ImpressCMS Core Development

Work on ImpressCMS 1.5.0 is advancing, with 2 major cleanups this last week : we got rid of a decidedly ancient version of TinyMCE, and we sunset the old OpenID login system.

Bye bye TinyMCE

The removal of TinyMCE looks important, because it removed hundreds of files from the repository (yay), but in essence it was fairly self-contained within its own folder. We decided to remove it primarily because it was really old, and nobody has stepped up to propose an update to a newer version. That old version represented also a security risk because it was no longer supported with security updates.

While we removed TinyMCE from the core at this time, that doesn't mean a recent version can't be added as an addon. It would definitely be a welcome addition to the addons list, and give site owners more choices in which type of editor they want on their site.

OpenID

If removing TinyMCE was fairly simple, OpenID was a totally different affair. The tightly coupled way in which OpenID had been integrated at the time meant that all the places in the code that access the user needed to be checked and adapted. That also meant quite a few tests needed to be done to make sure everything kept working. For instance, the first iteration of the Pull Request totally broke the creation of a new user, something you definitely want to avoid when running a live site.

We removed support for the very first OpenID protocol. Because of some terrible naming decisions a few years ago, there can be confusion between OpenID (which we removed for 1.5.0) and OpenID Connect, which is part of the OAuth 2. At the moment, ImpressCMS does not support OAuth.

What's next

1.5.0 will support PHP versions starting with PHP 7.4. those restrictions still need to be enforced. Next to that, we will introduce support for MySQL 8, which introduced new reserved words that can clash with column names in SQL when they are not quoted properly. PHP 8.0 support could be feasible as well.

When will 1.5.0 be out?

The plan is to have 1.5.0 out by the end of september 2022.