phpMyFAQ devBlog

We put a lot of work on phpMyFAQ the last days because I got some help from my Mayflower colleague Anatoliy. The beta release should be ready after Easter!

Today we started with the work on the new administration layout. Here’s a first screenshot:

phpMyFAQ 2.5.0-beta Administration frontend

Today I installed IE8 on my virtual machine and phpMyFAQ 2.0 and 2.5 are working well on IE8. Beside testing new browsers from Redmond we fixed a lot of issues in the frontend and backend PHP code base.

One of the main targets for the beta release is improving the backend technology. As I wrote some weeks ago, we switch out Ajax library from Prototype to jQuery. The last I improved the comment administration which is now fully ajaxified and you can delete multiple comments without any page reload. We’ll add more Ajax befor releasing the first beta version.

The last couple of days I moved a lot of the backend code to get a cleaner structure. In the future we want to release more versions and phpMyFAQ 2.5 will be the base. A base has always to be very solid and this is what I’m currently working for.

Alberto Sanchez from Spain implemented a cool new feature for phpMyFAQ 2.5: LDAP authentication! With phpMyFAQ 2.5 it will be possible to authenticate the users against your company LDAP server. Thank you very much, Alberto!

Today I updated one important component of phpMyFAQ: the WYSIWYG editor. We upgraded the outdated TinyMCE 2.1 version to the latest version 3.2.1.1. Currently the Image Manager has gone away but it will come back. Besides this bigger change we fixed a lot of bugs.

The last days I fixed a stupid bug in the installer script. Some user had the problem, that the installer wrote the file with the database credentials but couldn’t read from it. It was a require / require_once issue on PHP 5… It’s fixed in SVN and versions 2.0.12 and 2.5.0-alpha2 will include the fix.

We’re still refactoring and migrating the whole code base to PHP 5.2 and it’s more work than expected but we’re on a good way.

Both version made good progress the last days… phpMyFAQ 2.0.12 will be released within the next two weeks, the release of phpMyFAQ 2.5.0-alpha2 is planned for march.

Today was a big code change in the database connection backend of phpMyFAQ. I refactored the whole connection handling and added a singleton pattern. Yes, nothing special but with this addition we got rid of the global handling of the database object. We also improved a lot of code during this refactoring.

Today I added a wrapper class for the Filter extension of PHP 5.2. Beside that I rewrote the instant response feature using jQuery instead of Prototype.

Matteo added a new mail subsytem for phpMyFAQ 2.5. The new version makes good progress and all “new” features are added but it’s still very unstable… we’re also preparing a bunch of new features on our website like a API documentation and better developer information.

Matteo and myself committed a lot of fixes and patches for phpMyFAQ 2.5 last week. We also received updated Turkish and Chinese translations. 2.0.11 will be released within the next 2 weeks, the alpha2 release should be out the first quarter of 2009.

We fixed a lot of bugs the last weeks and phpMyFAQ 2.0.10 will be out the next two weeks. phpMyFAQ 2.5.0-alpha2 is also under development and we fixed a lot of PHP 5 related issues. The second alpha release is planned for Q12009. Because of the delay of the final release of phpMyFAQ 2.5 we’ll support phpMyFAQ 2.0 with PHP 4 also in 2009. Our installer will show a warning with the release of phpMyFAQ 2.0.10, if you still use PHP 4.

Today, I fixed some annoying bugs which we introduced in phpMyFAQ 2.0.8. Expect the 2.0.9 release the next days. If you like, please test the current SVN version.

We’ll release phpMyFAQ 2.0.8 the next days due to a security issue in one of our used libraries. So please stay tuned.

Simon from Ireland fixed the long time issue with an annoying bug in MS SQL. We already switched our repository to SVN and try to release 2.0.8 as soon as possible.