News Manager

[roog]

Well then, version 2.0 is out.

I rewrote most of the code and added a lot more functionality, hence the bump to 2.0. The list of new features and changes is quite long but the most noteworthy are:

• Settings can now be easily configured, you no longer have to tweak the code
  
• Multilanguage support
  
• Automatically generated excerpts
  
• Private posts (similar to pages)
  
• Tags
  
• Archives
  
• Keyword search
  
• Several sidebar functions, such as recent articles, archives and a tag cloud
  
• Human readable post id's (1, 2, ...)
  
• CKEditor now follows global settings
  

You can see a demo on this page.

I have done my best to make version 2.0 backwards compatible, so you should be able to migrate your previous articles although it will require manual intervention. To do so, copy your /data/aricles folder to /data/posts, retaining permissions (since this plugin is moving towards a blog, I decided to rename articles to posts). Starting from version 2.0, post id's are now in a human readable format (1, 2, ... instead of "4d774dfa37a1d") so the best thing would be to rename your old articles, although it should also work without renaming them. You can run the following python script from within your posts/articles folder to rename your previous articles:

Code:

#!/usr/bin/python

import os, glob

posts = sorted(glob.glob('*.xml'))
for i, post in enumerate(posts):
  os.rename(post, '%d.xml' % (i+1))

The one request I haven't been able to fix yet is fancy url compatibility. I'm not very familiar with mod_rewrite rules and I have managed to create some rules that for instance rewrite http://yoursite.com/post/1/ to http://yoursite.com/index.php?post=1, but they break other parts of GS. An example of the rule I have just described is:

Code:

RewriteRule ^post/([^/.]+)/?$ index.php?post=$1 [L]

So, if anyone can help me out here, it is much appreciated!

Also, since this plugin now has i18n support, you can create your own language files by translating the existing ones in /plugins/news_manager/lang. And if you do, please let me know so that I can include your translation in the next release.

I expect that there will be new bugs introduced with this new version. Let me know when you find any and I'll try to fix them asap.

Cheers,
roog

PS) For those interested, the legacy 1.x version (last release is 1.2.6) of this plugin is still available here.