Added a new feature, but it's little weird to describe.  I've mentioned it a few times before, though.  It's what I'm calling the "Multi-Page Root" feature.  Basically, if you were to do some sort of article, but that article was super-long or written in multiple parts, you could break it up into multiple pages.  But after it's broken up, you'd normally have to handle all the navigation yourself (Simple's built-in navigation is heirarchal in nature, so it's not very well suited to a sequential article) after you'd created all the pages.

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Okay, got another back-end update done that you'll never notice as a user.  User passwords are now stored in an encrypted form in the database.  Now, if a person somehow gains MySQL access to your database and manages to obtain the password for a user, they will still not be able to log in.  Also, they won't be able to create an account for themselves unless they figure out how to encrypt passwords (since they would have to store an encrypted value).  Is it perfect?  Absolutely not ... if someone somehow gained access to your site's MySQL server they could just edit page content directly in the database (though, thankfully, it won't be rendered onto a page until someone logged-in publishes it from the back-end).  But it does prevent a user from dumping the passwords for future duplicity.

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Two quickies that you'd never notice from the outside.  When deleting a template, Simple asks you what template you'd like to apply to all the pages that currently use the template you're deleting.  I fixed a bug where, with certain versions of MySQL, the list of templates to change to was always empty.  And finally, I actually made a decent Page Administration console tab.  Instead of just listing out all the pages in the site, it now arranges them nicely into a structured table and lets you scroll through 10, 20, 30, 40, or 50 at a time.

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I managed to knock a few items off my To-Do list last night for Simple. None of it is really anything you'd all get a kick out of.  When you enter the wrong password, the system logs what user name you attempted to use.  There's a setting for whether or not to use a WYSIWYG editor by default.  And users can send messages to one another from a form on the users administration page (just in case you want to yell at someone for not updating their section on time).

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Okay, I know it's not much of an update, but I've redone the template for the Simple site.  It now no longer requires Javascript to work.  It's a tour de force of head-wracking CSS masochism.  Seriously, this shouldn't have been hard, and theoretically wouldn't have been with a table, but this way gives me a fully liquid design (except with a fixed-width menu, so only the content area resizes).  Also, all sizes are specified in ems, so if you resize your text, everything else will resize to match.  Mostly, that's novelty, but it's nice to know I could pull it off.

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Some incredibly minor changes to report.  I fixed a bug where I was not properly altering the page body when placing it into the textarea for editing, causing any HTML you wrote out as text to be interpreted. (i.e. if you wrote "<!-- This is a comment -->", it would actually be transformed into a comment instead of being displayed on the page.)  Also I added Previous/Next capabilities.  Basically you specify the root of your series, and then add the code to insert the Previous/Next buttons onto the page.  It flattens the tree structure into a linear one so that you can step through each page.  Check out the Documentation section for an example.

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Today I officially launched my personal website (as in, I put a redirect in my root directory that will pull people into the CMS). Some of the reasons for me not revealing the project have resolved themselves (most notably I now know that the place where I work has no interest in it, so I don't mind now if they know that I have it).

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I've added a few things this week, though they're very small and all on the administrative side. I've added some menu features that allow for things like in other CMS systems where the menu only shows the current page's children and siblings, and users then use the breadcrumbs to go back. When logged in, each page displays who last modified it and when. Also non-administrators are now allowed to view other users' profiles (but not edit). Before, they just received a generic "Access Denied" message.

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Added the feature to view a revision in a preview window, although strictly speaking that would make it a postview (since it's a view of something that has ceased to be). This should make it easier for a webmaster to restore a revision since he'll/she'll be able to see what's being restored before restoring it. I've also moved the settings out of the global function file, something I should've done long ago. This means that updating should be a simple matter of transfering everything except the settings file.

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Here's a brief overview of how image management works in Simple. Images are arranged into virtual folders which can be renamed and rearranged without breaking links to the images themselves. To add an image, you simply go to the folder where you'd like to put it and click "Add an Image." Then select the file to upload, give it a title and optionally a caption and some alternative text, and click submit. The system creates an entry, places your file on the server, makes a thumbnail, and places your entry within the virtual folder.

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