Implemented a new search system, compliments of the Geeklog participation in the Google Summer of Code project. Sami Mazen Barakat is the student who developed the new search functionality. He was mentored by Randy Kolenko. What they developed is in our opinion one of the best enhancements for Geeklog and it is reflected in glFusion. Search results are now presented in an integrated format with short descriptions of the search results. There are several new configuration options to allow you to customize how search will work on your site.
Another Geeklog Google Summer of Code project was to enhance the comment system. The goal was to allow comments to be edited and also moderated. glFusion has implemented the features that allow a user to edit their comments (admin configurable) and to also set an automatic comment close date on articles. glFusion has not implemented the moderation feature at this time. Jared Wenerd is the GSOC student who developed these enhancements. He was mentored by Michael Jervis on the Geeklog team. This is another excellent enhancement that brings tremendous value to Geeklog and glFusion.
glFusion uses several CSS and JavaScript files to accomplish some of its great Web 2.0 features. To allow you to customize parts of your site, we have separated out the CSS into several files. As a result, page load times were a little longer since there were so many requests from the browser to the server to get each of the individual files. We've solved this problem by consolidating all the CSS into a single call statement. We've done the same thing for all the JavaScript files as well. Now, only two statements are required to load all the CSS and JS. We've leveraged the caching technology used in glFusion to make building and serving of the files much faster. As a result, we're seeing about a 20% reduction in page rendering / load times!
IMPORTANT NOTE FOR THOSE MIGRATING FROM GEEKLOG
If you are using what we call a 'legacy' theme, that is one that is based off the stock professional theme included in Geeklog, you will need to make a few minor modifications to your header.thtml template. See Legacy Theme Support for more details.
We've enhanced Site Tailor so you can now create multiple menus. You'll notice the new Navigation menu here in the left navigation bar. The footer menu is also administered via Site Tailor. You can now create and customize multiple block menus and even get creative and place a horizontal navigation menu in a static page. glFusion now has a full featured integrated menuing system!
glFusion v1.0 included the Forum plugin by Blaine Lang, with the ability to set bookmarks. New with glFusion v1.1.0 is the ability to easily sort your bookmarks. Check out the new Bookmark tab in the Forum navigation bar to sort your bookmarks by Forum, Topic, Title, Views, and Date.
We've also added a Latest Posts tab. This will display the last n (where the site admin sets the value for n) number of posts. What we've noticed in usage of the system, is that we've fallen victim to relying on the Forum centerblock on the homepage to see new forum posts. Since it only lists 10 items by default, we found we were missing some posts on days with lots of activity. Now, we can easily see the last say 50 posts to make sure we don't miss anything!
We've made a few tweaks to the Administrative interface as well. We've separated the Command and Control screen from the Submission screen. We've also added a new Log Viewer so you can easily monitor your common glFusion logs. Finally we've also added a configuration option to hide the Admins Only block except when you are on an administrative screen.
With our ongoing effort to bring better integration and synergy to all the various parts and pieces of glFusion, we've moved the configuration options for CAPTCHA, Forum, and FileMgmt into the core glFusion online configuration system. This means no more config files to edit!
We've also implemented a caching technology for reading the configuration data with each page load. This new caching feature also improves page load times by a few milliseconds.
We've moved all the media handling (resizing of images, thumbnail creations, etc.) out of Media Gallery and into the core glFusion code base. This means that all plugins can leverage the same media management code. So for example, attachments in the Forum are processed using the same code that images in Media Gallery are processed by. This gives you a single spot to configure your graphics drivers and provides a mature and consistent interface for all plugins to use!
We've modified the internal email handling routines to include improved HTML email support and secure SMTP (TLS or SSL). This makes it possible to use email providers like Gmail to send your outgoing emails through.
We have moved several files out of the public_html area into the private/ area to help improve site security. There is no reason to have library or include files sitting in the open web accessible directory. For those users upgrading from earlier versions of glFusion, we've included a utility called filecheck.php to assist with cleaning out the old files.
Previously, the Nouveau theme included support for creating a variety of widgets that added functionality to your site. We've now moved those widgets out from under the Nouveau umbrella where they can be leveraged by other themes (some style files will need to be copied out of the public_html/layout/nouveau/ directory and into your layout).
We have also set up many default widgets to make it easy to customize and deploy. See the Widget Documentation for more info.
The profile page has been re-designed to be more friendly to social networking features and to additional input coming from plugins, etc. The size of the default avatar has increased, so your users might want to re-upload an image if their current one appears overly stretched.
v1.1.0
v1.1.0.rc1