News

When creating a User Profile, a new feature is available that determines which of the Navigation options will be accessible for those Users assigned to that Profile. For instance, an Administrator could block access to "Files" by unchecking that option in the Edit Profile page and everything within that module would be unavailable for those Users, regardless of any other security settings.

Beginning April 2006, Microsoft Internet Explorer began displaying a strange message that said "Press SPACEBAR or ENTER to activate and use this control" whenever you tried to play a Flash or Quicktime file. A javascript workaround has now been introduced which should eliminate this message and play these files just like you would expect. In addition, the buttons at the bottom of the Slideshow were not working properly and this too has been fixed. These problems only affected Internet Explorer. All the other supported browsers, especially Firefox, have been working great and no changes were necessary.

The underlying framework of the benwillies application now supports the PostgreSQL database management system. Although most of the sites built with this framework use MySQL, with at least one using SQL Server 2000, the addition of PostgreSQL is still a welcome addition, particularly for Linux shops. Except for the install scripts, the same code base supports all three database vendors. Only the weighted searching of Articles and the DB Statistics report is missing as both of these depend on custom MySQL features.

Administrators can now create custom stylesheets just for the printing and mailing pages. The main advantage is that you can have your logo appear at the top of all your printed articles. However, please keep in mind that print stylesheets should be kept simple with very few colors and images because otherwise they could just print the original page and it would defeat the purpose. For instance, keeping a white background is highly recommended.

The buploader shell script is an XML-Soap client that allows non-Windows users to automate the uploading of their files to the benwillies file server. You can either specify a set of individual files or the name of a folder and all the files will be batch uploaded in one continuous process. And now the buploader script has gotten even more powerful with the addition of two new options, one that lets you delete an entire folder full of files and another which will limit any query to only the folders that you created. So by writing your own shell script that drives the functionality of the buploader script, you can for instance, create a batch job that runs every night on your computer that will upload all the files in a particular folder to the benwillies server and so as not to exceed your quota, delete the oldest folders, thereby implementing an automated backup service. The new buploader script is located in the "xml soap clients" folder in the Files section.

Administrators can now limit the kinds of files that can be uploaded into their Group to be only web-compatible images and plain text files. A new option has been added to both the Group and User Profile pages called "Images Only" that when set, will restrict the type of file that either an individual user can upload or to prevent anything except web-compatible images and plain text files from being stored within their Group. Previously this was a configuration setting that applied to the entire site, and the webmaster may still elect to override all other settings this way, but if the webmaster allows it, then the Group Administrator gets to decide what file types will be allowed in their domain.