It's time for Composr development update for the month of December:
- Continued bug fixing, product tuning, and extended automated testing.
- Set up a Patreon so users can help keep Composr independent from silicon-valley investors while still being maintained professionally. Please support us, we need more Patreon support.
- Finished an extensive review against dozens of other Content Management Systems so that we avoid being too much of an echo-chamber of ideas. Started surveying a sample of new users to find what our biggest priorities are.
- Removed 145 lines of CSS from v10 that had become disused, helped via new automated testing. Every little bit of tidying and trimming we can do is important to keep the product as lean and well-formed as possible.
- New CSS-changes page on our website, showing all the CSS changes made between releases. This will make it easier to keep custom themes up-to-date, as if you override a CSS file (particularly global.css) you can now track all the future changes that have been made to that file, by version.
- Improved non-bundled addon build process so we can better automatically track versioning changes.
- New transliteration addon, for non-'Western' users who don't have the PHP intl extension.
- We're seeing our international community continue to do great work, translating into Catalan, Spanish, Tamil, French, Russian, and Chinese. A big thank you to all the translators.
- Better release-tree inspection code for our website, allowing more reliable upgrade-path advisory from the Admin Zone dashboard.
- APNG-animated-emoticons so that the animated emoticons look good on any background colour in Firefox and soon Google Chrome, .gif versions remain for non-supporting browsers (v11).
- New option to say where to redirect to after logging in (optional) (v11).
- New option to say where to redirect to after joining (optional) (v11).
- Continued refactoring to further improve code quality (v11).
- Significant progress towards implementing Content Security Policy to make XSS vulnerabilities impossible in the future (v11).
- Finished tuning and testing of Responsive Design in the default theme (v11).
- Completed large sweeping eCommerce architecture improvements (v11).
Thats it for this month and more to follow in 2017. I wish you all a happy new year!
Comments
Composr won't show up in those "one-click" installers until Composr moves out of RC.
It strikes me as odd, the one package i am testing, and is free, is by far the most stable and well written. The other two have been in development longer and have less features (comparatively), they are driven by a release date and not by a milestone date.
Chris i have NO IDEA how you and your team are managing to do this project, having also tried just about every other single cms on the market, this is by far the best coded. Sure some have different features, but Composr says what it is and what it isnt, most of the others try to be all things to all people. They do this by adding code upon code and then having every tom dick or harry make a plugin.
You end up with a mess! a mess normally full of holes! An example is wordpress, back in the day this was a great blog platform, recently they have followed the crowd. It is now bloated and riddled with security flaws.
I dont know if your aware of this Chris but softaculous dosnt offer composr on many shared hosting accounts. I am unsure of the process but i think it would make a difference to getting the word out.
I use namecheap amongst others, and there one click installs dont have composr. The more people who try it, the more will use it.
It is truly a remarkable project.
If you want the unstable line tested, once i work out how to use GIT i can install on another server, i can sort any security issue with pass wording the directory.
I havnt used Git Hub before so that will be new, if i succeed i will do a clean install but with better screen shots for us noobs.
I am going to buy a decent screen shot program, and upload so complete noob guides, most the docs look good. But i think having a few done for the real early beginner would be a benefit. I understand the docs better now, but there is that initial time lag if your starting your first site.
I think this is something the community could address, rather than you and your team. Would leave you to concentrate on the important things.
And as i am finding out, there is normally 6 ways to skin a cat in Composr
The v11 branch is currently extremely unstable while Content Security Policy, I'm not sure if it currently installs. It's the v11 branch on our github.
What you may want to try instead is the feature__hybrid_responsive branch, which has the responsive design stuff for v11 and not much else, that should be very stable.
You can set up git and do a clone from github, or you can download a whole branch. It essentially works as a manual installer, but with all the non-bundled addons pre-installed.