I am curious to see what version of PHP folks are using to drive their glFusion or Geeklog sites.  As most of you probably know, the PHP Foundation officially dropped support for PHP4 on December 31, 2007.  I know several hosting providers have started the migration to PHP5, but I don't have a good feel for how many have actually implemented a PHP5 solution.  The reason why this is such an important question is that PHP5 offers many new features and capabilities that we would like to use, but we need to understand if a PHP5 only version of glFusion would prevent many people from running it.  There is a poll on the right where you can select which version you are running.  I would appreciate everyone answering the question, the more responses we get the better informed we'll be.  Don't panic if you are running PHP4 right now, nothing is going to change immediately, but you might want to check with your hosting provider to find out their plans for moving to PHP5.

The gl Labs Community is pleased to announce that glFusion v1.0.0 is now available for download.  glFusion is built on the foundation of Geeklog v1.5.0, and brings new style and functionality to your new or existing Geeklog-based site.  Pre-installed plugins include: CAPTCHA, Bad Behavior2, Media Gallery, Forum, and FileMgmt.  glFusion doesn't stop at just packaging things together, there are several enhancements under the hood that bring improved performance, scalability, and usability.

Additional features of glFusion are:

• Template Caching Library - Significantly improves the performance of your site.
• Instance Caching - This caches items such as What's New and the Forum Centerblock, which greatly reduce the number of SQL queries needed to load a web page. This allows your site to render faster and provides a much smaller server load.
• Integrated MooTools JavaScript Library – Powering new Web 2.0 features in glFusion.
• Improved FCKeditor Integration - Now your theme's styles are available in the editor giving you a true WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) editor.
• Improved HTML Filtering - You no longer need to define each and every HTML attribute that is allowed, instead you can use the pre-packaged 'use_safe_html' which provides all the necessary vulnerability removal without the hassle of defining all the allowed HTML styles.
• Full XHTML Compliant Site - This includes all the pre-installed plugins too!
• Improved Upgrade Experience - glFusion reads the old config.php to pre-populate site name, slogan, DB, etc.
• Calendar and Links plugins integrated with CAPTCHA – You asked for it, we listened!
• New Site Tailor Customization Plugin - Exclusive to glFusion, Site Tailor allows you to edit and customize your navigation menu items and colors.  You can also manage your header logo with the online logo management screen, reducing the need to edit .thtml and .css files manually.

For more information on installing or upgrading Geeklog v1.5.0 and below to glFusion, please Read More...
 

This question has come up several times over the past few weeks as glFusion has emerged.  We think the best way to sum up why glFusion exists is philosophy.  We believe the gl Labs philosophy is different than the Geeklog philosophy.  Using this definition for philosophy: a system of principles for guidance in practical affairs, we believe our principles for guidance are different than those of the Geeklog team. Notice we didn’t say better, just different. Let’s see if we can explain this in more detail.

For some reason, folks from the gl Labs community have not had much luck in getting new features into the core Geeklog release. The Caching Template Library (CTL) was submitted and rejected.  The Nouveau theme was submitted and rejected.  Both of these enhancements directly addressed two major areas in Geeklog that we feel are good opportunities for improvement.  When these two additions were rejected, the idea of a gl Labs value added release was born.
 

The gl Labs Team is pleased to annouce glFusion v1.0.0 Release Candidate 2, the second release candidate.  Thanks to some great feedback we have made several small bug fixes and a few more key enhancements.

Distribution Packaging

Installing Geeklog has always been a difficult thing to explain, stuff goes in the web root, stuff goes outside the web root.  To make it clearer what files go where, we have broken the glFusion distribution into two directories; private/ and public_html/. All the files in the private/ directory should be placed outside the web directory.  All the files in the public_html/ directory go in the web directory.

Safe Template Customization

Another challenge with running a Geeklog site is that each time an upgrade comes along, for either the core distribution, or your theme of choice, you end up overwriting your customizations with the new templates from the release.  glFusion now supports createing a custom/ directory under each of the theme directories where you can copy and customize your templates. This protects them from being overwritten during an upgrade and also gives you an excellent inventory of exactly what templates you have modified.

For example; if you wanted to insert a Ad Block between the story body and the story footer, you would edit storybodytext.thtml.  Now, you will create a custom/ directory under public_html/layout/nouveau/, copy the storybodytext.thtml there and then customize it. glFusion will always look in the custom/ directories first and use that template instead of the stock templates.

There have been several bug fixes as well, for more details....Read More...