Nuke Resources - PostNuke Rogue Dot Seven Released Dec.02/2001

The Rogue release is here. Many bug fixes have been made over the Preview Release.

Rogue is a different way of thinking about users and permissions. It does take a little bit to get used to, but the system is very flexible for admins to control permissions of your website. This release also shores up a security problem with the "Authors" password. All passwords are encrypted, regardless of system. PostNuke is moving away from cookies once and for all next release to completely remove any possibilities of security problems with the use of cookies.

-- Permission System -- Jim McDonald. The new system gives you unlimited depth to "user groups". Gone are the days from having the separate admin and users system. The new system unifies these and allows you to give or deny special access to any user. You can deny certain areas of your site to an unregistered user, or the entire site altogether. You can also set your groups so that even when a user registers, they have to have their group access upped by a site admin. There are really quite a few possibilities now with the user system, that will only get better by the end of the Rogue Cycle.

Note, most third party plugins will need to be upgraded to the new system, hence the need for the preview. Any third party plugin that uses the admin will definitely need to be upgraded with the new permissions.

-- DB Abstraction -- Ryan and Pablo -- Ryan did the hard part with the original abstraction in PEAR, and then we changed directions and went with ADODB. The abstraction is done in a very professional manner and does not add much weight to the script. As Ryan went through the original time he also cleaned many of the queries that we were using, which has improved performance greatly! Pablo is now the ADODB expert, and has also written a great guideline for developing with ADODB and is posted in the sections on this site. We are hard at work to make the install file ADODB compliant as well, with Rogue.sql's coming for supported DB's very soon.

-- Multi-Sites -- Sebastien -- The long talked about MultiSites mod is here. What this does is allow you to run a single codebase with several different domains. We run it on this site, and it works quite well! All of the support sites and postnuke.com all run off the same single instance of postnuke codebase. This allows for very quick updates, and global changes through sites. It's also an excellent tool for ISP's or small companies that would like to offer hosting. Read the docs in the multisites module. Great work on this one!

-- Language tool -- Pascal -- For those of you that work hard on the translations for your PostNuke site, there is a new tool for you. The language module goes through and finds the missing defines in your language files and generates a report and a temp directory for you. It's a great tool, and I have just begun to play with it.

-- Wiki and bbcode -- Sebastien -- Still working on this a bit, but you can now use wiki code formatting with your article submissions.

-- Install writes to config.php -- Scott. A long asked for feature. The install file now writes to the config file during installation. This only works for fresh installs currently, but we will get it working for upgrades as well. With the install writing to the config file, we have also encrypted the SQL password and username, to harden security a bit.

-- MD5 Passwords -- Alley -- Now all passwords in the users table are encrypted with MD5. This is a much tighter security for you windows folks out there, and better than the old crypt method as well. Now with the admin table gone, your admin users have their passwords encrypted.

-- index.php redirection -- Tim (I hope I didn't forget who did this!) -- As you notice, the index page now doesn't redirect to the modules start page, it simply loads it. You still have the option of selecting your start page.

-- New admin schema -- Pascal -- Still a work in progress, but we are moving away from the multiple links / case / module files for admin modules. An example can be found in the language module.

-- Better theme arrays -- Jim -- I posted the doc on this yesterday, but take a look at the PostNuke theme for them in action. Very elegant code!

-- user.php modularized -- David. The new system is very much like the current admin system. David did a great job in modularizing the user.php file so now you can have custom user modules.

-- MPN Upgrades -- Michael -- Upgrades from MyPHPNuke now available, along with upgrades from PHPNuke 5.2 and 5.3.

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