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Sunday, June 26, 2022

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Latest development news

Old photograph of a man working with a Commodore PET computer. Hi folks,

viewed from the outside, it seems rather quiet around the FlatPress project. But just look at the picture to see how hard we’re actually working behind the scenes! ;)

In fact, things are really moving nicely. In total, we have three active development branches:

Main development

In the master branch, we’re working on “normal” features and bugfixes for the next FlatPress version. Talking about the new Gallery captions plugin, improvements of the Leggero theme and many smaller and bigger bugfixes. Oh, and the cool PhotoSwipe plugin made it into the standard FlatPress package!

For all details, see the current change log.

PHP 8.1 compatibility

We need to make FlatPress working with PHP 8.1 properly. This aim contains two main tasks:

  • Update the Smarty template engine to its current 4.x version.
    This has been done in the Smarty update branch - now we need to make sure everything works fine. If you feel like supporting our project, please help us testing!

  • Change all internal date formattings.
    With the current “%Y-%m-%d” style of the deprecated strftime() function, FlatPress throws ugly warnings under PHP 8.1. We opened issue 92 for that, the development will take place in the strftime branch.

New Admin Area

Honestly, it’s a shame this gem isn’t part of a final FlatPress version yet. Franah built a completely new Admin Area which brings a new fresh touch to working with FlatPress. Also, it’s reponsive, meaning it adapts to your screen size and works flawlessly even on your mobile gizmo.

If you want to take a look into it, please feel free to get it from the Responsive Admin branch. Of course, it also contains all the bugfixes and features from the master branch.

Share your findings and opinion on the new Admin Area on the support forum.

Be part of the development!

You’re warmly invited to grab FlatPress from the described development branches and test the heck out of it.
Simply follow the link to each branch on GitHub, hit the green “Code” button in the upper right, and select “Download ZIP”. Then just install FlatPress on any web server, e.g. in a subdirectory of your blog site. To get rid of it later again, simply delete this subdirectory :)

Report any bugs and glitches or simply let us know what you think about the new features on the support forum.
Also, follow FlatPress on Mastodon or Twitter to stay in touch with the latest progress of your favourite blogging engine.

For any further questions or suggestions, please drop a line in the comments below.

All the best,
Arvid

Image: “HRA computer lab - ~1983” by Blake Patterson - licensed under CC BY 2.0