Flux CMS DevBlog

Finally, uploading and inserting images in the blog editor got much easier. There's a new field called "Upload Picture" where you can upload a picture (surprise ...) without reloading the editor pageand then it gets automatically inserted into your blog post (where the cursor is). The image gets uploaded to /files/images/blog/. This is hardcoded and can't be changed currently, but you can of course move the file later with the usual CMS commands. If you want to later insert the image again, you can choose it with the common image drawer from the /files/images/blog/ folder.

And we have the next feature, a preview for blog posts. There's a new shiny Preview button, if you edit posts, click it and a new window pops up, which shows you a real preview of your post. It's not saved in the original post, so this works also, if you edit an already published post without publishing it. But this means also, you should not forget to actually save the post, otherwise the changes are lost.

If the popup window doesn't show up, Firefox most presumably blocks it and shows a message like the one below. Just click on the message and then "Allow popups for example.org" and you won't be bothered anymore with that :)

If you click preview a second time and the preview doesn't update, you maybe have to do shift/control/whatever+reload to really reload it from the server and not take it from the cache.

Addition: It needs a db update (you know, http://example.org/admin/webinc/update/) to make the preview work.

Benjamin did it again. He added a Public/Private/Draft feature to each Blog post. You can now save posts as "draft" or as "private" and no not legitimate person will see those posts. The difference between "draft" and "private" is that private posts can be seen in the overview by all logged in people, the "draft" posts never will show up in the overview or RSS feeds, but if you know the direct url, they can be seen as well (for logged in users only).

Next feature on the list (and easily doable with this new feature): Post Preview. See the next post for an update of that :)

It's now possible to use tags with spaces, either use

"tag with space" anothertag "a third tag" andanotherone

or comma separate your tags:

tag with space , anothertag , a third tag , andanotherone

If you want to use tags with spaces in ecto, you have to change the "tag separator" in "Weblog -> Edit Templates -> Tags" to ", " instead of the space we recommended before. If you don't use tags with spaces, you don't have to change anything, the old setting still works.

Flux CMS now has another integrated XHTML-editor: FCKeditor.

If you want to try it yourself, just enable it in conf/editors/xhtml.xml:

<editor name="fck"/>

You can now also tag your posts done via moblogging. Use the #a or !a option for that, eg

#a bitflux cms

would tag your post with bitflux and cms. See also the moblogging docs for more details.

Soon to come: Geolocation tagging via moblogging and tags. As an alternative to Plazes (esp. where it's not available, eg. if you're somewhere outside or on a mobile network, where Plazes doesn't work)

Update: Geolocation via moblogging works now. Add the following to your moblog-post and it will add the correct data to your post.

#a geo:long=47.38 geo:lat=8.53 geo:loc=Zurich

or shorter (especially handy, if you're on a mobile phone keyboard)

#a lo=47.38 la=8.53 loc=Zurich

Benjamin and I added Plazes to Flux CMS. I'm quite busy right now to explain that further, but you can open an account at Plazes, install the Launcher and play with it. I'll explain later, how to use that feature in Flux CMS and Freeflux (the end result you can already see here in this blog post below :) )

Update: Short How-To:

1) Open up an account at Plazes.
2) Download the launcher and start it
3) Register your first plaze, if it's not already there. See "my home" for an examples
4) Make sure, plazes shows your username at your plaze.
5) Log in into Flux CMS, go to "Bookmarks" -> "Users", add your "Plazes Username" and "Plazes Password" and hit submit (the password isn't saved in cleartext at our side, so no worries and the password field is empty again after saving, but stored)
6) Make a new post (edit an old one will not work), either via the webform or xml-rpc.
7) See the Plazename and longitude,latitude in your post and in the RSS feed
8) Everyone knows now automatically, where you have been, when you posted :)

If you have changed the default blog.xsl templates, you have to add the following code to it to actually see the geolocation info:

Put the following on top (just after <xsl:import href="../standard/common.xsl"/>):

<xsl:import href="../standard/plugins/blog.xsl"/>

And then search for <xsl:template match="xhtml:div[@class='post_links']" mode="xhtml"> and replace it with:

<xsl:template match="xhtml:div[@class='post_links']" mode="xhtml">
    <xsl:call-template name="plazeDiv">
        <xsl:with-param name="blogInfo" select="../blog:info"/>
    </xsl:call-template>
    <div class="post_links">
        <xsl:apply-templates mode="xhtml"/>
     </div>
</xsl:template>

Update: I updated the above code to make it more simple and we added a ../standard/plugins/blog.xsl template for such things in the future. It was too much work, to update each and every xslt file. Therefore we have now a standard blog.xsl, which should be included by the different theme/blog.xsl. We will add common stuff there, but you can easily overwrite them in your own theme/blog.xsl. See the current SVN version of that file to have an overview, what we included there (currently, it's only the plazes stuff).

After a suggestion by Frank and some former nagging by Alain I finally added the possibility to accept or reject comments with one click from the notification mail. You don't even have to login to make a rejected comment approved or an approved rejected. This is done with some hashes for each comment, which is in the link and checked against. You only can change the comment-status once, after that it doesn't work anymore for that comment and you have to login to change it again. And this also works for Trackbacks.

If you have your own Flux CMS installation, don't forget to update the db with calling http://example.com/admin/webinc/update/.

We're very proud to announce Alain Petignat as new committer to Flux CMS. He committed this morning a helper method and the needed xslt code for displaying the latest moblog on a Flux CMS page. See the helper code itself for some explanation and his page for a "demo".

Many thanks to Alain and welcome to the Flux CMS developer community. Let there be a lot of contributions :)

Another little new feature mainly done by Benjamin: Little preview images for the theme selector in Site Options. To see it in action, just login into your Freeflux account (or update your local installation), go to site options and change a theme. Tataa :) You can also hover over the thumbnail and see a larger version. No more saving the theme just to see how the page will look like.

Of course, if you change your CSS or XSLT on a standard template, the preview images are not accurate anymore, as they are not rendered live.

If you do your own themes and want to have a preview picture as well, just make a "preview" folder on your themes folder and name the jpg like the css, but replace .css with .jpg, eg.

/themes/mytheme/css/main_foo.css
will become
/themes/mytheme/preview/main_foo.jpg

And make the preview picture approx. 400x240 pixels large.