Exponent 0.96.0 Released

The development team has been working away for the last four and half months, putting in new features, fixing bugs and changing things in response to your feedback.

So what's new in 0.96? All kinds of stuff.

Let's start with site administration.

In 0.95, only the administrator had access to the administration control panel. In this version, you have the option of opening up the panel and assigning permission to arbitrary users. Now you can appoint one of your users as a database administrator, or put someone in charge of Users and Groups.

Exponent now lets you create new site administrators (through the web) that have almost complete control over the site. For security reasons, these acting administrators are not allowed to modify site database settings or import data. Otherwise, they have the power of the default administrator account, including all the default permissions.

Site Hierarchy management has also undergone massive improvements. There are now many more options for creating pages. You can create aliases to internal pages, as well as links to external websites. Additionally, you can create stand-alone pages that act like hierarchy pages except that they exist outside of the hierarchy.

Pages are now more mobile in 0.96. They can be moved into and out of the hierarchy (becoming stand-alone pages), and also moved around inside the hierarchy.

Pagesets bring more power to site management, especially for sites with similar and identical hiearchy structures. You can set up a template of sections (complete with default modules and content), and then use these templates when adding new pages.

With the addition of an optional Captcha/Turing test, Exponent sites are better insulated against massive account registration.

Users, groups and permissions management were also areas the developers concentrated on. You can now pick what groups a user belongs to all from one screen, through a link on the User Manager. User accounts can be locked, thereby preventing those users (even acting administrators) from logging in.

Permission management has gotten easier in some respects. For instance, Exponent is now capable of handling sectional administrators, who have all permissions on all modules in their section. You have to be careful with this one.

The Calendar module has been improved with several new features. The first, and most requested is recurring events. It is now possible to create an event that repeats. For instance, a weekly meeting could be entered into the calendar and configured to repeat every Tuesday for the next six months. Furthermore, once created, editing a single occurence of the event gives you the option to apply the edit to all occurences or just a few. Deleting recurring events works the same way.

We've also added contact forms and categories to the Calendar module, allowing content editors to categorize events (with optional color-coding) as they create them, and also provide site visitors an avenue for giving feedback to the site maintainers.

The SMTP subsystem now has authentication (only PLAIN and LOGIN), as well as an option to forego the custom mailling subsystem and use the mail() function instead.

The Private Message center was modified to prevent cross-group messaging.

We also started on a development path for linking content and pages. In 0.96, you can create a link in the content editor and pick a apge or module to link to. Eventually, this will be expanded to allow content creators to link to specific items of content.

Backwards compatibility is always a major issue with any moderately sized software project. The development team has written a conversion subsystem into Exponent, to allow any version of EQL (database dumps) to be imported into a later version. Since the content is the most valuable and vulnerable part of the website, this makes upgrading much easier and more painless.

In the same vein, Exponent now features a sub-framework for importing ang exporting data. The upgrade from 0.96 to future versions of Exponent will be even easier, since you can easily export your files.

0.96 brings with it a bunch of new modules, including the FAQ Module, Article Manager, Listing Module, Flash Module (which was actually backported to 0.95), the Dynamic Form Builder and a Multiple Site Manager module.

Finally, the internationalization effort is still going on. We can still use volunteers, of course :-)

Have fun with the new version!