May-24 - PHP4, news aggregation, web services, home page, and more

With this release we have tremendously extended YACS ability to collect and handle external news. Support for web services has been expanded with a new facility for distributed searches, and support for standard API trackback and weblogs ping. The control panel has been changed to a single convenient place to browse available modules. The home page can scroll the list of featured pages. This release also features some improvements, and a couple of bug fixes:

 YACS has been adapted to PHP version 4. Impact most notably the usage of network functions fsockopen() (example in links/link.php) and of image functions (see images/edit.php).

 RSS News feeding has been almost completely revisited. YACS can now act as a correct platform for news aggregation. The architecture is based on three modules: servers, links, and categories. Server records are used for feed definitions (see servers/index.php, servers/servers.php, servers/view.php, servers/edit.php and servers/delete.php). News are saved as links in the database (see links/links.php). Finally, news are classified into the category tree (see categories/view.php).

 The index page for newsfeeds has been enhanced to better describe (phpDoc and script execution) information channels available, and to list external feeding servers as well. See feeds/index.php.

 The configuration page for feeds has been almost rewritten to cope with the new design. New global parameters have been introduced. See feeds/configure.php.

 The database abstraction for feeds has changed a lot as well. Check functions get_news_from(), tick_hook() and get_remote_news() at feeds/feeds.php.

 Also, the database abstraction for links now distinguish between regular links and links collected from news feeding. See function list_news() and other places at links/links.php.

 YACS can now provide news in the Microsoft CDF format. See feeds/cdf.php. Will anybody use it anyway?

 Our client software for web services has been enhanced. Support for XML-RPC communications has been improved, and support for REST calls has been added. See services/call.php.

 The index page for supported web services now describes the new interface for distributed search processing.

 The ping interface now creates records for servers that ping us. See services/ping.php. useful to track sites that use YACS, or to update portal sites in corporate environment.

 The script used to populate the database has been extended to support default peering servers. Also, a new hook with the identifier 'control/populate.php' can now be used from external modules. See control/populate.php and servers/populate.php.

 Tracback interface has been fixed (links/links.php). Pingback interface has been actually activated (articles/view.php).

 A new REST-based service has been created to submit search requests. See services/search.php. Fully supported to enable distributed searches across several YACS servers. See search.php.

 The control panel has become the main place to display the list of installed modules (see control/index/index.php). A new hook with the identifier 'control/index.php#modules' has been created for this purpose (see for example collections/hook.php). The user menu has been reduced accordingly (see shared/surfer.php).

 The home page has been enhanced with the ability to scroll featured pages and to display a list of pages selected randomly. Some boxes have been moved from the extra panel to the navigation panel. See the script for the home page at index.php and the configuration panel for skins at skins/configure.php.

 All reference skins have been modified to support new navigation boxes handled at the home page and to support HTML 4.0 instead of HTML 4.01, in order to solve a rendering issue of scrolling lists with Netscape Navigator 7.1.

 The index page for skins now offers to test available skins. See it at index.php. Or check it at skins/index.php.

 Codes used to build in-line tables now support the tabulation char as fields separator, in addition to the vertical bar (see codes/tables.php).

 Hooks have been deeply revisited. phpDoc documentation has been extended in control/scan.php. Also in this script: default behaviour has been added to hooks 'publish' and 'tick', to allow for automatic server ping on publication, and for automatic periodic news feeding from external web sites. New identifiers have been created: 'control/index.php#modules' to extend the main control panel, 'control/populate.php' to extend the database populating script. The identifier 'control/setup.php#setup' has been changed to 'control/setup.php'.

 The overlay interface has been extended. See function edit() in overlays/overlay.php. Scripts for recipes and polls have been adapted accordingly (overlays/recipe.php and overlays/poll.php).

 The newsletters are now sent only to users that explicitly ask for it. A new field has been added to every user profile for that purpose. See users/users.php, users/edit.php, and letters/new.php.

 A '-' is now inserted in logs on anonymous hits. See agents/logger.php.

 Access restrictions have been reinforced. Surfer now has to be an authenticated member to download articles (articles/fetch_as_msword.php) or to mail it (articles/mail.php). See also codes/codes.php. Same change for files, at files/delete.php and files/index.php. Also for images: images/delete.php, for links: links/delete.php, for locations: locations/delete.php, locations/view.php, for tables: tables/delete.php, tables/view.php, for users: users/fetch_vcard.php, users/mail.php

 YACS now support files prepared for Palm mobile devices, with extensions .pdb or .prc. See files/view.php, files/edit.php and files/files.php. More to come for Palm users soon, I hope.

 Friendly message added on image handling, for first timers. See images/view.php.

 The main configuration panel has been adapted to support easyphp 1.7 default parameters for mySQL connectivity. See control/configure.php.

 First installation process has been streamlined. The interface of the main configuration panel has been streamlined. See control/configure.php. Messages sent at setup stage have been cleaned. See control/setup.php.

 Numerous cosmetic changes and bug fixes. explode() has replaced preg_split() calls where applicable. Default server set to www.yetanothercommunitysystem.com for script updates in scripts/configure.php.