yacs 7.4: blogging interface, file detach, TinyMCE, FCKEditor, jsCalendar

Posted by Bernard on May 2 2007, (popular)

The blogging interface has been considerably extended, and YACS now supports major available tools, such as Microsoft Windows Live Writer, ScribeFire (previously Performancing for Firefox), Flock, BlogDesk, Post2Blog, Zoundry Blog Writer, not mentioning w.bloggar. Images can be uploaded while blogging, and free-text tags can be added as well. Also, with the support of the RSD standard, YACS allows for the auto-discovery of its blogging interface.

A bare document management system has been added to YACS. A file can now be detached by an authenticated member, to let other members know that someone is working on it. The intent is not to replace a full check-in/check-out system, and YACS does not lock files, but at least it will help a lot team members to collaborate on any document, just by letting know who has taken the lead.

Also, the commenting form now allows for the attachment of one file, and we believe that this simple feature will contribute a lot to information sharing in on-line communities. Previously you had to upload a file somewhere, to record its id, and then to reference the file id in your comment. Now, for the same result, you just have to type a comment, and to select the file to upload at the bottom of the form.

YACS now features two different WYSIWYG editors, namely, TinyMCE and FCKEditor, and jsCalendar has been added as well to ease the selection of dates. All these serve one single purpose: ease the production of rich pages by non-expert people.

446 files have been modified or added since the previous release.

The new release is available for immediate download. If you are already running a YACS server we highly recommend you to upgrade your server.

Here is a list of new or updated features coming with this release:

The blogging interface has been entirely revisited to introduce new features, such as the upload of images and files attached to new posts, and to better conform to XML-RPC standards, including the MetaWeblog and the Movable Type interfaces. As a result, YACS now supports most powerful blogging tools.

Really Simple Discovery (RSD) has been implemented in services/describe.php, and invoked from the front page, at index.php, to allow for automatic discovery of the suitable API by blogging tools. This works very nicely with Flock, while Windows Live Writer still asks for additional steps.

UTF-8 transcoding has been added to the XML-RPC codec, for the benefit of the blogging interface, but also of the parsing of RSS feeds. See services/xml_rpc_codec.php.

A new command has been added to allow for file detach. When a member detaches a file, his name is recorded by YACS. On subsequent access to the detached file, other members are informed that the document they are looking for is currently under review, and that they should wait for an updated version.

Authenticated members are now allowed to change files posted by others. A global parameter has been added to disallow this behaviour if necessary in the configuration panel for users (users/configure.php).

Files can now be attached to comments, and this greatly simplifies the sharing of information from within a threaded discussion.

Versioning has been extended to file descriptions.

A new code has been introduced to render a stack of rotating images. Attach several images to any page, then replace individual with one single

to achieve a smart visual effet, managed through a bespoke Javascript generated dynamically by YACS.

TinyMCE 2.1.0 has been introduced and implemented into YACS.

YACS already had FCKEditor for months; we now have moved to version 2.4.1, which is the most recent.

jsCalendar 1.0 has been fully integrated to streamline the selection of a date. Moreover, the provided popup calendar is fully localized in English, French and Italian, where applicable. Other languages will be added when they will be available for YACS itself.

By default YACS assign published articles to weekly and monthly categories. This can now be disabled from the configuration panel for users. Some sites definitely do not require this anyway.

Previously the character ; was used as a separator between categories assigned to an article, and this has lead to many errors because of conflicts with Unicode encoding. Now only commas can be used to separate categories and tags.

The maintenance script for categories (categories/check.php) was falsely complaining for errors. The entire script has been revisited to fix all issues, and to make it work as expected.

RSS feeds now correctly embed the server image, if one has been made availabe in the skin. See for example categories/feed.php.

We are still on track on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) techniques. As suggested by ThierryP, we are generalizing the usage of nick names in friendly URLs. With this release, the site map provided to Google features nick names (sitemap.php), as does the list of visited pages aside, etc.

The introduction of nick names in URLs has induced the need for Unicode encoding in many requests to the database. With this version a small fix has been introduced to ensure that item ids where not falsely processed as binary UTF-8, since this could lead YACS to very strange results.

No iframe anymore. This tag was used previously to support heartbits between the browser and the server, with the aim to avoid session timeouts. This has been replaced with a img tag, for the same result. The difference is that img properly validates with XHTML strict, where iframe does not. With this change, even YACS forms validate properly against XHTML strict standards.

The code that generates cached versions of localized strings has been streamlined to improve response times, and to better adapt to tricky Unix configurations. See i18n/i18n.php.

The skin alfresco is not part of the reference archive anymore.

The PHP parameter magic_quotes_runtime is now disabled by YACS to avoid tricky side effects on cache management. See shared/global.php.

YACS now only compresses pages if it is explicity allowed to do it. This simple fix should ease the installation of the software where ISPs have activated compression at the system level.

The Javascript code and style sheets related to nicetitle have been slightly modified to eradicate run-time errors.

Several bugs have been fixed in Javascript dynamically generated by YACS.

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