…I’ll be coming home next year…

Yep, time is passing by, and another year has gone; so long after our first though about “rewriting” spb and now they’re starting to implement their very own widget system :) time passes for them, too; a happy new year guys, for both you and your creature.

Now, let’s go forth, and talk about next year (the verses above were Foo Fighter’s).

What is this new year going to mean for our beloved FlatPress ?

I’m already working on the next release. I’m cleaning the code as much as it is needed to upload it to SVN; this will mean you will be able to track down my progresses almost daily (at least, every time I commit something new to the server), using the SVN client.

But before I’m ready to do this I want to separate my code from the third parties’; this mean when getting code from SVN the first time you won’t find Smarty and SmartyValidate, which are needed for FlatPress to display its content. You’ll have to get them yourself from http://smarty.php.net and http://www.phpinside … code/SmartyValidate/, or just from an older FP package :) this way I won’t have to sync my SVN to theirs.

While doing this, yesterday I think I’ve finally manage to make FP really super-portable (at least on *NIX servers; on IIS the admin panel wouldn’t be supposed to work, AFAIK), this meant the setup could become even more simple, and it now finally consists of only two effective steps.

No more need to insert a blog root and the blog url we ask you for is no more considered a critical information: BLOG_BASEURL is now a constant which is created by flatpress itself (and so, we hope hassle-free).

While I was then removing these steps then I decided to add a few more features. :P
In case of a reinstallation you will be asked if you really want to overwrite your configuration files, and what of these files you want to overwritten, being able to skip this step as well.

Also, you will be able to skip the admin creation if you already have a working admin and don’t want to change his password.

Other changes involve the rename of the theme config files from theme_conf.php to theme.conf.php to be consistent to the other config file naming conventions. Of course the change is not only formal but also substantial. The theme config file will let you choose an alternate css for the admin panel.

You probably know that your theme provides an admin.tpl file which lets you design your admin panel html layout; what you probably don’t know is that, despite themes tend to put the admin panel right in the usual theme layout (with the widget sidebar, too) this isn’t needed. This was an original decision we liked in the beginning, but now we see how sometimes this is restrictive. Imagine you don’t have any sidebar: you’ll have a bigger work area for your entry text editor, letting you write with more comfort.

Moreover in this config file (which is actually a php file) you will be able to override the default admin.css used to display the tabs in the admin panel, which is FULL of horrible hacks to make it work with IE; if you don’t mind about IE you can completely override it to completely change how panel/tabs are displayed.

This, and much more.

Happy new year, FlatPress.

…catch me if I get too high…