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Work Jump Starts, New Plug-In System

Posted by David Risley on May 2, 2007 - 9:22 PM

It has been quite awhile since I have posted an update regarding the Miraserver product. Let me take a moment to let you know what is going on.

Work has been almost non-existant on this product for the last several months. The primary reason for this has been simple: lack of man power and lack of time. PC Media is a very diverse enterprise. I am highly involved in the world of content publishing on the internet. I am also doing quite a bit of consultation for clients. Those developers I have hired to work on Miraserver were not up to the task. Not that they were bad coders; it's just that I am solely reponsible for most of the programming in Miraserver up to this point. It is hard for another programmer to jump in and work on Miraserver, and each programmer has a very long road before they would be useful working with this product. To make matters worse, I did not document the product as I programmed it (an outpoint I am now in the process of fixing).

So, where do things stand now? Well, the good news is that I picking the project up again, moving it to the front burner, and I intend to push it through to "final". I will be doing this on my own because that has proven to be the only way to do it. While I am at it, I am going to be working HARD on documentation, not only for the end user but for the programmer. In addition, just this evening as I began working on it again, I instituted a new plug-in system into the code. The plug-in system is going to be a VERY important component as the product goes to "final" because it will allow others to alter the workings of the product as they see fit without the need to alter the source code. And, of course, the use of the plug-in system will be fully documented and made available so that we foster the development of Miraserver plug-ins in the community.

At this point, Miraserver is in a "Beta 2" version for Version 2.0. The product DOES work and I am now in the process of upgrading my largest website to Miraserver 2. Call it a bit of a test rat. However, there ARE some known outpoints with 2.0 at this point (none of them showstoppers) that I will be rectifying. I don't really plan to add any new features at this point until 2.0 goes to "final". The plug-in system was an exception simply because of the importance of it. My goal is to release this to "final" some time in June. There is quite a bit of work to do, so I'll need to burn the midnight oil to make it happen. But, to do anything else is to stick it to the existing users of Miraserver.

Stay tuned.

Beta2 - Bug Fix

Posted by David Risley on December 5, 2006 - 12:58 PM

A user of Miraserver Beta 2 reported an issue with webpages/categories not being properly linked in site menus. Essentially, the link was blank yet the title of the page was showing up. I have issued a quick update for Beta 2 to fix this issue. The only file changed is contentfunctions.php in the "includes" folder.

For all users, simply re-download Beta 2, un-zip, and upload the new contentfunctions.php.

Miraserver 2 BETA 2 Release

Posted by David Risley on November 8, 2006 - 7:52 PM

Without further ado, I am releasing Miraserver 2 Beta 2, the second beta release. This release fixes many bugs found with the initial beta release. In addition, I have now included a built-in system for handling search-engine friendly URLs using either rewrite rules or a 404 handler. Now the pages generated by Miraserver can appear as static pages to the search engines and you can customize the structure of the URLs in preferences. In prior versions, it was necessary to perform a hack to get SEO-friendly URLs.

Here are the release notes for Beta 2:

Changes for Beta 2:

  • Miscellaneous interface repairs
  • Correction of session errors when rating articles or using the contact form
  • Correction of sending a message to multiple recipients by user group
  • Inclusion of URL re-writing capabilities
  • Misc internal enhancements to the preference system
  • Change to prevent removal of user groups before syncing with a forum
  • Correction of installation script to assign default template set on installation
  • Repair of replacement variable set selection dropdown
  • Repair of replacement set pop-up window in WYSIWYG interface

Templates Changes:

  • comment_viewall_page
  • article
  • article_dropdown
  • blog
  • faq
  • news
  • page
  • bio
  • homepage_headlines
  • latestarticles
  • latestblog
  • latestheadlines
  • main
  • newarticles
  • previews

Upgrade Instructions:

  1. Un-zip the ZIP archive.
  2. Perform a full database backup. You might also want to backup all Miraserver files before overwriting them.
  3. Upload all files, being careful not to overwrite your config.php file.
  4. Navigate to upgrade.php, located in the install folder.
  5. Follow the procedure in your browser.
  6. When complete, delete the install folder from your server for security purposes.
  7. Log into your control panel.
  8. The upgrade script inserted all template changes in as the default templates. To merge any changes with your customized templates, you will need to visit each of your customized templates and compare to the original by pressing the "View Original" button.