August-9 bookmarklets, publication pings, rss, codes and more

Another bunch of small but useful enhancements. YACS is more and more becoming a complete platform for blogging, while preserving the initial goal of supporting web communities.

 YACS now generates bookmarklets to ease the job of bloggers. At each section (sections/view.php) an extra box offers a special link to blog in it. Give it a try! to post to our forum during your browsing sessions.

 The YACS bookmarklet do not presume who you are. Therefore, the blogging form (articles/edit.php) has been adapted to transmit data to the login page when necessary.

 The script that ping external sites on publication has been extended. See articles/publish.php for more information. Related code has been removed from default publication hook (control/scan.php). Also, ping requests are not encoded anymore, since most servers are not able to cope with this (services/call.php).

 Also, pings now take into account references that have been encoded by YACS (links/links.php). This means that local pages can be cross-referenced with little effort from now on.

 Technorati has been added to the list of servers to be pinged by default (servers/populate.php).

 The index page for feeds (feeds/index.php) now lists in an extra box standard button images for most popular RSS formats.

 Our main RSS feed now has a style sheet, to enhance its rendering into regular browsers. Give it a try and see services/rss_codec.php.

 The module that renders YACS codes has been reviewed, and several minor bug have been fixed. For example, implicit rendering do not take place anymore in pre-formatted areas. See codes/codes.php. Also, two of the related help scripts have been streamlined and extended: codes/basic.php and codes/lists.php.

 This time I think I have understood the difference between urlencode() and rawurlencode(). If you have to encode args of a query string (i.e., after a question mark), use urlencode() (see actions/accept.php). Else if you have to encode parts of a complex URL (i.e., before any question mark), use rawurlencode() (see collections/browse.php). Of course, if you don't need to encode something, do not call any of these functions (this is why we have modified get_url() almost everywhere).

 Users now have a link to review past electronic letters before subscribing to our mails in users/edit.php.

 The module producing the Flash object with most recent titles at the home page now includes shared/global.php, as other scripts. See feeds/flash/slashdot.php.

 The test page has been extended with a small form to check POST requests as well. Check control/test.php

 set_magic_quotes_runtime(0); into shared/global.php seems to have solved most of escaping issues we had in the past

 Reference skins have been updated with new images for RSS feeds.

 Several minor enhancements. For example, a header 'Connection: close' has been added to every HTTP request, to better implement network standards. Also, generated CSV data now escapes quotes accordingly to the standard.