Reason Developer Zone: Developer Notebook: The Last 9 Months of Reason Development (Part 2)

Reason Developer Notebook

October 31, 2007 at 11:18 pm

By Matt Ryan

Many minor bug fixes, stability improvements, php5 support changes, code cleanup, accessibility, standards compliance, and performance enhancements.

Ability to manually sort images attached to a post (3-26-07)
Ability to set featured posts from both the publication and the post (3-26-07)
Renamed module publication from blog to reflect wider capabilities of the framework (3-28-07)
Added ability to place a feed from a publication (or aggregate of several publications' feeds) on any page as a "related publication." This is done by putting the publication module into "related mode" (5-9-07)
Added ability to set the wrapper ID in the page type (so multiple publications can be placed on a page without breaking XHTMl compliance)
Needed types automatically added to site if they are not already there when a publication is created (e.g. groups, comments, issues, news sections.) ( 5-14-07)
Added ability to associate posts and events with each other (using event-to-news allowable relationship) (5-18-07)
Improved issue and section handling (5-29-07)
Completely overhauled the method by which items' markup was created to make it easier to alter HTML of item detail view — scrapped submodule scheme in favor of markup generator scheme that parallels other parts of publications framework and enforces better separation of logic and presentation (7-15-07)
Added ability for administrators to select who should get emails when new posts and comments are added (7-15-07)
Added common European/international date/time formatting options (7-15-07)

Improved performance (3-19-07)
Improved calendar search interface. (3-19-07)
Fixed minor display bug that caused two back-to-back events in different years but same month to not show the year change in calendar (3-21-07)
Added keyword display, searching on keywords, and inclusion of keywords in head items (3-21-07)
Modified calendar interface to only lock to a given day/month/year timespan view if a specific view is actively chosen by user (3-21-07)
Included location, sponsor, and contact organization in the searched fields
Fixed bug in calculation of events that repeat monthly (4-9-07)
Fixed XSS vulnerability (6-10-07)
Changed name of repeat field to 'recurrence' ('repeat' is a reserved keyword in newer versions of MySQL) (7-30-07)
- Note: this is an API change; any code written assuming the information will be in the 'repeat' field will fail.
Abstracted out most of the logic behind repeating events and such to support future front-end event management (7-30-07)
Added iCalendar generation class and built the ability to export iCalendar-formatted data into the calendar module via query-string request. (Note that this is still somewhat experimental and has not been revealed in the UI yet.) (7-30-07)

Significant bug fix: fixed fatal error if logged-in user was not set up in Reason (3-30-07)
Improved interface for managing users (4-5-07)
Improved authentication security: users with empty passwords cannot log in

Added new navigation scheme option "parent_at_top_one_level." This admittedly awkwardly named scheme only shows the pages in the current context and does not display siblings of parent/grandparent/etc. pages. Parents/grandparents/etc. are displayed immediately above the current page in a sort of "vertical breadcrumbs" navigation. This scheme is useful for very large sites where standard Reason default navigation becomes too burdensome. You can see it in action on the Carleton Athletics site. (3-26-07)
Support for caching site navigation (4-19-07)
Support for split navigation, plus a nav class that places 1st level across the top as tabs. "Split" navigation refers to the top N levels of navigation being displayed in one page location and the rest being displayed in another page location (4-24-07)
Modified markup of default navigation to allow better css/dom hooks (4-26-07)
Added get_tree_data method as a simple way to get the entire hierarchy of a site (8-17-07)

New functions: reason_add_template(); reason_update_entity(); create_allowable_relationship(); create_default_rels_for_new_type(); get_template_by_name()
New standard link creation functions: carl_construct_link(), carl_construct_relative_link(), carl_construct_redirect(), carl_make_redirect(), carl_make_link() (added 3-18-07; moved into carl_util 7-2-07)
Added ability to run reason in environments without SSL/HTTPS (4-18-07)
Added union joins capability to entity selector
- Note: this is an API change for the add_right_relationship_field() and add_left_relationship_field() methods on the entity_selector class. The allow_null parameter was changed to limit_results, which takes different arguments and behaves differently. (5-10-07)
Added user_can_edit_site() function
Switched from XML Unserializer- and Xpath-based XML handling methods to XML Parser library (8-20-2007)
Removed dependency on command-line curl by standardizing on libcurlemu library
Added carl_clone to support object duplication in both php5 and php4 (8-29-07)

Data in db-backed forms without a group attached made available to all backend members of site with Editor role or higher (4-23-07)
Stored data can be viewed on backend (6-1-07)

Improved hierarchical open/close actions in back-end UI (now js-based for no page refresh) (4-16-07)
Major security enhancements on backend (4-19-07)
Refactored back-end head items subystem (5-17-07)
Tidying name field (7-17-07)
Temp files deleted if they are successfully copied to destination (7-17-07)

Replaced image gallery module with gallery2: shows images in place, better searching, etc. (4-17-07)
Added stubs for module self-documentation (5-14-07)
Added self-documentation for a variety of commonly used modules (5-15-07)
Added ability to show images alongside children pages in children module (6-26-07)
Added external_url type & enabled its use for RSS display pages (7-20-07)

Added content disposition of "attachment" instead of "inline" for pdf files (reducing XSS vulnerability present in showing inline pdfs -- writeup) (6-15-07)

Rewrite testing zone changed from destination directory to tmp directory; also modified so only local host can see rewrite testing dir (5-15-07)

added the following page types:

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