AdaptCMS 3.0 released about a month ago, we a lot of progress has already been made on 3.0.1. In this blog we will go over what has been done so far, what’s upcoming and when this version will likely release. Continue onto the full story.
Template Documentation
We’ve been trying to brainstorm ideas to improve the usability of AdaptCMS and the best ways to provide an experience where you have the tools to find out how to do something in the CMS easily. One the first things that will improve the current CMS usability is “Template Documentation”. When editing a template that is supported, there will be a second tab called “Documentation”. There you will find a helpful page describing all the data that is available to you on this page and how to use it with code examples.
This new feature also expands to when adding/editing a static page. This makes it much easier for non-PHP users to use the system, as real working examples are provided. It is also setup to support Plugins if they have their own documentation as well as themes.
New Theme & Theme/Plugin Improvements
There were some significant bugs fixed, today we fixed a bug affecting the gaming theme – after installing the theme, you would see a bunch of errors when trying to add/edit one of the articles the theme added. We also overhauled the upgrade functionality of both to match the core, so you can provide an array of versions and inside those – an array of SQL files to execute and/or a text file to display upgrade notes, this comes into play with several plugins being upgraded to 1.1 for the next AdaptCMS version.
We’ve also added a new theme! You can see a picture of it below, it is another Bootswatch theme and is sporting the brand new Bootstrap 3.0 style. In addition, the default frontend layout is also sporting the new Boostrap 3.0 look and we are looking at upgrading the admin in addition.
In regards to the plugin updates – Links has added a “Apply” feature so visitors can submit their website to be added to your site and some code fixes were done. Polls has added a “List” page so that you can see a paginated list of polls, it is no longer restricted to being used in blocks only. In the admin, Polls also now have a tab showing the current voting stats and another tab showing who voted for which option. Support tickets also received a few model fixes and so did Google Analytics, along with a check tracker status feature added.
Comments Upgraded
Not planned, but there has been some improvements to comments. We had a few database fields – author_name, author_email and author website that had no input fields, so we added those. After you enter those fields (they are optional), a session is set to temporarily remember them. There is also new engine CRUD for comments, allowing staff to see the newest comments and be able to edit/delete them easily.
Conclusion
So, a lot of work has been made on 3.0.1. We still have some to go and there is some background items we’d like to do to improve the codebase for other developers to work on. We had a target date of October 5th, but right now we are looking at releasing it between the 20th-30th of September. Features wise, there are only a few left and from there we’d like to start on adding some unit testing, improve code commenting and get some of the new documentation up on the website – this will be a new area on the AdaptCMS.com website replacing the existing documentation page.
The new documentation will feature version-specific docs and very specific details on every area of the site once they are completed. Stay tuned!
