Flux CMS DevBlog

We just upgraded the Freeflux.net accounts to Flux CMS 1.5.

For people with customized themes (changed xslt) not everything of the new features will work out of the box. We will fix them manually and continously (especially the comment preview feature needs adjustemens) and also document it here later.

If you have problems with the new version, please report it here or in the forum

What's new besides a lot of bugfixes (in short):

- FCKeditor upgraded to 2.3.1
- new sidebar blog plugin (more)
- blog comment preview
- microsummaries and opensearch support
- akismet support (more)

- event handler für dbforms

- javascript based mail obfuscation (via Popoon)
- built-in fulltext search for Xhtml resources (DB based data are easily integrated)
- new advanced permission plugin
- new assets editor

Annoyed by the forced Google ads on freeflux.net? You don't have to be anymore. You can turn them off now, even on the free accounts.

Just log into your account, click on the "Ads" tab in "Freeflux Info", click the link to turn them off, and gone they are. You can turn them on again later, if you like to support us somehow.

Of course, we don't mind, if you leave them, where they are now and we reserve the right to introduce them back again, if we feel it's needed (for example, if you're producing a lot of traffic). But for the time being, enjoy your ad free Freeflux, if you prefer it that way.

As mentioned in another post, Flux CMS can be made cocomment enabled (or if you install it, it already is). But our comment form has slightly changed with the 1.4 release of Flux CMS, so you maybe have to adjust the cocomment code in your blog.xsl. The correct code is now:

<xsl:if test="$singlePost = 'true'">
<xsl:variable name="entry" select="/bx/plugin[@name = 'blog']/xhtml:html/xhtml:body/xhtml:div"/>
<xsl:if test="$entry/@blog:post_comment_allowed='1'">

/* cocomment elements*/
var blogTool               = "Flux CMS";
var blogURL                = "<xsl:value-of select="$blogroot"/>";
var blogTitle              = "<xsl:value-of select="$dctitle"/>";
var postURL                = "<xsl:value-of select="$blogroot"/>archive/<xsl:value-of select="$entry/@blog:post_uri"/>.html";
var postTitle  = "<xsl:value-of select="$entry/xhtml:h2/text()"/>";
var commentAuthorFieldName = "name";
var commentAuthorLoggedIn  = false;

var commentFormID          = "bx_foo";
var commentTextFieldName   = "comments";
var commentButtonName      = "bx[plugins][blog][_all]";

</xsl:if>
</xsl:if>

Hope that helps

The latest trunk of Flux CMS runs now also on PHP 6 :) Doesn't use any of the new features, but it runs smoothly.

The main pain for making it work was, that the method signature of extended classes have to be the same as in the parent class, otherwise it throws a fatal error. Somehow annoying, but easy to fix.

By the way, we highly recommend using PHP 5.1.x over 5.0, but we will further support 5.0.

Like written in my other post, I added now akismet support to the Blog plugin (in trunk aka 1.5-dev). It's used as a last resort, when all our own checks don't catch it. So far, it's working great and already caught one of those handcrafted spam comments (all others were labeled as spam before akismet had to do anything)

If you want to use Akismet, you need your own API key from them, and put that into config.xml with the following lines

<blogAkismetKey>yourkey</blogAkismetKey>

and that's it. We will make that option available later also on the site-options page in the admin.

We used the Akismet PHP 5 class by Alex for a really easy integration of the service.

BTW, we still think that captchas are the wrong way to tackle the whole spam problem (they don't help with handcrafted comments or trackbacks anyway) and only discourage legitimate users to comment at all. With all our anti-spam features we have now, we should be on the right track to avoid having to use captchas even longer (hopefully forever). Nevertheless, there is captcha code in the CMS, which can be turned on via an option, it's just not really tested yet (as noone is using it :) )