News

• Posted by fiammybe
• Posted on 4/10/2018

Dev Diary #2 - April 10 2018

After Alpha 6, work continues to bring ImpressCMS 2 closer to completion. There were some bug reports already, which will help us to make the next versions more stable and secure.

Since Alpha 6, the major milestone from a technical point of view was the upgrade of our templating engine. We moved from Smarty 2 to the more recent Smarty 3 template engine. This is a big step forward, because the templating system was tightly integrated within the core until now, resulting in blank pages the moment we tried to change even a minor functionality. @Mekdrop did a very nice job with this upgrade, which is the first step toward improving the way we handle templates.

Speaking of templates, we are currently looking into the necessity for the separate template manager in the core. When looking at the different ways that are available in ImpressCMS to change the way the pages are presented to you, we feel that the template manager is not very useful. People will adapt the templates in the theme they are using, not in the template manager that takes into account the templates that come with the modules themselves. Currently, we have no knowledge of anyone using it, so we are considering removing that functionality.

Another cleanup has been to remove the FCKEditor from our standard distribution. It is really old, and it pales in comparison to our other editor options functionality-wise. Also, browser support isn't what is should be with the versions today.

There were a few bugs with the use of the URL rewriting that is now used. Keep in mind that because of this, ImpressCMS 2 Alpha 6 and Alpha 7 will only work on an Apache 2.4 webserver. That is the vast majority of our userbase, so we decided to focus on that initially. If you have other needs, don't hesitate to do a PR on Github to make it work in your environment, or create a ticket on github.