Jan-28th - Full-XHTML, syndication at the home page, utf-8 mail, and safety

330 files have been updated or changed.

As usual, it is highly recommended to ask YACS to smoothly upgrade your server. For further information check How to achieve incremental upgrades of a YACS server?.

 All 10 reference skins provided in YACS archive now generates XHTML. See skins/index.php and beyond. And the test page for skins has a link to validate its content to the w3c validator.

 Categories displayed at the home page can now list attached links (index.php). Ok, let me explain how this little change helps to turn YACS into a simple news aggregator. Suppose you have a category feeded by some RSS source. Configure it (categories/edit.php) to display as a gadget box (at the middle of the home page), as an extra box (aside the home page), or as a navigation box (aside most pages). Most recent links received from the source will be displayed at the given place. And you can put up to six gadget boxes at the home page... Mark, does this answer one of your questions?

 Additional options have been added to render the home page, at index.php and at skins/configure.php. A basic decorated layout has been introduced. Also, Anatoly can now avoid the title of the cover page, if necessary.

 Internationalization has been extended to mail messages sent by YACS. We are converting message titles and body to utf-8, as visible at articles/mail.php, users/mail.php, and shared/mailer.php.

 Most code related to Unicode has been moved to a new library class, at shared/utf8.php. As a result, the size of shared/global.php has been dramatically reduced...

 Also, a new library class has been created to take care of outgoing mail messages. See shared/mailer.php. It is likely that this script will be the only place where we will call mail() in the near future, but additional work is required to achieve this goal.

 Senders can now get a copy of mail messages they are sending. See articles/mail.php

 On the page used to test a skin (skins/test.php) a link has been added to select the skin under test as the site skin.

 YACS is now better protected against bbCode code injection (see codes/codes.php), including Unicode masquerades. Also, YACS ensures that the IP address of the surfer does not change over time (to prevent cookie steal), and checks the running instance as well (to avoid cross-authentication from sister instances). See shared/surfer.php. Many thanks to Mordread for his input on these topics.

 Thanks to Mark's input, YACS can now list restricted articles to anonymous surfers, and ask for authentication only when required to provide the full page. Visit the updated main Configuration Panel (control/configure.php), and change the 'with_restricted_teasers' parameter. Actually, I have extended the concept to restricted sections as well. See how we modified SQL statements in articles/articles.php and in sections/sections.php.

 The main configuration panel (control/configure.php) also has a new option to make YACS stick to the preferred language instead of adapting the interface to the surfer language. Change the 'without_language_detection' parameter.

 YACS now displays basic commands (print, PDF, MS-Word, Palm) only to logged members, except in Wiki mode ('with_auto_publish' = 'Y'). See articles/view.php and categories/view.php.

 Anatoly has suggested to display article references in discussion boards. Instead of corrupting the existing layout, I have selected to put this in popup windows that appears when the mouse hover some title. Give it a try in our Le forum...

 User profiles have been streamlined. The Watch List and the Recent Articles are not overlapping anymore (see members/members.php).

 Previously, user notes for manuals were shaped after those of the PHP on-line manual. Now they are shaped after the MySQL on-line manual and the result is more compact. See comments/layout_comments_as_manual.php. And don't hesitate to contribute to our on-line manual if you wish.

 To avoid new self-registrations go to the main Configuration Panel and change the parameter 'without_registration'. Applications can still be transmitted through query forms if necessary.

 The silent option has been removed from the edit form for actions (actions/edit.php). Actions updates are now always silent, that's it.

 To streamline the usage of handles the query form now links anonymous surfers to a special user profile. See query.php.

 Help messages displayed at the query form (query.php), at the article edit form (articles/edit.php), and at the comment edit form (comments/edit.php) now correctly explain what you can do, or not, with HTML and YACS codes.

 Follow-up commands have been added at the end of configuration panels on parameters change. See agents/configure.php for example.

 The setup assistant (setup.php) now checks that a index.php exists above the YACS installation directory. If not, it copies YACS main index page there. This means that the home page of the web server will be automatically handled by YACS if necessary. Does this answer gracefully a concern reported by several persons? I hope so...

 On first installation a streamlined configuration panel is displayed, without parameters related to HTTP and to mail services. These can be set afterwards, at control/configure.php. Also, if the root path is not /yacs/, cascaded style sheets (.css files) are modified accordingly.

 While setting software extensions YACS now writes selected hooks into shared/hooks.xml (see control/scan.php). In the future we will have specific scripts or external programs analyzing these information for further processing.

 YACS now supports a demonstration mode. You just have to create a file named demo.flag, and all configuration panels will refuse to save new parameters. The sending of mail messages will also be forbidden, phpInfo won't execute, etc.. This is how we have make a safe demonstration site for YACS. Log in as demo/demo and do what you want, except you cannot break the site... The demonstration mode is now a feature of YACS, and you can use it everywhere you have to demonstrate YACS, at your office, at home, during trade fairs, etc... Enjoy!

 On database crash YACS does not consider surfers as associates anymore. See control/configure.php.

 Code related to extended RSS attributes has been streamlined in articles/articles.php and in comments/comments.php.

 The anchor interface (shared/anchor.php) has been extended to allow for binding by content. Also the get_introduction() has been changed to a get_teaser(). The next step is to use these to streamline the way we are getting some article excerpts throughout the code.

 As ob_start() has been flagged as a major source of blank pages, a ob_end_clean() has been added in an attempt to fix this weird behaviour. At least I have not been able to reproduced the issue since that change. Many scripts have been impacted by this, including all feeding sources such as agents/feed.php or articles/describe.php.

 By the way the test page now also lists output handlers, at control/test.php.

 Last week I found a link that did not provide the expected page. After some troubleshooting, I found that some equal sign '=' had to be changed to a 'LIKE' in related SELECT statements. It seems I have (re)discover the proper way of achieving strict binary search with MySQL...

 Also, a small performance improvement has been added to MySQL queries by adding the parameter MYSQL_ASSOC to most invocations of mysql_fetch_array(). Look at the manual for more information if you wish.

 Lastly a new explain() function has been added to agents/logger.php. This is aiming to be a handy tool to analyze MySQL performance during development phases.

 To avoid last minute bugs a validation step has been added to the packaging of the YACS archive. The idea is quite simple: scripts/validate.php includes almost every other script. A very straightforward way to detect PHP syntax errors... To achieve this we have modified numerous scripts either, but the result is there: less bugs and safer releases. For example headers_sent() now take place everywhere before using header(). Also, one side effect of this change is that almost all exit have been replaced by return.

 Another decision with a high impact is to lower the level of messages accepted from PHP. At the moment YACS blocks all notifications. In the near future notifications will pass through. For example I have started to chase uninitialised variables, which generates a lot of warnings. Look at all the isset() spread everywhere... And guess what? Half a dozen bugs have been fixed thanks to this technique. This is a huge work that takes place in the background; it should be achieved before Summer time...

 Thanks to Pierre, YACS now actually logs outgoing mail messages if the related debugging option has been activated into the configuration panel.

 Most extended characters (we have so many accents in French...) have been converted to their equivalent HTML entities. This has been quite tedious, as you can imagine, but this is also a big move towards full-ASCII source files. I told you YACS will become a reference platform...

 Labels of submit buttons are not encoded anymore, and localized strings are correctly rendered instead of HTML cryptic entities...