Flux CMS DevBlog

Until now, it was almost impossible to close all comments in one go, if you're for example under spam comment attack (at least, if you didn't have direct access to the database). Not anymore, the Blog editor defaults now to the "Default" comment mode, which means it takes, whatever is set in blogDefaultPostCommentMode in the Site-Options during a new comment entry.

If you want to keep for example all your comments open all the time, you set blogDefaultPostCommentMode to "Always allow comments". But when you're under a comment spam attack you can set this temporarily to "No comments allowed", until the spammer goes away or the comment-spam-detection in Flux CMS is updated.

You can of course set the comment mode for each post entry individually, disabling for example comments just for one post.

We have some ideas for further comment modes like "Moderate", where you have to approve each and every comment before it goes online and "Friends only", where only friends can comment.

Who's your friend will be handled by the soon-to-come OpenID authentication and will be up to you to decide. The "Friends" feature will also not automatically moderate or reject comments by friends (except when you set the post to "no comments allowed") and they will be able to see your "private" posts (without having to have an account for your blog like now).

Flux CMS (and all Freeflux accounts) is now also an OpenID server. OpenID is a is a decentralized identity system and all it does is provide a way to prove that you own a URL (identity). And it does this without passing around your password, your email address, or anything you don't want it to (Most of this text is from their website).

What can you do now with this? Not much yet, as OpenID is quite new and not very widespread, but LiveJournal already supports it (the main developer of OpenID is Brad Fitzpatrick, the founder of LiveJournal). This means, that if you go to their OpenID login page, you can type in there your Flux CMS or Freeflux URL (like foobar.freeflux.net) and you will be automatically logged in (if you logged in to your Flux CMS account before, if not, you will be asked to do it). And the first time you have to approve, that you allow LiveJournal.com to get your identity. More demos can be seen here.

It is expected that more and more sites support OpenID (there are already WordPress and Moveable Type Plugins available), therefore this could get quite useful. The advantage for you is, that you don't have to remember passwords and usernames on OpenID enabled sites for proving that you really are you.

For the Flux CMS implementation, I just took the library from videntity.org and adjusted the server example a little bit to our needs. That's why it doesn't look right now like the rest of the CMS and there's no management screen for it. It's pretty basic, but does the work. Our further plans are to integrate an OpenID consumer into the comment system, so that you don't have to type your details over and over again and that it proves that it's really you. More ideas are in my mind, let's see, how this develops :)

If you have your own theme or edited master.xsl, you will not have the right line in your html head. Just add

<link rel="openid.server" href="{$webroot}admin/webinc/openid/" />

to your /html/head part in master.xsl and it should work. If it doesn't, please tell us.

And if you want to use that on your own server, make sure the PHP extensions gmp and mhash are installed. There are alternatives written in PHP in the library from videntity.org, but for some reasons they didn't work.

One missing feature currently is also, that there's only one identity per CMS instance, meaning that if you have different users on one installation, all have the same identity (the URL). This will change some day.

We have now added your current disc space usage on the admin main screen (on the bottom on the left side). This way you can see, how much you use and how much you still have left. We also "upgraded" each account to 40 MB of available disk space by default (it was 30 before). Be sure to watch that figure, 'causeif you go above the quota, you will be locked out and can't even log in anymore. You have to get in contact with us then, so that we can reactivate your account. This will maybe change in the future, so that you can lower your disk space without our intervention :)

The quota is updated every 15 minutes (it's a shell script :) ), therefore the figure may not be immediately accurate if you upload new pictures.

BTW, we never really enforced quota rules on Freeflux, even though we always monitored them. And we still have the policy that if you produce good and valuable content, we're more than happy to give you more disk space. Just ask .

I just added 2 new options for the blog plugin (defined in conf/config.xml)

<!--
           Which "Comment Mode" in the blog plugin should be default for new blog posts
           1 = Allow comments for 1 month
           2 = Always allow comments
           3 = No comments allowed 
     --><blogDefaultPostCommentMode>1</blogDefaultPostCommentMode>

and

<!-- If you want to get mail notification when a comment is rejected by the Flux CMS
           comment spam detection, set this to true. Moderated and approved comments
           are still sent.
  --><blogSendRejectedCommentNotification>false</blogSendRejectedCommentNotification>

They are not made available yet via "Site Options", that will be added later for additional convenience (and to allow Freeflux Users to set it). And the above inserted values are the defaults.

Update: They are now available via "Site Options", also for on Freeflux.net.

Flickr has the possibility to blog pictures directly from their webpage. Flux CMS did support that already, but Flickr didn't set a category, so the post didn't show up (but were accessible in the admin). We now made an exception for Flickr and set it automatically to the moblog category, when a request from Flickr comes (or to the first category, if there's no moblog category).

If you want to use that with your Flickr account, go to "Your account", then "Your blogs", then "Set up a new blog", choose "MetaWeblogAPI Enabled Blog", for the API endpoint write "http://youraccount.freeflux.net/blog/xmlrpc.xml", type in your username and password, then "Next", give it a label and you're done. You can now blog any picture from Flickr directly to your blog (the pictures itself are not uploaded, just some html code).

Philipp committed today the first changes for a multi lingual admin. It's not finished, especially the javascript based stuff is not done yet. Also missing is the auto-detection of the language according to the browser settings.

I'm mainly writing this already now, because if you update your CMS now, you'll get a fatal error in the edit frame after you log in. Just call /admin/webinc/update/ and it will go away (and maybe also delete the files in the tmp/ directory).

You can set your preferred language in your user account in the field "Admin Language", this will override the browser language detection (as soon as it's implemented). Currently german and english are available.

If you'd like to translate the admin to any other language, see http://svn.bitflux.ch/repos/public/bxcmsng/trunk/admin/lang/ (or admin/lang/ in your local installation), copy the german files and start editing. The files are XML based and should be quite self-explanatory. Any contribution is gladly welcome and if you're inclined to maintain a language, we're more than happy to give you SVN access.

As I tested Opera 8 yesterday and realized that it works quite well with the latest Opera 8 releases, I invested some time and fixed some remaining CSS problems and all looks good now :) In the same go, I fixed some MS IE issues with the blog editor, so that should look better now, too.

The "half" in the title means, that it will not be thoroughly and always tested by us in the future, so new issues may leak in in the future. And for example the cropping feature of the image editor doesn't work either and we don't have any plans to fix that :) And dbforms2 has some issues as well. But that's the same with Safari and currently IE. We'll fix it for IE, but Safari (and maybe opera) is still lacking some XPath features, AFAIK, so that won't happen soon.

Update: Konqueror 3.4 also works ;)