Oscailt CMS / News: Recent posts

This release of Oscailt is compatible with PHP 8.3.3 and the main purpose was to find and fix uninitialzed variables, incorrect variable naming, usage and referencing.

There were also changes to replace the usage of the deprecated HTML tags for font and big and this has resulted in changes to the style sheets to achieve the same results.

Functional changes were an update to the Marquee banner object to generate marquee using CSS animation features so as to be compatible to HTML 5 and the code for handling the admin related pages was partially refactored to reduce code duplication.... read more

The purpose of this release was to make Oscailt compatible with PHP 8.3 and to fix one major bug and several small bugs.

The most important change is a bugfix for a critical issue around saving configuration data and this affects the installer in the previous release of 4.3 and this previous release should not be used. Refer to the upgrade notes for 4.3.1 if you already have an installation.

This release also contains a few new features such as handling long video-ids for Odysee videos, allowing video cover images to be uploaded with publish, a new test page for displaying embedded videos in admin image manager, improvements to bulk delete, a new sub-division to the database cache, a new video macro for use in feature templates, more diagnostics in the installer and various other minor improvements.... read more

Due to a critical bug in the 4.3 release that affects the installer, you should download and use the 4.2.1 release instead

A new release 4.3.1 which fixes this problem is pending and should be released shortly

This release of Oscailt was to make it compatible with PHP 8.x and it required considerable code changes to bring it into line and a slight change to the method for the hard coded configuration. The previous version 4.2 had incorporated a number of changes for the preparation to the switch in date format as strftime is now deprecated. There were a few more changes in the xml object templates to help with the date format conversion for existing objects for existing installations.... read more

This is a minor release of Oscailt which address a security issue for a potential cross site scripting vulnerability. It contains no new functionality.

See the releasenotes.txt for details and the upgrade/upgrade-4-02-01/ for details of upgrading.

The latest version of Oscailt which is v4.2 will only work up to PHP 7.4.15.

Development is under way to allow it to run under PHP 8.2 and this new release will only consist of these compatibility changes. Release is planned within the next few weeks

This release incorporates changes to enable Oscailt to work with PHP 8.x although it has only been tested up as far as PHP 7.4.15. The changes relate to using alternative functions that are deprecated in PHP 8.x and switching the usage of date formats from the use of the strftime function to date() and the change of the format itself.

To aid in this process of identifying the usage of date formats in all site objects and migrating them to the new format, a new sub page was added to the viewobjects.php admin page. Any imported sites will have to be migrated. The steps are described in the Upgrade guide from 4.1 to 4.2... read more

This release continued with improvements and bugfixes around the use of story tags introduced in release 4.0. Most of the changes relate to the management of tags and associated pages. There is also a new container object which works very similar to a codebox object and is used for containing multiple objects. One such potential use is for the case when a static page gets too big and exceeds the fixed page limit of 64 kb. The container object allows multiple documents to be stacked so that they will look like one continuous larger page. The document object has a new preview mode to show only main contents to help with this.... read more

This is a minor bugfix release of Oscailt and fixes some issues with the tags introduced in release 4.0 around tag managment. There are also some improvements in the tag management adminpage navigation. It also fixes a bug around the inclusive of tags in the category filter object.

Other minor changes are an update to enable all active static document pages to be html cached. The remote commands available through Jabber now include a spam command to mark stories as spam and automatically hide. The picture object when displaying the site featured image now makes use of HTML div tags which allows the style sheet classes to be updated for that.... read more

This major release of Oscailt to 4.0 from 3.x versions has been made primarily because of the introduction of tagging for stories which has been long overdue. This version is compatible with PHP 7.4 and required changes to the code base to remove some deprecated functions and replace with recommended alternatives.

The tags feature allows for editors to create tags and to link one or more tags to a story and these are displayed at bottom of each story. The tags can be used in searches and used in filter drop-down lists. The tags are integrated into site imports and exports. The tags can be used in searches and used in filter drop-down lists. The tags are integrated into site imports and exports. ... read more

This release of Oscailt is compatible with PHP 7.3 or possibly higher and contains an important change to the stories tables which requires carefully following the steps in the upgrade notes if upgrading from a previous version. The main changes of interest are an update to the Inset box to allow a slide panel of contained objects such as codeboxes. This enables one to setup a deck of embedded videos to be displayed on a front page and to skip through them with the navigation keys. There is a new basic text analysis option in the administration spam configuration page to do character, vowel, word and unqiue word counts on any story. The comments module has been extended to have a headlines type capability. The page layout has been extended to optionally allow the first inset to appear before content and all other insets after the content. This allows for example a slide panel of videos followed by featured stories which could be another slide panel followed by an offset which could contain multiple headlines. ... read more

This release of Oscailt now integrates with Jabber message server to enable Oscailt to send out updates whenever stories are published. This has been achieved by using the XMPPHP library. The other main features added are increased spam detection support for contact forms, changes to fix PHP compatibility around the preg_replace function, updates to the custom tags in the publish form, defaults text strings for objects which makes for faster site buildout, new options to archives object, improvements to admin edit regions, topics and types to detect untranslated strings for multi language installations, scheduled unhiding of stories and numerous bug fixes.... read more

Oscailt 3.7.2 has been released as it was discovered the file html/objects/type.inc had a syntax error in it. This is the only change.

If you are having problems with 3.7.2 up to now it may have been related to that.

This is a minor release and fixes three main issues which are incorrect usage of mysqli for use with PHP 5.4 or less, errors with story inserts and updates when MySQL is configured for zero date usage and a number of various minor bugs causing errors in the logs.

For the full detailed list see the releasenotes.txt file in the downloadable tar.gz file.

To upgrade your website from a previous version see the instructions in the upgrades/upgrade-3-07-02/ directory. There are no database table changes in this release.

Oscailt version 3.7.1 released
19th Oct 2018

This release builds on Oscailt 3.7 and fixes a number of issues introduced in that release which were mainly missing cookie acceptance page for the publish form when this option is enabled, adding correct colour schemes to some of the import site templates. It also addresses some problems identified around the setting for NO_ZERO_DATE in some MySql installations which affects the event_time and sticky time when stories are published.... read more

Oscailt version 3.7 released
16th Sept 2018

This release of Oscailt now supports PHP 7.x and PHP 5.5+. It also comes with a new set of template sites that can be imported to help those new to Oscailt and who are building out new sites. Several of these templates come in at two separate colour themes. The HTML User Guide that is packaged with releases has been updated and has an extensive 'How To' section. The installer has also been updated with more diagnostics and numerous bugs found when building out a site from scratch have been found and fixed.... read more

The latest version of Oscailt (3.6.2) only works up as far as PHP 5.4. This is largely because it is using the older mysql API.

There is work in progress to update the codebase to use the mysqli API which is compatible with PHP 7.x and to identify other changes needed for this task and this will be the main priority.

This means the next version of Oscailt should work with PHP 7.x

In other related news the codebase has been migrated from CVS to SVN as CVS is being phased out by SourceForge.... read more

This minor version of Oscailt has been released to fix a problem with versions of MySQL 5.x where there were problems with database inserts for TINYINIT column with empty strings or null values. This may have caused problems with all earlier versions with these version of MySQL.

There are a few other additional features added. Please see the release notes for futher details.

Oscailt version 3.6.1 released

It seems version 3.6 had two syntax errors in the code and this has now been fixed with this 3.6.1 release of Oscailt. There are a few other changes such as making the codebase compatible with php 5.4 onwards, update to the administration object listing pages to display the last update time of an object and new buttons in the publish form for the Oscailt image macro.

In this release cvs revision tags have now been added to most of the code base so as to help track files in any releases from this point onwards.... read more

It has been brought to our attention that the original Oscailt 3.6 release file oscailt36.zip from March 2016 had a problem with it and would not unzip.

The original file has been uploaded again to SourceForge and downloaded again to ensure it unzips correctly. This has now been confirmed to be working correctly. Therefore you can go ahead and download Oscailt 3.6.

If you have previously downloaded the file prior to today, then please try again.

Oscailt version 3.6 released

This long awaited version was orginally planned to be released in 2014 and has now been released with a few further changes and fixes added in the meantime. In this release the main new features are addition of a facility to email out pending events to an email list, a new option to add a slide panel to the features newswire, ability for users to edit their comments for a short period after publication, introduction of custom tags in publish to get around issues with HTML editors and a host of other minor updates and fixes.... read more

After several years in the making the first official version of a User Guide for Oscailt has been released and is available for download.

It is contained in a single zip file which can be simply put on your harddisk and unzipped and it contains a table of contents html file and the contents html file. All the images are in a separate images directory. Simply click on the Oscailt_3x_UserGuide_toc.html file and it should load automatically into your default browser.... read more

Oscailt version 3.5 released

This release continues the trend of previous releases of adding more features to Oscailt and improving its language support. The full feature set can be found in the file documentation/oscailt_3x_features.html

As for all releases since version 3.0, there is a comprehensive upgrade guide for those upgrading, found in the upgrades/upgrade-3-05 directory and for new users there is the full install script with instructions in the main README.txt file.... read more

This release has been in development since June of 2009 and had been planned for release earlier this year so as to try avoid the long gaps between releases. As with the previous three releases a comprehensive upgrade guide for those upgrading, can be found in the upgrades/upgrade-3-04 directory and for new users there is the full install script with instructions in the main README.txt file.

There are a number of new features and other improvements which hopefully prove to be useful and in summary they are:... read more

Version 1.0 of the Oscailt embedded flash audio player has been released. This is a branch of the Fabricio Zuardi XSPF embedded flash audio player and has some modifications applied to it to enhance its useability.

Oscailt 3.3 onwards was updated to generate the embedded HTML for this player.

This release is shipped with the associated ActionScript source code and is under the same license agreement as per Fabricio Zuardi.... read more