October-18 - Comment API, MS-Word and Palm downloads, direct uploads, referrals, secret handles, actions and more

About 164 files have been updated or added to the system.

 YACS started to support the Comment API in the previous version. We have now added the ability to receive new comments posted by news readers, and to let them know about that into our RSS 2.0 feeds (through <slash:comment> and <wfw:comment> tags inserted by services/rss_codec.php). The back-end script for comment posts is, simply enough, comments/post.php. See also articles/articles.php, articles/feed.php, and feeds/rss_2.0.php.

 Additionnally, an option to the configuration panel for services has been added to enable comment debugging. See services/configure.php.

 comments/layout_comments_as_daily.php has been introduced to better stick with current blogging standards. Called from articles/view.php and from comments/index.php, if the 'daily' layout has been selected.

 YACS better threads comments. On any comment (comments/view.php) you will have links to predecessor and to successor(s) (if any). Quite useful on very active pages. The table for comments has been updated for that purpose (comments/comments.php).

 Links to submit new comments are now offered even to anonymous surfers, to better suggest them either to register or to authenticate. At least they are incitated to participate.

 YACS helps to make the information more mobile. Even anonymous surfers can now benefit from the direct download of articles into either MS-Word (and, from there to their PocketPC) or into their Palm handheld. See articles/view.php, articles/fetch_as_msword.php, and articles/fetch_for_palm.php.

 First users of YACS were sometimes puzzled because of the necessity to create an article before uploading an image or a file. To streamline the process we are now allowing direct uploads. Scripts used to edit files (files/edit.php) and images (images/edit.php) have been extended to automatically create a hosting page when necessary. These new simple ways of sharing files are promoted at the help page (help.php), and at every page on the user menu (shared/surfer.php).

 Most index pages now display the list of the main referrals to them. See for example index.php, or articles/index.php, or even feeds/index.php or scripts/index.php.

 For associates, the main index page for referrals (at agents/index.php) now offers a streamlined view of most recent referrals.

 YACS has now an option to suppress every referral information, at control/purge.php.

 The background agent in charge of referrals (agents/referrals) better stop crawlers, hackers and banned sources. Also, domain information is automatically extracted from the referring URL. Dead referrals (more than 100 days old) are pruned automatically.

 When secret handles are used to reference some YACS items, anonymous surfers will be automatically authenticated as being the item creator. Therefore, these surfer will be able to add new comments or to perform other action "naturally", without the login step we had before. The automatic authentication on handle has been activated on actions (actions/accept.php)

 YACS better rewards poster of new categories and on new sections, and offers a nice menu on item submission. See categories/edit.php and sections/edit.php.

 Any member is now allowed to post an action to any other member. Also, only assigned surfer and associates can modify an action. See actions/edit.php.

 YACS adds small images to its folding capability. See shared/global.php and skins/skin_skeleton.php. Folding and unfolding icons are defined on a per-skin basis, and a complete set of icons is provided for reference skins by scripts/run_once/041008_folder_gif.php.

 The query form now has a help panel to better describe how to use it (query.php).

 Popdex has been replaced by Feedster into the search engine (search.php).

 YACS accessibility has been enhanced in forms. The 's' key has been assigned to the submit button in most forms. Under Internet Explorer, just hit Alt-S to submit form data to the server. See query.php.

 The index page for feeds (feeds/index.php) has been greatly enhanced to better support both new and seasoned users of such things.

 YACS was already able to ping other servers on article publication. However this process is not triggered for pages submitted through XML-RPC (for example with w.bloggar) or by e-mail. Therefore we have added a script to explicit request a general ping, at servers/ping.php. The command is accessible to associates from the index of servers, at servers/index.php.

 The extraction of links from new published pages has been deeply reviewed at links/links.php. This translates to more efficient trackbacks and pings.

 Link validation through the Internet has been greatly enhanced at links/link.php.

 YACS now better supports fancy urls. An application suggested by Ofloo is to gather links to valid IRC servers. We have demonstrated this here.

 The automatic typing of links has been greatly enhanced in skins/skin_skeleton.php

 The script that populates sections now distinguished between first installation from subsequent calls. Sample sections are created only on first installation, to not scramble running installations. See sections/populate.php.

 A new configuration panel has been created for servers at servers/configure.php. At the moment the script is mainly used to list banned hosts, and this information is used in other scripts dealing with external links, including: agents/referrals.php, feeds/feeds.php, links/check.php and servers/test.php. Of course the main control panel, at control/index.php, references this new configuration panel.

 In the control panel (control/index.php) modules are now listed in alphabetical order.

 Documentation has been greatly enhanced for the backup/restore facility. See control/backup.php and control/index.php.

 An icon has been added for Mozilla in agents/browsers.php. Also, more spiders and crawling engines are now identified as 'bot'.

 The readme.txt file has been enhanced to better promote the incremental upgrades enabled by YACS. "Never install your server again..."

 End of lines have been made explicit, and numerous scripts have been changed from "\n" or "\r\n" to "\015\012". See articles/mail.php or letters/new.php for example.

 A new function Scripts::get_url() has been created to ease the pain of referencing scripts. See scripts/scripts.php

 A new function Sections::get_default() has been created in sections/sections.php to locate the default section more easily.

 To further harden the system we have added mysql_escape_string() to actions/actions.php, to articles/articles.php, to categories/categories.php, categories/members.php, to comments/comments.php, to files/files.php, to images/images.php, locations/locations.php, sections/sections.php, servers/servers.php, tables/tables.php and users/users.php

 Documentation has been expanded also in the troubleshooting script, at control/test.php.

 Handling of short names used for remote authentication has been debugged. See users/users.php. Many thanks to Eoin.

 The icon used for newsfeeds may now be defined in the skin. See feeds/configure.php

 A subtle RSS validation issue has been solved by adding a space character before the ending tag (' ]]') of escaped XML fields ('CDATA'). See feeds/atom_0.3.php.

 The Flash object that animates titles of recent pages at the home page now correctly handles HTML entities, and use the Ming compression facility. See feeds/flash/slashdot.php.

 The blogging, pinging and xml-rpc back-ends (services/blog.php, services/ping.php and services/xml_rpc.php) now correctly process utf-8 data.

 Scripts that have to be ran only once are now sorted by alphabetical order. This enables software developers to better predict change steps of their site.