Release Notes

Overall

In LiveWhale 1.4.4, we’ve incorporated a number of improvements to pages and page editing, including a new way to automate group-specific page content with improved dynamic templates.

And in this release, a number of new modules are making their debut. The previously by-request profile content type is now an official LiveWhale module. The LiveWhale trash, e-commerce payments module, content streams, and redirects module all provide brand new, significant functionality to the CMS.

We’ll cover way too many of the details below— we know it’s a lot so it’s broken up into logical groups— and the more technical changes are at right. Enjoy!

The Top Four

Of course all these new features are awesome, but these four rise to top.

group=me

Pages are now group aware meaning that shared widgets and template-based content— like titles and navigation— can use group-specific content, automatically. And when you go to insert a widget or image into a page, you now see the group’s content.

Profiles

The Profiles module is now included in all LiveWhale installations, with significant upgrades.

LiveWhale Calendar

We’re bringing the fully-redesigned front end for LiveWhale Calendar back into LiveWhale CMS, with its fast, AJAX/JSON-powered, responsive interface.

Stream widget

Ever wanted to display both news and events in a single widget? Now you can. The Stream widget combines other widgets into a single content stream.

The “Almost as Big” Features

Manager Improvements

Many— if not all— of the content managers in the backend have been greatly improved in 1.4.4. Here are five areas where you’ll see better and more consistent functions to help in the day-to-day.

New Filtering

Content manager lists now have a series of persistent filters that allow you to more quickly sift that news item, event or image— to name just a few— with relevant terms. Think only “live” news. Or, view images by year. Still can’t get the right list, use the integrated filtering search.

Content Search

Not only has content search been completely rewritten to improve native search results (for widgets on the front-end as well as back-end searches) but the backend interface also sports an improved experience. And, you can now search for widgets.

Help Text

We’ve added help text to give site editors a faster start and guide them when they have common questions. (And you can add to or update the help text to make it your own.)

Tighter View

Are you using a small screen, or just want to see more at a glance? Try the new “compact” view on your manager lists.

(Un)Select All

And once you have your manager list, just select or unselect all to make quick work of bulk changes.

Trash

Delete something by accident? Restore all deleted content— even files and images— from LiveWhale trash for up to a year (configurable). LiveWhale trash even restores the connections the item had when deleted, when possible.

Payments (e-commerce)

You can now authorize a group to be able to accept payments for events through the Stripe service, and write plugins to support other payment gateways.

Redirects

Create and manage server redirects and vanity URLs from LiveWhale. No more digging into htaccess and server configuration files.

Everyday Awesome

• When attaching images to news stories, events, etc., it is now possible to mark the image being used for the thumbnail as thumbnail only. When doing so, that image will continue to be used for the thumbnail icon, but otherwise will not show up in the image slideshow when viewing the story details.
• You can now upload GIF and PNG files to the image library and insert them into WYSIWYG regions. This includes transparent and animated images. (Previously all GIF/PNG uploads were converted to JPEGs.)
• You can now add a caption beneath images inserted via the WYSIWYG insert image button.
• When inserting an image into WYSIWYG regions, you can now optionally enable the click-to-preview effect on them.
• You can now preview page templates when choosing one.
• Draft previews now open in a new window.
• Events List View (now called “Your Events”) now comes before Month View.
• When filling out forms, missing required fields are now highlighted.
• You can now enable/disable the use of captchas on a form-by-form basis, if captcha support is configured on your system.
• You can now specify one of the e-mail address elements of a form as the “from” address in e-mailed submissions.
• The blurb body entry field has been enlarged for easier content entry.
• You can now move checked blurbs to a different blurb type.
• After saving items in LiveWhale, the success message now links back to the item just edited.
• LiveWhale messages that are not manually dismissed are now cleared automatically after three months.
• When pasting a link into the WYSIWYG link editor, host and protocol are now removed for same-host links.

Admin Time Savers

• Admins can now force a group to auto-accept their suggestions as a link.
• New user interface elements have been added to the groups manager. You can now view last login time, who’s currently logged in, and who can switch to a particular group. Additionally, an alternate view listing all users alphabetically has been added.
• Bulletins sent to a specific group now also go to users with switch group access to that group.
• You can now flag any of your Places as requiring a reservation, along with specifying custom reservation instructions. Attempts to schedule an event that conflicts with an existing reservation will prompt the user with a warning.
• LiveWhale now produces a page error for tags with an editable class which are not supported as editable elements.
• The backups and export data tools have been combined.
• When LDAP returns a login error, LiveWhale reports more about it.
• Galleries now possess a date field a la news stories.
• LiveWhale now logs activity for draft cancelations.
• Users are now automatically authorized for page editing and template permissions for their group’s directory.
• Template usage permissions now automatically include any templates that also satisfy page editing permissions, but users are no longer automatically authorized for all templates if no template restrictions are in place at the group or user level.

Just for Developers

Markup, Design, Function

• The updated resource optimizer is now more developer-friendly. Most significantly, resource caching is no longer tied to the page cache, so changes made to Javascript and CSS will propagate immediately, rather than rolled out in 5 minute intervals.
• Added limited support for HTML5 data attributes. Due to a limitation in the Tidy module for PHP, data attributes are now preserved in WYSIWYG edited fields only if the same element has an “id” attribute.
• The related_to arg (previously news-only) is now available for all content types with a details template.
• Navigation menu items now possess an .lw_has_subnav class when they contain a subnav.
• The .lw_editor_body class is now added to the body tag of editable elements while transformed into WYSIWYG mode during page editing. This helps with targeting content in editable regions during page editing.
• Added new body classes to frontend pages denoting the primary site directory and the group associated with the current page.
• It is now possible for developers to override the script and/or stylesheet used for a galleries detail page.

New Handlers

• Navigations now support the onAfterCreate and onAfterUpdate handlers.
• Added new handlers “onBeforeEditor” and “onBeforeManager”.

API and Developer Tools

• New developer-friendly API for interacting with the database, bringing significant performance improvements. Now used by the widgets layer, but will be incorporated throughout the rest of the CMS in future releases.
• The /livewhale/api response now notes whether the server supports HTTPS requests.
• The experimental LiveWhale jQuery plugin is now official. Use it to add widgets to external, non-LiveWhale-powered web sites or portals.
• Added new developer modes to the settings screen. This allows admins to configure minimization, caching, and error reporting for their own user.
• Added recursive directory deletion to the FTP API.

Widgets Make the World Go ’Round

Editing Widgets

• Shared widgets are now editable by admins only and now appear separately from group-owned widgets, under the “Shared Widgets” submenu item.
• Widgets are now searchable from the backend search. Admins can use this search to find widgets located in other groups.
• Admins now have a new “All Widgets” view under the widgets tab that lists all widgets in the system with usage information.
• The filter arg in the widget editor now provides a dropdown of available fields, rather than a text field.
• Added the ability to duplicate a widget from the checked items dropdown menu.

New and Expanded Arguments

• You can now use page and group variables inside widget args.
• Added support for the “class” arg in widgets, which allows you to add arbitrary classes to the widget container.
• Added the “disable_preview” arg to the images widget to disable the click-to-preview effect.
• You can now add retweet, reply, and favorite links to tweets in the Twitter widget using the new format variables.
• Added the “time_format” arg to the events widget. It works just like “date_format”, and customizes the format of the time variable.
• You can now customize the default “date_format” and “time_format” used by all events widgets on the site using the corresponding settings for the widget’s config.
• Allowed {image_href} in supported widgets for the raw image url.
• Use of id attributes are no longer allowed in widget format args unless used together with max=1.
• Added support for not_matches in widget filters.
• Added the “require_image” arg to news, events, and profiles. This requires all results to possess at least one attached image.
• Added the ability to disable the automatic HTML markup formatting/repair of content included via the file widget. This can be used when including partial HTML segments for templating.
• You can now use the extract arg in the pages widget and the file widget in order to return just a section of the HTML output.
• Added support for the is_remote arg on widgets. This will ensure that links in the widget output incorporate the full url to the web site (http://www.yoursite.edu/path/to/item) and open in new windows, so that the widget output can safely be used in an iframe on a remote site.

Widget Output

• The Places widget now refers to blurbs by the blurb type’s title, rather than “blurbs”.
• Widgets no longer show linked items to avoid showing duplicate content when a widget is set to display content from more than one group.
• Widgets with non-square thumbnails no longer take into account any custom thumbnail crops on the story, event, etc. being listed.
• Widgets are now more consistent in creating links with http vs. https, depending on the protocol used for the current page.
• File widgets now display corresponding file type icons for common file formats.