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Releases and Bernard's Blog
Releases
YACS evolves rapidly and you have to keep on.
 | yacs 8.4: user profiles, group messages, tabs, overlays - This month the user interface of YACS has been extensively reviewed, for end surfers, for power members, and for site associates. Review your own record, it's probably good time to expose more of yourself to other community members. Tabbed panels have been introduced almost everywhere, since we believe they help to locate things and to make the software more user-friendly. And the ability to send messages to editors of a section, or to category members, is our answer to the strong requirements you had on group messaging. Many changes have been made to the code, yet most of them are small-size improvements, corrections or optimizations. We are continuing efforts started last month to stabilize the full software, and minor changes are expected in May before release of a major version in June. We believe YACS version 8.4 is rather strong, and your kind feed-back is very welcome. » |
| yacs 8.3: time, forms, usability, SEO, and performance profiling - This month we have tackled time zones, which management has been quite painful for a while. Generally speaking, this release does not bring too many new things. Our focus has been on code quality, on bug troubleshooting, and on all these small enhacements that, at the end of the day, will make you more happy with YACS. It is time to add a dynamic calendar of events for your site, if not done yet. Add the overlay 'date' to a section created for this purpose, then add one page per event, and see by yourself how easy this can be. » |
| yacs 8.2: Forms, calendars, shaped mails - The interactive support of forms has been a long-lasting request, and starting with version 8.2 it is becoming a native feature of YACS. As usual, we have started with rock-solid building blocks, and you will find in this version an easy-to-use form editor that leverages the AJAX technology. This will be expanded over time with next monthly releases, thank you to test YACS forms and to provide feed-back to the development team.
Support of on-line calendars has been streamlined as well, and the addition of the overlay 'day' to a section is the only configuration step required to build monthly views of next events. Previous users of this overlay may have to add some parameters to switch back to the previous behaviour.
Another important feature coming with this release is the shaping of mail bursts. Initially this is imposed by limits set by Internet service providers. YACS is now smart enough to delay the transmission of mail messages to stay below the threshold of 50 mail messages per hour or so. » |
| yacs 8.1: AJAX photo gallery, JSON-RPC, SEO, performance enhancements - YACS is quite a flexible system to publish photos and images. It resizes uploaded files automatically, to ensure that they will fit nicely into page design. Thumbnail images are generated automatically as well. The new version of YACS adds a dynamic AJAX gallery, to enhance the experience of surfers navigating all these photos.
YACS version 8.1 leverages AJAX development efforts started during Summer 2007. The JSON-RPC specification has been implemented this month, since we believe AJAX developers are looking for such a standard approach of interacting with back-end services.
On the SEO side, this version also brings new mechanisms to expose user profile information, and page meta-information as well. Also, punctuation has less impact on nice URLs built dynamically.
Lastly, a lot of energy this month has been dedicated to performance enhancements. First, some limits set in the software have been modified to better adapt to growing YACS servers. And the backup/restore facility has been revisited to accomodate for huge databases. Second, YACS now allows for partial loading of libraries. Third, many back-end scripts have been profiled to remove as much fat as possible. At the end of the day, YACS 8.1 is taking care of computing and network resources it can use. » |
| yacs 7.11: AJAX, on-line chats, page templates, Freemind, security and performance - AJAX has been fully integrated into YACS, including the prototype.js and scripta.culo.us.js famous libraries. These have been completed with our own Javascript library, named shared/yacs.js. Auto-completion has been integrated into several forms. For example, this is used to guide folksonomies while editing tags, and to select among users when assigning people to sections.
Page templates have been added to YACS to ease content management. You have to create one page first, and then to configure sections to use it as a template for every new article. Combine page templates with some WYSIWYG editor, such as TinyMCE, to achieve rich and structured dynamic sites.
YACS may be the CMS with the most comprehensive integration of Freemind maps. Not only can Freemind files be displayed on-line, but YACS can also generate mind maps dynamically out of section content.
Access restrictions are now fully cascaded throughout the content tree. This is a simple, yet powerful improvement, that will ease a lot the configuration of complex permission schemes.
As with any other web system, the burden put on the server relates to the richness of information computed and provided to the end user. To improve on this as much as possible a number of SQL statements have been profiled and optimized. » |
| Patch to enable software update - If your server runs YACS 6.6, and if you have not been able to move to a more recent version, then try this patch. » |
| yacs 7.6: pretty urls, tag cloud, Google maps, Digg, invitations - At the beginning of 2007 we promised you to move towards web 2.0, and it took only about three months to deliver a comprehensive implementation of this. YACS automatically build a cloud of tags like del.icio.us, features Google maps, and order pages after ranking, like Digg. Integration with Wikipedia and with popular RSS aggregators has been improved as well. YACS also extends collaboration capability to any recipient of a mail message, which will help to leverage your community. And URL rewriting will help to better match SEO standards and to achieve high ranking for your site. Enjoy! » |
| yacs 7.4: blogging interface, file detach, TinyMCE, FCKEditor, jsCalendar - 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. » |
| yacs 7.3: dewplayer, page locks, ldap, hooks, backup, cron |
| YACS 7.2: free tags, twin pages, content language, graphical setup |
| YACS 7.1: full internationalization, and many goodies - Internationalization bulk effort has been completed in a few amount of weeks, and the team has to be congratulated for this huge achievement. GnapZ, Agnès, you are the best!
On top of that, a full set of new features have been introduced in this release, and web designers will appreciate the introduction of customized layout, the capability to rotate images in page headers, etc.
Keep posted ! The new 7.2 is on its way, the www.yetanothercommunitysystem.com web site has a new skin, its content is reshuffled, and we have tons of idea for 2007... » |
| YACS 6.12: gettext, anonymous interactions, user interface, overlays - A huge effort has been made with this release to enable internationalization and localization. YACS fully supports the gettext approach, which is the de-facto standard for such a thing. Moreover, YACS has a built-in parser for .mo files, meaning it is able to read translated strings without the help of some external library. Some modules have been fully internationalized, and we are now ready to move forward for the whole software.
It is now more easy for anonymous surfers to interact with a YACS server. For example, a random number is associated with any page created anonymously and provided to the surfer. Anonymous pages can be modified at any time by clicking on links from within surfer mail box, providing a high-level of interactions without the need for registration. Also, anonymous surfers are challenged only once with random strings, a feature aiming to stop spamming robots. Moreover, name and e-mail address provided at any form are stored and re-used throughout the session, providing a feeling of being "at home" without any registration. We believe that anonymous usability is key to viral marketing and fast-growing communities.
A number of adjustments have been made to improve the user experience while browsing a YACS server. For example, comments have been pushed to the bottom of article pages for a number of common layouts. During interactive presentations (based on S5 technology) you can switch the screen off by pressing the 'B' key, like in Powerpoint. The nicetitle library has been modified to limit information provided. Also, the information page for files that have no description is skipped, leading to direct download or streaming. A new Flash player has been added for the fast rendering of Freemind files. New codes have been introduced to implement simple Wiki tagging rules, and other codes have been added to create dynamic lists where necessary. At the end of the day, we are aiming to provide a faster and richer interface to all surfers.
New overlays have been added to demonstrate the full power of YACS as a programmable platform: contact for the capture of customer or prospect information, issue for the tracking of bugs and problems. Both of them integrate smoothly into any section, and update a back-end database that can be queried separately. » |
| YACS 6.9: safety, community wiki, contextual menu, nicetitle, behaviors, internationalization - Safety is often linked to security, but it is more than that. Safety relates to the overall experience you will have, as a webmaster, of your web management system. Our community has learnt in past months how diverse and tough the Internet universe could be. This new version is a revisited masterpiece of PHP code, streamlined for ease of use, that supports versions 4 and 5 of PHP/MySQL run times, and that has been hardened against hackers.
YACS already supported public and private web spaces. In the first case anyone, including anonymous surfers, can contribute. In the second case only explicit editors can contribute. With version 6.9 we are introducing the concept of community web space, by which a section becomes a wiki open only to community members.
One other important addition is the introduction of contextual menus to pages built dynamically by YACS. While browsing an article or a section, surfers will have a nice side menu to reflect the hierarchical structure of site content. The objective is to enable transverse navigation, and easy shortcut to top content levels. Of course, this is fully skinnable both at CSS and PHP levels.
The famous nicetitle library has been integrated to all reference skins, and many links generated by YACS now feature a nice hovering pop-up. Hovering is a smart way to provide more info to surfers before they click on a link.
A new API is offered to PHP developers to extend YACS. They already had hooks (to include customized scripts on event), and overlays (to store data along articles). Now they have behaviors, to turn YACS into a lightweight application server. A sample behavior is provided, that ensures license approval before file download.
We are also moving forward a full internationalization with the creation of a new i18n module. Our hope, in future versions, is to support external language files. » |
| Security Patch for YACS 6.6.1 - This patch is aiming to protect your server against some PHP attacks. » |
| YACS 6.6: dates, votes and petitions, digest newsletters, Flash videos - A new module and one overlay have been added to better handle the time dimension. Add events to any of your sections, and YACS will list all of them in views for one month, one year, etc. The index for dates always introduces forthcoming events. All companies that are looking for a straightforward way to present their future events will appreciate.
Another module has been added to record decisions. Also, two overlays are provided to handle votes and petitions. The aim is to support on-line communities to take objective and collective decisions. YACS offers: polls for fast and dirty feed-back, petitions for gathering electronic signatures, and votes to express motivations and take decisions. Which one will you used today?
Previous versions of YACS were already able to send newsletters by e-mail to community members. For the production of article digests, YACS now modulates the list to automatically avoid duplicates. If one article is mentioned in a letter, it won't be mentioned in the next letter. Previously you had to take care of this manually, but YACS is also aiming to reduce admin time as much as possible.
By the way, YACS now supports several flavors of newsletters: announcements, digests, and releases. Use announcements to send any kind of message to community members. Digests are lists of recent articles, and their production has been streamlined, as explained previously. Releases only mention featured articles, and they should be reserved to servers used for periodic publications.
YACS now integrates a small player to render Flash videos from within articles. » |
| YACS 6.4: subscriptors, centralised user database, aggregation, usability - The basic YACS security scheme relies on following roles: associates, members, subscriptors, and anonymous surfers. Basically, subscriptors are community members with no right to contribute. In previous versions members could be made editors of selected sections. This month we have added the capability to make subscriptors readers of protected sections. Webmasters can use this feature to better control people who are allowed to access content of their site.
YACS now supports the sharing of user information among several sites. All you have to do is to add new database settings for users in the configuration panel for system parameters. YACS will use these settings, independantly from regular database settings, while accessing user records.
YACS has allowed RSS aggregation for a long time, but only a limited list of feeds could be supported. This limitation has been removed, and YACS now features a round-robin approach to parse small batches of feeds in the background.
YACS has never been so friendly to webmasters, thanks to the feed-back of numerous testers. Images can be added to files. Click on one link to duplicate an article, or to promote a comment. Most PHP generated by YACS is now masked. The setup assistant reports on critical checks performed prior engaging the installation. Many more like these have been added, to enhance your experience of YACS. » |
| YACS 6.3 has been released : FCKEditor, user support, PHP5, MySQL5 - FCKEditor, the famous WYSIWYG tool, has been integrated into the YACS archive, and every member can select to use it, or to stick to the legacy textarea panel. YACS codes and smileys are still available under FCKEditor, anyway.
This new version improves on user support, through confirmation messages and improvement of the login page. Confirmation messages are sent after registration for adequate storage of credentials. Additional messages are sent on password change. Also, members e-mail addresses may be validated if associates require to do so. In that case applicants are only subscribers. On reception of confirmation message they will have to click on the provided link to become actual members. The login page features a number of useful shortcuts.
YACS is now developed under XAMPP, based on PHP5 and MySQL5. A huge number of corrections and enhancements have been introduced, thanks to the feed-back of all of our motivated testers. Thanks to all of them. » |
| The archive you need to render S5 presentations - YACS version 6.2 includes everything that is needed to deliver S5 interactive presentations, but this is limited to reference skins. You should download the attached archive to add S5 capability to the private skin used at your site. » |
| YACS 6.2 has been released, supports S5, Freemind, Matroska multimedia formats, and enhances web space management - YACS now integrates the famous S5 library from Eric Meyer, and lets you create interactive on-line presentations out of ordinary web pages.
YACS supports mind maps and the related Freemind open-source software. Not only can you post a map to a YACS server to share it throughout a community. You can also view it directly from within the browser window through the provided Freemind Java applet. This architecture allows for a rich graphical interface to any complex topic or web content.
YACS also supports the Matroska format for video and audio files. Do you know that Matroska files may contain several streams, including video, audio, text sub-titles, and even front-end menus? Actually this specification allows for very sophisticated interface management similar to what is provided by DVD. Combine YACS and VLC to achieve a powerful video-on-demand system, that will let you change the sound track or sub-titles at any time during the streaming session.
YACS enables full-size play-back of Flash files in the browser window. Use your usual tools to create interactive and attractive Flash objects. Or download Wink and create interactive tutorials for free. And benefit from the fact that most browsers have some Flash plugin readily available.
It is well-known that YACS has no group to manage permissions. But complex delegation schemes can be achieved anyway, by explicitly assign members to web spaces. A member assigned to a section becomes a managing editor of it, and is empowered to the point where he can do almost what he wants there. Editors can create, modify or delete sub-sections, create, publish, modify or delete articles and comments, etc. A section may have several editors to support collaborative work. Also, access to a section may be restricted to editors to make it a private web space.
Moreover, any member can create its own personal section (providing that this has been granted in configuration files), meaning that YACS may become a platform of choice for communities of bloggers, where each person has his own web space. This feature, combined with teasing capabilities of YACS, should help to make your communities grow faster than ever.
The configuration of sections has been streamlined to further ease the handling of sophisticated options supported by YACS. For example, changing the skin used throughout a section is now almost obvious... » |
| YACS 6.1 has been released, and enhance on audio and video delivery - YACS now integrates the excellent library getid3 to provide more information on file content before and during streaming.
This means that singer names and song titles are displayed instead of cryptic file names.
Likely, VLC and Winamp nicely display the same information, plus song duration --no more complex web links. » |
| YACS 5.12 has been released: wikis, editors, threads, slideshows, performance, installation - Wikis have gained so much traction in the Internet arena during previous months, that it was almost impossible to not consider to implement wiki-like mechanisms sooner or later. With this release YACS allows for anonymous contributions to one or more sections, and this is a big change in the rights management scheme implemented previously.
This does not mean that your YACS site has to be entirely open to everybody. Actually, this new release also empowers editors in sections they are managing. This will allow you to extend your community to key contributors, while limiting the number of associates to a very minimum.
On popular demand threads of comments have been separated from main content, except in discussion boards of course. This way of proceeding, while departing from the common blogging approach, will allow for a better scalability. Also, a central place has been created to access most recent threads easily, whatever section they belong to.
Since very old releases YACS may add a web interface to a directory of files. Streaming of audio and video files has been introduced in a previous version. This release comes with a new nice feature, aiming to create automatic slideshows out of your shots and images.
A new cache strategy has been introduced for pages with a high number of components, such as the home page. Previously, every component was cached separately, and many SQL statements were necessary to retrieve them. Now the entire page is put in the cache once, and only one SQL statement is required on cache hit.
Also, a web form has been introduced to edit text files of any skin. This means that web designers can tune a new skin without any direct access to server's file system. Instead, they will derive a skin from an existing one, and then edit cascaded style sheets and templates remotely, from within their favorite web browser. » |
| YACS 5.10 has been released: video on-demand, forums, Content Assistant, skin derivation and more - Build a home media server with YACS. All you need to add on the main house computer is a web server, a MySQL database, and YACS. Then create a collection to list available files through a nice web interface. Use VLC or Winamp to start on-demand audio or video sessions.
Please note that streaming support has been added to files attached to regular articles as well.
Also, YACS supports structured forums, and the Content Assistant has been greatly improved to ease your task.
Web designers will appreciate the new capability of YACS to derive a reference skin to a new one. Then change the cascaded style sheet or add some images to achieve the skin you are dreaming of.
Security has also been reinforced, with anti-spammers and anti-robots protections, and the recording of IP address on login. » |
| YACS 5.9 has been released - This new version unleashed the full power of CSS, as depicted at the test page for skins.
However, this power has a cost: you will have to update your skin before upgrading to this version. » |
| YACS 5.7 has been released: nested sections, custom home page, performance and more - YACS used to have a flat model of sections, and cascaded categories were used to classify everything, and to host web links. The version 5.7 offers a more simple approach of content management: nested sections host server content (articles, files, links, comments), and the role of categories is restricted to, well, categorization. You can now create folders of sections, to any depth. You also have more flexibility to aggregate RSS feeds directly in sections of your choice. Of course, the Content Assistant has been extended to help you take the most of nested sections.
The home page has been deeply re-engineered to allow for complete customization. Some ways to achieve the home page you are dreaming of:
- create a cover page of your own to introduce yourself, your server, etc.
- include a reduced version of the site map if you wish
- create articles to be used as gadget boxes
- configure some sections to list their content as gadget pages
- configure some categories to list related pages as gadget boxes
- to introduce recent articles, select one layout among the 8 available
- use hooks to invoke you rown PHP script at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of the home page
- add optional elements, such as a Flash-based dynamic banner for recent articles
- edit a skin of your own to wrap everything
We have profiled SQL statements related to key scripts, including the home page, the browsing of a section and of an article. The net result is an optimised usage of cached information, a lighter stress of the database back-end and, more importantly, a faster and scalable YACS server. Enjoy! » |
| What? No new release in June? |
| YACS version 5.5: Content Assistant, page rating, polls, author profiles, and more - YACS now features a simple-to-use Content Assistant to streamline common operations. Would you like to create a blog, a directory of links, a discussion board? Previously you had to handle several web forms, and to know about keywords used for options. Of course, sophisticated edition capabilities ar still here. But we have added a smart assistant, accessible from the Control Panel, to let associates create complex things quite easily.
This version also features page ratings. Add the keyword 'with_rating' to the options field of any section, and every related articles will offer a link to let surfers express themselves.
Polls have been extended to better support Techcolosseum. What a nice site!
YACS also better supports author profiles. Add an option to a section to change the way all related articles will show author profiles: either at the top of a page ('with_prefix_profile'), at the bottom of the page ('with_suffix_profile'), or on the side ('with_extra_profile'). » |
| YACS version 5.4.1: Social bookmarking, appcasting, open office, and many more - YACS now features a simple-to-use bookmarking bookmarklet, similar to the one of del.ico.us. This means that members of your community can share their findings easily.
Also, each section has now its own RSS feed for attached files. Use this feature to spread separately software packages, marketing presentations, and other kinds of files. Podcasting was for your audio files. Appcasting is for corporations. YACS supports both.
Aren't you using OpenOffice yet? Maybe you were lacking a good CMS that understand the various OpenOffice and StarOffice file extensions, and that list shared documents with nice icons. Well, YACS does exactly that.
YACS also supports gracefully GPS waypoints described in XML (aka, .gpx files). EasyGPS can handle such things with ease. » |
| YACS version 5.3: Security, Files, and more |
| March-13 User profiles, geographical syndication, and more - With this new release we have implemented several suggestions from YACS users, as usual.
Also, we have enhanced the capability of YACS to support contacts among registered users, through Skype and common instant messaging platforms. By the way ids from AIM, MSN, ICQ, IRC, Jabber and Yahoo are supported. New attributes have been added to user profiles to support originating labels (you can achieve 'From the wreck-toys-department' like in Slashdot), message signatures, and even public PGP keys, if any.
Syndication has been enhanced as well, with geographical coordinates reflected in all RSS feeds. How will you use these information to better podcast? » |
| Feb-16 XHTML validation, time zones, FOAF, session security, content management - YACS now parses articles and comments, and rejects input that is not compliant with XHTML specification. Actually the input is submitted to a XML PHP parser, and any error is reported. This simple feature is very efficient to spot unbalanced tags. However, it is not aiming to enforce any XML grammar.
YACS now automatically adds to any user profile some RDF meta-information. As a starting point we have selected to implement basic properties and relationships as specified in FOAF Vocabulary Specification. At the moment, any YACS server can be parsed automatically by a robot to learn user names and avatars. These will be extended over time, as usual. And of course, we will get the most out of FOAF when we will have found a way to link people (actually, user profiles).
Some friendly hackers have shown me different ways to hack PHP sessions. As a result YACS now adds many checks on the basic PHP system. » |
| Jan-28th - Full-XHTML, syndication at the home page, utf-8 mail, and safety - All reference skins have been turned to XHTML, and the w3c validator has provided positive results for the test page for all skins.
Use categories to catch RSS feeds, and position them like you want at the home page. Yes, YACS has a straightforward and efficient approach to aggregate news from everywhere.
The support of Unicode has been extended to mail messages, and YACS now proudly send utf-8 text messages... Well, maybe this is not really safe everywhere, but at least is works with mail servers observed up to now, and it supports accented characters.
Safety and security have been considerably improved, and it is recommended to update to the new version to avoid bbCode code injection, cookie steal, and cross-server impersonation. Not kidding.
Many improvements have been added to the way YACS manages web content, and most of them have been suggested by some of you. For this release we have to thank: Mark, Anatoly, Mordread, Pierre, among others. » |
| Jan-9th - a XHTML skin and a new setup assistant - Skeleton is the first of our reference skin that validates at the w3c. Of course, many modifications have been required in skin files. But many other scripts have been impacted as well, most frequently because of the different end of tag. The next steps will be more simple, since we only have to convert template files and style sheets of other reference skins.
We have listen to your complains and have introduced many enhancements to the installation process. Additional validation checks have been added. The setup assistant has been streamlined and requires half mouse clicks than before. Some weird behavior of MySQL has been fixed. Also, YACS requirements have been reduced (the .htaccess is not necessary anymore). My secret objective is to have less queries than before on installation issues, and to put the focus on other aspects of YACS. » |
| Dec-27, neighbours, manual layout, navigation, files syndication, ie bookmarklet and more - This is probably the very last 2004 release of YACS, and we have put as many gifts as possible into the basket.
The first gift was on Eoin's wish list. It was about geographical distance computations. YACS has now the complex MySQL statement that makes it all. As a result nearby articles and user profiles are automatically listed where appropriate. All you have to do is to attach one (or several) location(s) items to your pages and/or to your user profile.
The second gift is not ready yet, but will pop up in coming weeks. We are preparing an on-line user manual for YACS, and have enhanced the layout articles/layout_as_manual.php to support structured lists of articles, similar to table of contents in electronic books. The outline is based on dotted strings of number (eg, 1.2.3.0), that allow for up to four levels of classification. The next step is to apply this layout to articles anchored in the section "How to use it?" and to turn this section into an electronic on-line manual, with the support of end-user comments.
The third gift is a navigation bar for articles. They make sequential reading of blogs a breeze. Links to go to the previous or next pages appear automatically in the sidebar. Of course, the navigation bar is compatible with the manual layout described previously.
Several gifts have been included for people who syndicate everything. The most notable one is the creation of a RSS feed for public files shared at any YACS server. Give it a try.Note that <enclosure> attributes are provided as weel, to enable a bare form of podcasting. Moreover, YACS better integrates with Radio Userland, with Sharpreader and with Moreover.
A special gift is given to people who are using Internet Explorer with Windows. They can benefit from a contextual bookmarklet to blog to their YACS server. This is a special gift, since we prefer to support portable solutions. But at the same time we have to recognize that Firefox has not taken over yet...
Another big gift for Unicode supporters: YACS translates HTML entities to Unicode, and this means that any character will have only representation in the database. Ok, this may be a little bit too technical. What is the actual impact? First of all, this improves results provided by the embedded search engine. Secondly, this enables a better interoperability of w.bloggar and YACS web forms.
See you in 2005! » |
| Dec-12, sidebar editor, gravatar, page locator and more - With this release we have added a handy feature for bloggers: a smart side panel form to post new articles. If you are using Firefox 1.0, Mozilla 7 or Internet Explorer 6, you can authenticate to your favorite YACS server, visit the Control Panel, and click to add a side panel to the browser window. Then browse as usual, and push some text in the side fields to develop your blog entry. When you are ready, click on the submit button to push the new page to your site.
With all these communities we are involved in today there is this common issue to register again and again. Some weeks ago we introduced the Drupal login RPC interface to allow for some centralisation of user profiles. Today we are moving forward with the support of gravatars. Simply stated, a gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is an 80×80 pixel avatar image that follows you from weblog to weblog. If you provide an e-mail address to YACS, it will be checked against the gravatar web site to load any defined gravatar you can have. With gravatars, we do have a simple system to spread our visual appearance across web sites.
YACS now also has a page locator, which is aiming to streamline the usage of nick names. YACS is supporting nick names for a long-time for articles, categories, sections and also for user profiles. Nick names are good, except that you have to remember the kind of things they are referencing.
For example to view the user profile associated with the nick name 'foo' you have to use the URL '/yacs/users/view.php/foo'. But to view the category with the nick name 'bar' you would use '/yacs/categories/view.php/bar' instead.
The page locator will take care of nick names at a central place.
This means that to look for user 'foo' or for category 'bar' now you just have to submit nick names to the page locator with either '/yacs/go.php/foo' or '/yacs/go.php/bar'. » |
| Dec-4th, Unicode support, blogging templates, and more - YACS is now able to preserve UTF-8 entities, even if PHP and MySQL (version 3) only support ISO-8859-1. To achieve this, YACS translates extended characters into Unicode HTML entities. For example, the euro character € (UTF-8 bytes \xE2\x82\xAC) is translated into the HTML entity €.
Once again, this simple mechanism is enough to preserve UTF-8 entities, and therefore to make Stefanos, who uses greek characters, happy  When both PHP and MySQL will actually support UTF-8 natively, we will change YACS to streamline the whole thing... » |
| Nov-19, PDF, template import, message processing, and more - YACS already supported the download of any article into either MS-Word, or into your Palm-OS powered handhelp device, or into your printer. With this release we have added the ability to transform any article into a downloadable PDF file. We are aiming to provide a better support of images and tables with this format than with others. This work is based on the free FPDF library, that has been included into YACS distribution. The Acrobat Reader has been made available by Adobe on many platforms.
With this release we also have tried to improve the management of skins. First of all, reference skins have been made customizable. Were you dreaming of reusing the boxesandarrows template, but wanting to add an image and a slogan? Now you can do that from the configuration panel for skins, modifications of PHP files are not necessary anymore. Secondly, we have added a small importing script that is able to parse a regular Blogger template, and to make a YACS skin out of it. Expect to see various examples popping up at our site soon. Last but not lest, we have implemented the blogger.getTemplate and blogger.setTemplate XML-RPC calls. This means that YACS should be able to better support your particular templates in tools such as w.bloggar.
For corporate developers, and for those who want to use YACS as a development platform, we have added some hooks to the message processing. To catch every message submitted to the server through e-mail, you just have to drop a PHP script, and to handle $context['mail_body'] and $context['mail_headers']. Quite easy isn't it? Well, I suppose I should provide some example to further convince you... » |
| October-28 - Avatars for users, grooming for webmasters - YACS already supported avatars in user profiles. But users had to upload their own images. Now you can share your own library of icons, and let users pick one in seconds. By far more simple and efficient for not-so-high-profile Internet surfers.
YACS is also able to extract some XML from your database. If your boss has asked you to create a smart report out of your database, do not write a specific script for that! Create a regular YACS page to introduce the report, add a table element to encode the MySQL SELECT statement, and ask your boss to use the 'Excel' or 'XML' links to download data to his computer.
About two-third of YACS scripts have been modified because of grooming. Does this mean that you will have to reinstall the whole thing? Of course not. Trigger the update script and let YACS stage new or modified files, activate scripts, and update the database if necessary. If you have not yet play with this powerful feature, this release is the perfect opportunity to do so. » |
| October-18 - Comment API, MS-Word and Palm downloads, direct uploads, referrals, secret handles, actions and more - YACS now fully supports the Comment API, including the ability to post comments from within the news reader. We have demonstrated this feature some days ago, and this capability of YACS has been listed as an official implementation of Comment API.
Most often, owners of files do not care about creating nice web pages. They just want to push files, photos, and images as rapidly as possible. Good news! YACS now supports direct uploads. Previously you add to create a page, and then to attach files. Now you can fire a file, and YACS will create a page for it!
YACS was already able to catch referral information. This new release adds the capability to display this information, and to better integrate any YACS server into the web. For example, while displaying an article you will have a list of Google search requests related to it.
Secret handles are special ids used to reference pages in e-mail messages. They are used for example to let users track on-going queries. In this release we have added the ability to automatically log in people on handle presentation. This means that, from your mail client software, you can click on a link and be authenticated in your browser window. We have saved the tedious login step in-between... » |
| October-2 - Distributed authentication, Simple Search RSS API and more - YACS better promotes the concept of small sites involved into large clouds of servers with the introduction of authentication services. If you have registered once as Joe at foo.bar.com, and if this server supports authentication back-end services, you will be able to login at any YACS server by providing the fully qualified user name joe@foo.bar.com, and the password as usual.
To design this feature we have selected to reuse the drupal.login XML-RPC primitive as implemented into Drupal. Yes, this means that YACS can authenticate a user registered at a Drupal server.
Also, YACS better implements the Simple Search RSS API on the back-end side. Search requests can now scope either articles, comments, files, links images or user profiles.
In order to speed syndication, we have implemented compression in RSS fetching, and a separate feed has been created to transmit contents of published pages. » |
| September-27, charsets, backup, folding panels and other optimizations - From time to time even well-designed pieces of software need to be reviewed for optimization and debugging. This week we have improved the support of web character sets, we have compressed backup data, we have introduced folding capabilities to the user interface. Also, the user interface has been streamlined at several scripts, the rendering engine has been profiled to save CPU cycles, and RSS feeders have been enhanced as well. » |
| September 22 - RSS everywhere, and more - YACS now uses RSS for searches, for server monitoring, for comments, and for full content distribution!
Any search request can be transformed as a customized RSS feed, available directly from the search page.
The YACS main log has been transformed to a RSS feed as well, to let associates monitor one or several sites in parrallel. The challenge here has been to implement basic authentication to better ensure that only associates can access the feed.
Advanced bloggers will benefit from RSS that now include full article content, and from RSS feeds for comments. » |
| September 13- mail, permanent references and more - The e-mail posting interface has been enhanced after extensive tests. YACS also has smarter messages to post on various events. Permanent references are now displayed on every article, section, category, and user page, to streamline linking to them. » |
| September 9 - blogging by email, and more - L'assignation d'un souscripteur à une section est cascadée aux sous-sections. |
| September-6 - Unlimited session time, extended searches, and more - 56 scripts have been updated compared to the previous release. » |
| September-1, Ping-O-Matic, Yahoo, Atom, watch lists, and many many more - 202 script files have been updated from the previous August-10 release. This should be considered as a major release of YACS! » |
| August-9 bookmarklets, publication pings, rss, codes and more - 86 script files have been updated from the previous August release » |
| August-2 - gadget boxes, virtual hosting, local trackback and more - 188 script files have been updated from the previous release » |
| July-21 - import, locations, javascript, speed, and more - 107 files have been updated from the previous release » |
| July-12 - blogmarks, security, control panel, and more - 214 files have been updated from the previous release » |
| June-29 - weblogs, Palm devices, and more - 28 files have been updated from the previous release » |
