Image: ‘Sneaky peek’ by eva101 - licensed under CC BY 2.0
Hey folks,
it’s that time of year when little secrets happen and pleasant surprises await us. Of course, this also applies to FlatPress, and so I am happy to tell you that we move towards the first tests of the upcoming FlatPress version 1.5.
But not only do we need a plan - we also need a Release Candidate version to be tested! We’re working on that as well. You’ll be the first to hear when it’s done - here on our project blog, or over at Mastodon. Feel free to follow us there!
So stay tuned - and thanks for helping us testing!
Hi folks, you may or may not have noticed that we essentially stopped using Twitter.
What used to be a cool and open-minded place in the beginning, refreshingly free and almost a bit anarchistic, has turned into profit-driven attention machine. One may be fine with the ubiquitous advertising, well, someone has to pay the server bills! But do you really like being force-fed content by “the algorithm” that Twitter wants you to see? Instead of content from the accounts you follow yourself? An algorithm, by the way, that is in no way neutral, and is constantly being manipulated to promote content of, say, a certain Mr. Musk?
If you’d like to stay up-to-date, just follow us there, fave, boost, and spread the word.
And if you happen to still be active on Twitter, you might want to join us in leaving greedy “big tech” and starting over in a free, open-minded and non-commercial environment.
Image: ‘Beta’ by erokism - licensed under CC BY 2.0
Hi folks, thank you very much for your patience regarding the release of the next FlatPress version. We’ve come a long way, especially the upgrade of the Smarty template engine created a lot of issues.
But the effort was worth it: Today I can proudly announce the start of our first beta test of the upcoming FlatPress 1.3 “Andante”!
The name “Andante” may be seen as a (not entirely serious) allusion to the FlatPress release cycle: We’re not going particularly fast, but steadily we’re going.
Most important improvement of the new version is the PHP 8.1 and 8.2PHP 8.1, 8.2, and 8.3* compatibility. Also, we added a few helpful plugins and fixed tons of bugs and security issues. And check out all the other improvements like the localized installer!
Please see the Beta 1 release on GitHub to find the detailed change log, a download package and an update package from FlatPress 1.2:
This is a beta version - we strongly recommend not using it in your productive blog yet.
If you want to help testing, please see this topic on the FlatPress support forum.
I explicitly want to thank all the coders, translators and testers who helped creating this new version. FlatPress 1.3 wouldn’t be possible without you! (Cheers, Frank and Matthias! 👋)
See the contributors list to learn about all those great people!
All the best,
Arvid
* Update 2024-01-23: In fact, FlatPress 1.3 “Andante” will happily run under PHP up to 8.3 :)
From now on, the FlatPress support forum supports Two Factor Authentication (2FA). (For more information on what’s 2FA, see below.)
Feel free to secure your account!
Activating it is quite easy: Go to the User Control Panel, tab “Two Factor Authentication”. Select “OTP” and hit “Add new key”.
How to activate 2FA on the FlatPress support forum - part 1
Your OTP secret and a QR code are being generated. (The QR code basically contains the secret.)
Scan the code with your OTP app or enter the secret manually.
How to activate 2FA on the FlatPress support forum - part 2
Read the OTP from your OTP app and enter it in the “OTP key” field. Hit “Register new key”, and 2FA is activated for your account! From now on, you’ll need to enter the current OTP code after giving your username and password.
Of course, you can disable 2FA at any time by simply deleting the registered keys.
What is Two Factor Authentication?
Two Factor Authentication (2FA) with Time-based One-Time Passwords (TOTP) is a great way to protect your user accounts on any platform providing it. It basically means you do not only need your username and password to login, but also a 6-digit code freshly generated every 30 seconds e.g. in the OTP app on your mobile device.
So even if your username and password get stolen (via phishing, keylogging, social engineering, … you name it), your account can still not be accessed without knowing the 6-digit OTP code (which changes every 30 seconds).
This massive increase in security comes with a price, though: Without your OTP generator (i.e., the OTP app on your mobile or any other program capable of generating the code), you will be not able to access your account. But fear not, a good OTP implementation will provide you with static backup codes you can use instead. Of course, nobody else than you should ever get those backup codes, so keep them well :)
2FA is a widely spread standard. Some examples: Amazon offers it, PayPal does, GitHub and Twitter as well. My personal recommendation: Try it, get used to using it, and activate it on any platform that provides it.
What’s a good OTP app?
There may be countless TOTP generators out there. My recommendations are:
The password safe KeePass (great for securely managing many different, unique and safe passwords on Windows, Linux and even mobile platforms!) has the OTP plugin KeeTrayTOTP.
Rare picture of the FlatPress main development machine
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!
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.
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.
