Thanks to the Geeklog Japanese crew, glFusion has been enhanced to provide a much cleaner, and valid, (x)HTML output.

glFusion will continue to release new themes which take advantage of the XHTML capabilities.

The internal code that handled story authoring has been completely rewritten and is now much cleaner and functional. Most notably is that what you type is actually what you’ll get.

No longer will you need to edit multiple files before installing glFusion. The new installation routine will gather all the necessary information and write it to the proper configuration files. This new install routine greatly simplifies the glFusion installation process.

Almost all configuration options can now be changed via an online configuration editor. While the new configuration editor is still a bit rough around the edges, it is a great improvement from hand editing the config.php file.

The Web services API provides an interface for client software to talk directly to glFusion and perform certain operations. Typical usage would be to use a desktop client to publish and edit stories without having to visit the website.

Added ability to have Body Text in user submitted stories. Previous versions of Geeklog only allowed user submitted stories a single entry field, so the site administrator would have to break the stories into the Intro and Body parts.

Existing comments will still be displayed but no new comments can be posted.

glFusion includes the new Caching Template Library. The benefits of the Caching Template Library are that it adds the following new features above the old template library. These features benefit both the site administrator and the plugin developer.

• Compiles templates to PHP code for enhanced page load speeds
• Adds logic processing to the templates
• Ability to specify multiple locations to search for templates

Instance caching refers to the ability to cache high load functions such as the What's New block. For example, each time the main glFusion index page is loaded, the What's New block is built, requiring several MySQL queries to determine what is new. Instance caching allows us to store a pre-built copy of the What's New block in HTML format. This means that you do not have to go to the database to asks for what is new each time the page is loaded.

This provides a significant speed increase for your site and a significant load decrease for your server.

glFusion has replaced the no longer maintained KSES HTML filtering system with a more up-to-date and supported filtering engine. With glFusion, you no longer have to define all the allowed HTML tags, instead, you can simply specify safe mode which will automatically remove JavaScript, XSS exploits, and other non-desirable items from your user contributed HTML. glFusion's filtering engine also attempts to fix invalid HTML markup to help maintain valid HTML in user submitted stories and comments.

KSES recently had some vulnerabilities discovered, since the project is no longer maintained, there was almost a 2 month lag in providing updates. This is one of the main drivers why glFusion no longer uses the old, unsupported KSES filter.

For a full list of changes, please see the history file in the distribution.

glFusion developed several enhancements to Geeklog and also integrated several plugins to the core distribution.

• CAPTCHA – A Security / SPAM prevention tool
• Bad Behavior2 – A Security tool that helps block several automated bot attacks
• Forum – A collaboration plugin that allows for online communities
• FileMgmt – A file management plugin
• Media Gallery – A multi-media management system
• Site Tailor – A collection of tools to manage a site's look and feel, currently includes a menu editor, menu color configuration, and logo management.

• Improved distribution organization
• Nouveau theme is the default theme
• Improved FCKeditor integration
• Forum and FileMgmt upgraded to be XHTML compliant
• Calendar and Links plugins integrated with CAPTCHA plugin
• Enhanced upgrade process that will read some of the core values from the existing config.php file
• Improved distribution method that does not include the configuration files as .php files, instead they are packaged as .dist files. This ensures your existing settings are preserved during a site upgrade.

Geeklog v1.5.0 has made several internal changes that will break all existing themes designed for Geeklog v1.4.1 or earlier. glFusion adds some additional requirements as well, requiring a few new template files.

For more information on the template modifications, see the Template Changes in Geeklog section.