CPG Dragonfly™ CMS

layingback · Joined: Apr 19, 2004 Posts: 953

Yes, that tiny little Pro_News module has been updated again. There's hardly anything new added really, even if you didn't get v3.1 - which was Members-Only because it never really left beta for 1 of its features. But 3 or 4 people at a time working on the module for a full 9 month period does produce some results though ... Wink

Seriously, there are LOTS of changes in Pro_News over 3.1 and certainly over 3.0. A short list of just the major items is below, a fuller list is on my site on the Download pages, and the full details are in the CHANGES.txt file in the release. And thanks to development and testing contributions from masino_sinaga, fishingfan, rosbif, greenday2k and many other members, this may well be the most widely tested Pro_News release yet.

NOTE: To manage the release v3.2 will be available to my Sponsors group only for the first 48 hours, then to Members only over the weekend, then released for all next week. But of course there is nothing preventing you from joining before then to get your hands on an earlier copy! Smile

Besides all the new features (see below) almost every Admin screen has been extensively revised, so the whole process of managing Pro_News is easier, faster and more intuitive than ever before. In particular, the zillion configuration options - yes, there are a lot more in 3.2! - are separated into normal and advanced. On a new install you can attend to just the few normal options to get your module up and running, and come back to the many Advanced options to fine tune your site after you've had time to play with and understand it. The Advanced options are there for those who want to take advantage of them, but even without using them, you always get the ability to manage multiple Sections, each of which has the same capability as News but with the option to display in various orders, not just chronologically, and using independent templates. It's like having News installed 2 or more times, but without the overhead, and with a much more powerful Admin interface.

Some of the biggies in 3.2:

Display in Home option added at Article level
Access level restrictions for Article Posting added, selectable by Section
Related Articles feature added, allowing links to be added per Article to existing Articles (thanks to masino_sinaga for the code)
Per Category option for Forums, allowing different forums (or no Forum) to be assigned (masino_sinaga again)
Pagination in Admin > Articles (Courtesy of masino_sinaga)
Join in the discussion legend display selectable by Section/Category
Revised layout for Admin > Sections and Admin > Categories for improved readability and more feedback
Option to notify user of his/her article being approved.
Text for email notifications now changed via Admin > Config
Ability to hide "No Image" or other default image via Admin > Config
Fixed/improved thumbnail generation for .png files
Improved email notification code, for multi-lang or single language single use
Improved Admin > Block display interface, with link to Blocks module
Added an alternate Social Networking template in the currently popular "hover" style
Added "Enable Social Networking" parameter to Admin > Config
Included index2alb-nh.html and index2gly-nh.html templates into the product
Increase of Social Network site links to 42, with transparent background .png icons
Disable Article link to image if no larger image to display
and lots, lots more.

And biggies in 3.1:

"Discuss-This"-like interface to CPGNuCalendar 2.1 to automatically post entries with links back to newly submitted articles
Headline parameters can be overridden per Section (thanks to fishingfan for the code)
Suppression of unneeded User Fields from Submit Article page
Article Ratings now limited to Registered Members only
A Reference Id number added to template system
And last but not least a PDF Upload facility in Admin so that you don't need to incur FTP, it will batch upload too!
And as mentioned numerous small but important improvements.

The capabilities of Pro_News must be almost complete, there is so much in it now! Indeed I've built several sites using only Pro_News for all content pages, which really makes it very easy to manage and maintain the sites. [ I even managed to pull off a "splash" / "intro" screen on one site - within DF too, not by using the index.html trick. ]

As always, enjoy this "little" module, and stop by my site - not this one - if you want to discuss the product.