewing new and older modules to publish on the main PostNuke CMS site. Your articles/publications will include your picture, a short bio, and a link back to your site.

PostNuke CMS Community Reporter
Not every module developer writes his own news at PostNuke and we're looking for someone who is interested in writing up announcements, interviewing developers, and looking for exciting developments in this specific area of the community. Your articles/publications will include your picture, a short bio, and a link back to your site.

International PostNuke CMS Community Reporter
As a project we want to build relationships with the wonderful international sites and communities. The person who takes on this position will be responsible for writing announcements, and conducting interviews. Your articles/publications will include your picture, a short bio, and a link back to your site.

PostNuke CMS Theme Reporter
Responsible for theming news, short how-tos, tutorials, and introducing/interviewing designers. You should be familiar with all the elements of theming for PostNuke CMS including the Xanthia and AutoTheme. Your articles/publications will include your picture, a short bio, and a link back to your site.

Special Content/Documentation
We are looking for someone to compare/contrast the features of PostNuke CMS to the following software: PHP-Nuke, Mambo, and Drupal. The person should be familiar with both software CMS's to do a clear, concise comparison of features, functions, etc. Also you would have access to the PN team to review the comparison to offer technical feedback and information for accuracy. And the document would be included on the main PN site to help potential users decide which package to use. You would also be provided with a matrix of specifics to compare with guidelines so you wouldn't have to start from scratch. Your articles/publications will include your picture, a short bio, and a link back to your site.

For more information about the volunteer positions contact us at: vanessa at postnuke dot com

Note, because we had such a great response to Steffen's article calling for wrtiers (thanks Steffen) we wanted to make sure we

Generated on July 13, 2005.

PostNuke Community User Survey Results   (News)

http://www.designs4nuke.com/results/

PostNuke Site Navigation
We are currently working on improving the navigation and look/feel of the main PN site. And with all things it doesn't always go as quickly as we'd like but we expect to launch a preview of a new site in the very near future.

Documentation
This is constant concern for everyone involved in the project. There have been some nice additions to the documentation project over the past few months and I think more than not having documentation, the real issue it is difficult to find. So as we improve the main site we are paying close attention the issue of documentation. So look for improvement in this area in the near future.

Module/Block Repository
Some users requested a "full and complete list of all available modules/blocks/themes" - and we would like to say this is nearly impossible and it it were possible, it would be alot of work to keep it up-to-date. Several years ago we setup PostNuke's NOC as a centralized place to support any PostNuke related project for FREE.

The site offers the following developement tools: CVS (including a web interface), mailing lists, discussion forums, bug/feature tracking, document mgmt, task lists, and a website that provides usage statistics, including the project members, the number of mailing lists, CVS statistics, the number of items in the discussion forums, etc.

We encourage anyone, developers and designers, with a PostNuke related project to register their project.

Register a Project
Check out the Current Projects

UPDATE: The NOC is not perfect. The team knows it has flaws and that support there was lacking so we've added additional admins so no one should have to wait for weeks for project approval any longer.

Current NOC admins Drak Valerio, Frank Schummertz (pnCommerce.com) and IIRC Franky Chestnut (pnConcept.com).

This is our attempt to build a module, block, and theme repository for all PostNuke related projects.

Module Info
There are so many modules claiming to be PostNuke modules and were only half heartedly ported it the first days of PostNuke so beware there have been so many changes in the development over the past four years some modules may not work with the most up-to-date versions of the PostNuke CMS.

Better Forum Support
First let's agree the forum is quite helpful but we recognize there are some areas we can improve. We appreciate the feedback and are looking into ways we can optimize the technology to help us provide better forum support. But don't be shy, once you learn to do something or have an answer/response to a question get involved.

Summary
Finally as mentioned in the comments there were design errors in this initial survey but even with these errors the results are valuable and has shed light on several areas of the project. Again, it's our first survey and we will improve as we create more surveys in the future. There's no such thing as a perfect questionaire but we intend to get closer to perfection in the future. :)

Get Involved
We are looking for volunteers for several positions listed below:

1. Module Review Reporter: Responsible for testing and reviewing new and older modules to publish on the main PostNuke site. Your articles/publications will include your picture, a short bio, and a link back to your site.

2. PostNuke Community Reporter - not every module developer writes his own news at PostNuke and we're looking for someone who is interested in writing up announcements, interviewing developers, and looking for exciting developments in this specific area of the community.

3. International Community Reporter: As a project we want to build relationships with the wonderful international sites and communities. The person who takes on this position will be responsible for writing announcements, and conducting interviews. Your articles/publications will include your picture, a short bio, and a link back to your site.

4. PostNuke Theme Reporter: Responsible for theming news, short how-tos, tutorials, and introducing/interviewing designers. You should be familiar with all the elements of theming for PostNuke including the Xanthia and AutoTheme. All your articles/publications will include your picture, a short bio, and a link back to your site.

5. Special Content/Documentation : We are looking for someone to compare/contrast the features of PostNuke to the following: PHP-Nuke, Mambo, and Drupal. The person should be familiar with both software CMS's to do a clear, concise comparison of features, functions, etc. Also you would have access to the PN team to review the comparison to offer technical feedback and information for accuracy. And the document would be included on the main PN site to help potential users decide which package to use. You would also be provided with a matrix of specifics to compare with guidelines so you wouldn't have to start from scratch. Your publications will include your picture, a short bio, and a link back to your site.

For more information about the volunteer positions contact us at: vanessa at postnuke dot com

Generated on July 12, 2005.

Moving on: Better PostNuke ShortURLs   (News)

PostNuke sites well, while making the URLs hard to post to people in email or in forums. For instance, a news link looks like this:
/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=123&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0

For some time now, PostNuke users have cried out for better Search-Engine Friendly URLs, and for the past few years, the only thing available has been a theme hack first detailed by Karateka (possibly E. Soysal before that, the links in the article are dead) way back in 2002, since worked on by ColdRolledSteel (Craig Saunders), and consequently me.
The advent of the ShortURL hack has seen sites hosted on Apache servers with the URL Rewriting module (mod_rewrite) enabled get URLs like
/Article123.html

for the above link, where certain assumptions have been made about the default settings for mode, thread and threshhold. A big improvement, but not very descriptive, and it comes at the cost of heavy post-processing of the site's content for links. Also, Search Engines use link keyword relevance in their rankings, and Article123 doesn't say much about the link, except that it's an article with the id 123.
As Karateka pointed out at the time in his article, a problem in implementing friendlier URLs with virtual directories is that all paths in PostNuke are relative, ie relative to the site root folder where index.php is located, and fixing it then would have required extensive changes in the core. That is, a URL like /Example/view.html would result in the browser looking for all links relative to its present location, ie in the nonexistant subfolder called Example, and subsequently it would fail to find the linked stylesheets, images etc, and all links from the page would similarly fail.

Unfortunately this situation has not changed in the intervening years, but as PostNuke modules are becoming API-compliant, they reference the same system function to build their URLs, so fixing this function and other associated functions to use root-relative links(1) will fix all compliant module URLs. But that leaves all other links, like images, Javascript, and stylesheets. The move to templating with Xanthia (for themes) and pnRender (for modules) is also making it easier, since Xanthia templates use a Xanthia variable to reference the theme's image directory path. So fixing Xanthia and pnRender will fix most paths in Xanthia themes. The exception are stylesheet and Javascript link paths and any links in the theme header, for which new path variables need to be introduced, so some updating of Xanthia themes is required. This makes the transition period to PN 0.8 an ideal time to introduced these changes, since few Xanthia themes have been released so far, and core modules are only just being converted to pnRender.
I stopped work on ShortURLs some time ago (before pn0.75) on the advice that a core module was being developed; however I have seen no evidence of this to date, and there is no indication in the upcoming PN 0.76 or CVS that there is anything coming. I got curious a month or so ago, and was somewhat dismayed at what I found.

Since then no progress seems to have been made on PostNuke ShortURLs. In fact, the current Xanthia filter hack has regressed, becoming bloated with complex and wholly unnecessary Regular Expression rules, many badly written with duplication and a number of bugs, especially in the accompanying htaccess file, going from the 15 rules proposed by Karateka to a massive 89. So, I set out to try and fix it, but ended up revisiting the idea of a core implementation using virtual directories to more logically structure the URLs in a way that is not only Search-Engine Friendly, but more User-Friendly.

Along the way, I've also been sidetracked and made a direly-needed new themable tab system for the Administration area based on AlistApart.com's Sliding Doors technique and consequently overhauled most of the Admin templates and a few User templates too, partly out of necessity due to the new Adminpanel, partly because they badly needed it. Those of you who have tried the pn0.76 Release Candidates would know that the templated output in them leaves something to be desired, drab and somewhat unprofessional-looking due to all the styling and CSS-classes having been ripped out, leaving a basic grey and white look with overly large headings and no theme tables for backgrounds. Hardly what you would call of Release Candidate quality. So pnRender and its plugins have been fixed to allow the use of Xanthia-like theme-colour tags as well as a tag for root-relative paths needed for ShortURLs, and the opentable functions have been fixed so that proper themed borders can be used. In fact most of the changes are in fixed templates, plugins, and module files.

My proposed implementation still retain the Xanthia filter for backwards compatibility with older themes, modules and blocks, but has been wholly rewritten and pared down to 24 rules, including a rule to fix all links to be root-relative. As PostNuke is in transition to be fully pnAPI-compliant by PostNuke 0.8, the remaining ones can gradually be removed altogether as themes, modules and blocks are updated. There's also a version for AutoTheme.

This particular scheme is experimental and may be tweaked or improved upon. It seeks to reduce the reliance on the Regular Expression(2) post-processing for links and introduce more user-friendly URLs that have more relevance for people and search engines alike by using virtual directories to visually distinguish sections of the site by module and function, such as
/Example/View.html

and for the News articles introduce Category, Topic, and Title information in the link:
/Category/Topic/ArticleXXX-title-of-story.html

For instance for a news story in the category Computers and the topic Postnuke called "PostNuke Shorturls", you'd have the URL
/Computers/Postnuke/Article123-PostNuke-Shorturls.html

This is a clear, concise and informative link that tells the user and search engine alike something about the link before going there, while retaining backwards compatibility with links of the old ShortURL scheme. It more closely emulates the way we think and organise information, using the folder analogy where we have a clearly-labelled Computer category folder, under which we have the various sub-categories - Topics - with various articles. In this case, we're using a virtual file anchored by the word "Article", clearly identifying it as such, followed by the article number and title. There is backwards compatibility, so that older links for Article123.html will still work.

In this instance I've excluded the News keyword altogether for brevity in favour of the Category and Topic keywords which insinuate News anyway, though there is nothing against being consistent with all the other ShortURLs and having the Module appear first, as in
/News/Computers/Postnuke/Article123:-PostNuke-Shorturls.html

This is for the special case of the core News module though, a more generic method is needed overall for URLs with various unknown parameters passed in the query string. This implementation uses the scheme:
/Module/Function-Param1:Value1-Param2:Value2... -ParamN:ValueN.(p)htm(l)
where the Query string parameters are tagged onto the virtual filename grouped by colons and separated by hyphens, the idea being to use commonly-used characters we might normally use in a list to make it look as natural and readable as possible. It may be a less-commonly used character than the hyphen is needed, like the tilde ~ character, since some parameter values may use a hyphen, in particular usernames. This is not a problem if passed as the last parameter, where it may contain any character. So if the module developer kept this in mind, it might not be an issue. I'm not aware of it being one so far. The PostCalender ShortURL plugin deliberately places uname, if present, last.

The extension is not necessary, but used for convenience. The 3 types used are either one of html, htm, or phtml, the latter useful to distinguish when you want to link to real HTML files on the site. The extensions as well as the option to use ShortURLs or not is set in the Settings panel, though I've only offered the option of html and phtml, since frankly the MS DOS-holdover extension htm annoys me.
Older URLs are marked with a + before the Function name, as in
/PNphpBB2/+profile-mode:editprofile.html

so that the server can translate it correctly. If the directory doesn't actually exist, entering
/Example/

will redirect to the Example module main page (Apache only)
/Example/main.phtml

which in return gets rewritten invisibly to
/index.php?module=Example&func=main

Otherwise, if it does exist, the index file of the relevant directory will be opened.
Similarly, with
/HTML/filename.html

if the file exists, it will be opened, else PN will look for
/index.php?module=HTML&func=filename

It is still possible to tag on query strings like
/ModName/main.phtml?theme=seabreeze

or
/ModName/main-theme:seabreeze.phtml

will both be translated to
/index.php?module=ModName&func=main&theme=seabreeze

There are any number of possible ShortURL systems, the simplest being to simply chop the URL into virtual directories, like /News/123/ from the above News example as some do. Xaraya uses a variant of this for news, though it doesn't use mod_rewrite, so appears like
/index.php/news/123

Again, this is concise, but contains few meaningful keywords other than the module name News. You can combine the two methods for News and have
/News/Category/Topic/123/title-of-article

which works very well, but loses some of the elegance of the above philosophy, since the latter part breaks up the virtual file into 3 with no anchor words, which is not how we organise information.
For generic URLs, there are a number of methods; for instance Mambo, another CMS, use generic ShortURLs like
/component/option,com_newsfeeds/catid,5/Itemid,7/

for a News URL like
/index.php?option=com_newsfeeds&catid=5&Itemid=7

where the querystring values are grouped by commas and separated by forward slashes (virtual directories). It is a ShortURL, though in this case not shorter, and doesn't have any useful keywords, other than "newsfeed", and is not very human-readable. For a generic URL, this is somewhat unavoidable, but can be better than that.
This implementation also contain a way to customise ShortURLs on a per-module basis through a file called shorturls.php placed in the module folder (see the Example module), such as the News URLs, or 3rd party modules like PostCalendar, which instead of the full URL like
/index.php?module=PostCalendar&func=view&tplview=&viewtype=day&Date=20050405&pc_username=&pc_category=&pc_topic=&print=

with the above generic ShortURLs would be rendered as
/PostCalendar/view-viewtype:day-Date:20050405.html

but with customised URLs become
/Calendar/05-04-2005/day.html


The beauty is, though, once we've created the groundwork in the core of PostNuke, any implementation will be fairly easy.

1) Root-relative links: Links relative to the server site root (eg /nuke/filename.html), which stays static, as opposed to relative to the present file (eg filename.html).
2) Regular Expression (RegEx): A complex pattern-matching language that can look a bit like a mathematical formula, used in the Xanthia ShortURL filter at /modules/Xanthia/plugins/outputfilter.shorturls.php.


----------------------------------------------------------------
If this were Mambo, I'd charge you 80 Euros for all this (the price for SEF Advance), but because you're all such nice people (except that guy up the back, you know who you are :) ), I'll let you have it for free.

A PDF of the ReadMe included in the package, but with additional screenshots, is found here (570kb).

I've also written a more technical ReadMe on installing ShortURLs, included in the package under the docs folder, and also found here.

here's a test of the tab system using the Aqua theme. It also comes with an XP-styled theme and the default-CSS-based one. I hope you like it, because it took a lot of work to perfect.

OK, screenshots: Well, no point having screenshots of URLs, so here's some of the tab system and modified SeaBreeze and PostNukeBlue themes' Admin templates instead:

1. The main adminpanel in PostNukeBlue with the Aqua-themed tabs, hovering over the Settings panel.
2. Same as above, but with the Theme Override set under Modify Config and with a tabs.css stylesheets in the theme's style folder. The rounded corners are only visible in Mozilla/FireFox.
3. The Luna tab theme in SeaBreeze, hovering over the 3rd Party tab.
4. The Xanthia Admin tabs using Aqua tabs in PostNukeBlue, hovering on Theme Settings.


And finally, the downloads:
I started out fixing PN0.75, so there are 2 downloads: One for PN0.75, and one for PN0.76rc4. I'll update it once the PN0.76 final is released.
Please backup your site before installing these patches, since a lot of system files are replaced. The PostNuke 0.76rc4 ShortURL package is rather large, consisting of some 400 files in a 1Mb zip file. The PN0.75 package has some 170 files and is around 800kb. Most of the changes are drop-in changes that doesn't necessitate updating of modules, but there are some exceptions in the PN0.76 package, in particular the Settings and Polls modules, where you need to first go to the Module list, regenerate, and update. Specific patches for popular 3rd party templated modules like AutoTheme and PNphpBB2 are included, but only a limited number of 3rd party modules have been tested with this package. No changes are made to the database, but it is still a good idea to back that up as well. You have been warned.

PostNuke 0.75 ShortURL package (833kb)
PostNuke 0.76rc4 ShortURL package (1Mb)

Two of the updated core themes:
PostNukeBlue (249kb)
SeaBreeze (120kb)


Feel free to discuss this proposal in the forums.

Enjoy!


Martin Andersen 8/7/200

Generated on July 9, 2005.

AutoTheme Blocks module Security Fix!   (News)

is a temporary fix as this file will not be used in the next AutoTheme versions scheduled for release in the next several days.

Thanks to Infopro and Markwest for bringing this to my attention.
-Shawn

The AutoTheme module is not a core component of PostNuke, and so therefore this article does not apply to those who have not

Generated on May 6, 2005.

Kevin Hatch, Author of PostNuke Book   (News)

Question
Vanessa Haakenson: Kevin first let me thank you for taking the time to answer my questions. Tell us about yourself and what attracted you to PostNuke. How long have you been using PostNuke? Why didyou choose PostNuke?
 
Answer
Kevin Hatch: Well for what it’s worth, I’m a professional web developer. I’ve worn a lot of hats over the years with different sometimes-fancy titles, but overall I’ve mainly been a front-end UI guy in most of the teams I’ve been with. Lately I’ve been doing more programming and database development than Photoshop graphics, but I also freelance as a designer to help balance out the creative side.

I was first introduced to PostNuke early in 2003. My workplacewas primarily Microsoft when it came to web development, and my background at the time was much more with VB/ASP and early .NET. But we were starting a change to Linux servers, and it seemed clear ASP was on the way out. It was a coworker friend of mine that originally suggested PHP as a more universal solution, and without any particular preference for ASP I was happy to give it a shot. My experience with C++, Java, and JSP allowed me to pick up PHP pretty easily, and I quickly feel in love with language.

My first PostNuke site was actually an intranet portal. I’d converted all our other sites’ ASP pages to PHP, but we started looking at different PHP content systems to make the intranet development a little easier. I tried early alternatives like PHP-Nuke and phpWebSite, but PostNuke impressed me as a more mature system that also possessed a strong community of users.


 
Question
Vanessa Haakenson: What is the easiest and/or most difficult thing you encountered building your site?
  
Answer
Kevin Hatch: Funny thing, the most difficult thing about my current site was the choice of methods for publishing the content. There were too many options. I struggled with a number of different combinations of stock and third-party modules like PageSetter. I went all out, creating complex layouts and forms for my pages, but ultimately my needs just didn’twarrant all the trouble. I came back to the basic Sections module for most of the content, and the simpler solution gave me more raw control.
The easiest thing had to be my solution for the column layout using AT-Lite. My original theme was done with Xanthia, but I later tried it in AutoTheme to see how the layout features would work for what I needed. I found AT’s AutoBlock objects to be anabsolute dream for easy block-to-page assignment, and that’s what I ended up using.

Question
Vanessa Haakenson: When did the idea of a PostNuke book happen? What's the back-story?
  
Answer
Kevin Hatch: Early on as I worked with PostNuke I knew it was a project under development. It didn’t solve all my development needs, and I quickly started hacking and extending the code to get the extra features and customization I needed. In order to reproduce those hacks later as needed for other installs or upgrades, I documented the steps I took. I quickly had a great deal of good content collected, and I decided it ought to be posted online in case anyone else wanted to make the same custom changes I had. I wrote up the hacks as walk-through articles, and added them to my website.
I did post links to the guides now and then when answering a forum post that could use them, but just having the articles online ultimately prompted the book. The publisher Pearson Ed was looking to do some books on Content Management Systems, and in searching online for PHP-Nuke and PostNuke resources the editor came across my site. They liked the style and content of the articles, and asked if I’d be interested in writing a full book along those lines. I also have a formal writing background, and said I’d be happy to do it. That was back in November 2003.
After the approval of the book proposal I'd put together, the book itself was written over the course of the next ten months. Things were going fine with it till the surprise release of version 0.75. Sweeping changes were made to the content to add in the 0.75 changes, and some of the existing sections were no longer relevant and had to be cut. In the end there was also an overall length issue, where some of the other third-party modules I wanted to cover were also dropped. There are a lot ofgreat modules out there, but there just wasn’t the room to do them all.

Question
Vanessa
Haakenson: How
is
the
book
selling?
Are
you
going
to
do
a
follow-up/update
when newer
versions
of PostNuke
are released?
  
Answer
Kevin
Hatch: I
know
that in
the first
month over
two thousand
copies
were
sold, but
I don’t
know the
overall
sales figures
yet. I
did secondary
edits earlier
this year
for the
second
printing,
so the
first runs
seems
to have
done better
than their
initial
expectations.
There was
also talk
of doing
a German
translation
of the
text, but
I’ve
not heard
back from
that department
to know
if it’s
gone through.
I've been
very swamped
with
work lately,
so I've
honestly
not been
following
it closely
the last
few
months.
Whether
there’s
a follow-up
will probably
depend
more on
the long-term
book sales.
I’m
up for
writing
it if it
works out.
I’ve
also considered
doing a
shorter
book that
picks up
where PostNuke
Content
Management
left
off. I
think it
would be
useful
to have
a step-by-step
walk through
on the
development
of an API-compliant
module.
In the
first drafts
of my book,
there had
been a
section
at the
end just
on module
development,
but all
that made
it into
the book
was the
short API
functions
appendix.
The book
was targeted
well to
reach a
large audience,
but I do
with I’d
done even
more on
the advanced
side. I
think PostNuke
is a great
core
product,
but I’ve
never built
a site
with it
that didn’t
have third-party
modules
and custom
hacks.
It’s
like how
Firefox
is a great
core product,
but having
the right
few extensions
can literally
change
the way
your
browse.
PN already
does that;
there is
of course
the NOC
and many
great
developers,
but I’d
definitely
like to
see even
more. You
shouldn’t
have
to be a
coder to
get it
to work.
PostNuke
can become
anything
you want
it
to be,
but it’d
be easier
to have
all those
options
possible
in simple
add-on
modules.

Question
Vanessa
Haakenson: You
have
a great
site,
KevinHatch.com.
Tell
us
a little
bit about
the site
and how
you customized
it. What
modules
are you
using
for the
site? What
modules
were customized
or built
from scratch?
  
Answer
Kevin
Hatch: Well
my main
site’s
running
on PostNuke
0.75. As
I said
earlier
I’d
used a
variety
of third-party
modules
during
the development,
but I’m
currently
only running
AT-Lite
for the
theme.
The pages
have two
main content
areas,
and while
I began
with both
areas in
the “body” area,
my desire
to reuse
the side
column
for navigation
elements
prompted
me to
set it
up as a
separate
block area.
I created
an AT AutoBlock
object
for
each area
I wanted
to isolate,
like "Links" or "Homepage" for
example.
The
AutoBlocks
are displayed
in the
same place
in the
theme code,
but I
control
the visibility
of those
blocks
from within
AutoTheme
on a page
by
page basis
using the
AT Custom Modules
feature.
The
site does
have some
custom
code hacks,
but for
the most
part they
have
been used
to simplify
the PostNuke
install.
I normally
don’t
need most
of
the core
PN features
for my
personal
site, so
I removed
what I
didn't
need. The
links page
is the
most obvious
example.
That is
just the
core
Web Links
module,
but I changed
the display
of the
content
and removed
all
the user
features
that were
not needed
anymore.
I’ve
considered
writing
a
new links
module
from scratch
as well,
but for
the moment
just editing
the
core’s
working
fine, and
I do have
enough
other projects
to keep
me busy.
The KevinHatch.com
site is
really
not finished.
I’ll
be adding
a PNphpBB2
forum for
the application
support
in the
next couple
months,
and I need
to
finally
set aside
a weekend
to edit
and upload
some of
my other
guides
and
tutorials.
I plan
on expanding
the old
programming
guide content
to
include
information
on UI design
and Photoshop.
The site
is also
currently
a hybrid
of PostNuke
and raw
PHP using
server-side
includes
to pull
in the
PN theme
elements.
It was
simply
faster
at the
time to
set it
up that
way,
but eventually
the site
will be
completely
PostNuke.  

Thank You
Vanessa
Haakenson: Thank
you
for
sharing
your
thoughts
with
the community
and readers.
  
Answer
Kevin
Hatch: I’d
just like
to say
thanks
again to
all the
developers
who’ve
put in
so much
time to
keep this
project
going.
The open
source
movement
for me
has really
re-energized
my love
of online
development.
I
know things
don’t
always
get released
as quickly
as users
might want,
but
the focus
on producing
a quality
product
is quite
admirable.

  
About
Kevin Hatch
Kevin
Hatch is a
professional
web developer
specializing
in user
interface
design.
He has
more than
a decade
of
experience
in Internet
development
and has
worked
in a variety
of roles,
ranging
from graphic
designer
and interface
systems
analyst
to webmaster
and network
architect.
These days
he mainly
programs
in PHP
as a webmaster
and application
developer,
and freelances
as a graphic
designer
for select
projects.
He
has a combined
degree
in Computer
Science
and English.
He's experienced
in technical
writing
and is
the author
of a book
on the
PostNuke
CMS. He
currently
lives in
eastern
Iowa with
his wife
and their
nine pets.  
Related Links: KevinHatch.com
Purchase the book: PostNuke: Content Management System  

About
Vanessa Haakenson
Vanessa
Haakenson
brings
several
years of
experience
in developing
web based
instructional
products.
She is
an Open
Source
advocate
and contributes
her free
time to
managing,
promoting,
and working
with the
PostNuke
content
management
system.
She has
used PHP
for three
years and
has conducted
workshops
on PHP
basics.
Related
Links:
Designs4Nuke.com
(http://www.designs4nuke.com)
   



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

 

Generated on April 25, 2005.

Not quite a Roadmap   (News)

50%. He emphasized the advantages of this real templating system of non-templating systems like the old theme enginge or Autotheme.

After some turkish fast food Larsneo (Germany) told about the advantages of accessibility within Postnuke core. All avertable barriers will be removed from the core. The rest will lie in the hands of the administrator. This will not only make Postnuke sites accessible for handicapped users but also better to evaluate for search engines.

His second topic was the dangers of cross site scripting and other security issues. He pointed out his latest advances in fighting these problems. In the following discussing the team came up with a number of ideas that might prevent some of the mistakes of the past.

The second Day

The second day was the day of the module developers and far too short. Jørn Lind-Nielsen (Denmark) introduced us to his latest coup: workflows in Pagesetter 5.0.0. The state-based system uses XML and php-plugins for the design of specific workflows. Everybody was really impressed by his advances.

A new quality of commercial module development was presented by Frank Schummertz (Germany): He and his collegues from pnCommerce are currently working on a complex confugurator module that enables their customer to offer a shopping system for air conditioning system. The user enters all the requirements he has and the module calculates a specific offer.

The Remains of the Day

All in all it was a very interesting weekend with a bunch of really nice people. I think by getting to know eachother personally the relations within the team improve and we established some quite important connections among the module developers. As far as I understood Jørn, he's going to cooperate with Xexpress' Brave Cobra (Belgium) who not only entertained us with the story of his journey that almost ended in Paris and not in Stuttgart, because he used the right highway in the wrong direction. He also turned out to be a skilled singer and guitarplayer as he played some songs in the Biergarten as the other relaxed from the day.

Not quite a Roadmap

One of the important results of the meeting was the evaluation of the state of the .8-development – what is done, what is missing and what needs to be done:

Postnuke .8 will not contain any more features that .7x in regard to kinky stuff like more colorful links or coffee machine drivers. It will be a total redesign of the Postnuke core that gets rid of all the legacy stuff from phpNuke and form Postnuke into a professional framework that offers Interfaces for module developers.

So the main features will be the abstraction of API, Permissions, ADODB aso from the modules. An admin will be able to install the pure core with e.g. Pagesetter only and it will work. This will be a slim, performative core and it is already pretty advanced. But it needs to be completed and properly tested.

The next step will be milestone releases for module developers to test their modules with the new core. These milestones will work and can be uses as example but there will be no upgrade mechanisms for existing sites and no garantee that it will be 100% compatible to the final release. As a result the milestones can't be used in live sites.

Another thing that needs to be done is a total rewrite of all the old modules. They need to be API compliant and templated. The estimated 6 month did not suffice as the work turned out to be more complicated than imagined.

The last problem to be solved is the upgrading process, as for example the data from the Weblinks module will have to be distributed to the new Weblinksmodule, the ratings hook and EZComments.

All this efford will make the system more secure, performative and flexible but it's still some road ahead.

BTW: We are already planning a second meeting next year near Hamburg

Generated on August 10, 2004.

FUPEI.com ? Friendster-like site built on Postnuke   (News)

start-up, all the stats are rocketing high, especially after some computer media in Indonesia exposed FUPEI.com in their articles.

What is FUPEI.com anyway ? You could simply associate this site with ?a friendster-like site?. Well, not just that. FUPEI is built upon Postnuke and several modules ? all of them are free and open source. The site developer only made several customization such as friend linking module and theme (off course). The rest of the modules are e.g. Photoshare, XForum, Messenger, AutoTheme Lite, etc, which you can find on the net.

This site is still under steady and continuous development. Our developers are still tweaking codes and theme templates aimed to reduce the server load and to save bandwidth, while on the other hand to bring a better experience for the users. Some friends from Indonesian Postnuke Community also have volunteered to assist us in improving the system.

But of course, thanks to postnuke and all the modules, the system is already stable, realiable and secure. Our next plan is to find a sponsor, since our hosting service provider already stated that FUPEI.com is consuming a lot of resources, and suggested that we upgrade the account :-(

To all the developers whose modules are used on FUPEI.com, we'd like to express our gratitude. FUPEI.com would take longer time to develop without your modules. Please inform us if you think we have violated your license, since we don't have a clear understanding on legal terms. Last but not least, our gratitude goes to all postnuke developers ? and of course, to all postnuke communities world-wide.

On behalf of FUPEI.com's develope

Generated on June 8, 2004.

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