My Website : News : 2009

2009-12-03 : Website Template Updated : v2.11.0

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Enhancements

Added a simple photo album viewer which scans a specified directory and displays all photos. Each "album" requires a PHP file to point to it and define photo titles / comments. See example in template.
Added a simple search which searches all pages / news feeds (not hidden pages though - there must be a reason that they are hidden!). Note that this is purely a text match. New variable must be added to <setup.php> to enable this feature.

New Setup Variables (see <setup-sample.php> for details)

$my_enable_search
$my_extra_style_sheet[] (now used by default, not commented out)

Bug Fixes

Discovered that PHP v4 doesn't like strrpos with a "needle" being more than one character. So, "Latest Updates" and "Website Stats" didn't show any files ending in html (this was code introduced to look for link files).

See the downloads page.

2009-11-04 : Website Template Updated : v2.10.2

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Oh no! A second bug release in a week. Mind you ... I knew about this last week, but forgot to fix it - D'Oh!

Enhancements

None.

New Setup Variables (see <setup-sample.php> for details)

None.

Bug Fixes

Didn't check the top of the page when I tested the code to hide the copyright information: the name was being displayed at the top of the actual page since the header got slightly corrupted due to having a missing meta open tag.

See the downloads page.

2009-11-01 : Website Template Updated : v2.10.1

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Enhancements

None.

New Setup Variables (see <setup-sample.php> for details)

None.

Bug Fixes

Fixed a couple of bugs on "Latest Updates" and "Website Stats" pages that crept in after the link files were added in version 2.10.0. Basically they are non-existant pages, so should not be shown.

See the downloads page.

2009-10-22 : Website Template Updated : v2.10.0

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Enhancements

Added a new page called "Website Stats" which shows latest update times and page counter hits, with a grand total at the bottom. Displays pages images and news.
Added the facility to have external website links appear as category headings or under category headings and not just in the website lists. These will open in the same window as it's anticipated that they will be for sites on the same server but outwith this software's control.
Allows copyright information to not be displayed by commenting the variable $my_copyright_start in <setup.php>

New Setup Variables (see <setup-sample.php> for details)

None.

Bug Fixes

Only displays the year once if $my_copyright_start = the current year

See the downloads page.

2009-05-26 : Website Template Updated : v2.9.0

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Any users upgrading will have to update their style sheets as a new printer style sheet has been added (see enhancement 2).

Enhancements

Improved the RSS and Atom page rendering: Atom now displays entire news items in XHTML. Both now present correct MIME type via header() call.
Added CSS sheets for printing - totally forgot about that one!
Added "Latest Updates" page to show list of latest page updates together with their modification time.

New Setup Variables (see <setup-sample.php> for details)

None.

Bug Fixes

None.

See the downloads page.

2009-04-06 : Website Template Updated : v2.8.0

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Any users upgrading will have to update their style sheets as a new <div> has been added (see enhancement 4).

Enhancements

Changed the "you're a SPAMBOT" section of <Contact.php> as it appears that some people can't figure out to just go back and answer the question correctly!
Added <Survey.php> which allows you to construct simple forms that generate e-mails.
Added facility for a custom "Page Not Found" error page which lives in ./hidden_pages
Put the "(* updated in last 14 days)" text into its own div in the page list div. This allows the font to be changed from the style sheet.

New Setup Variables (see <setup-sample.php> for details)

None.

Bug Fixes

A couple of formatting errors in <Contact.php> fixed.

See the downloads page.

2009-03-05 : Website Template Updated : v2.7.0

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Enhancements

Added the facility to support "favicon.ico" which must live inside the ./images directory.

New Setup Variables (see <setup-sample.php> for details)

None.

Bug Fixes

Discovered that some systems were reading the file change time wrong. All related time function calls changed from filectime to filemtime (file modification time).

See the downloads page.

2009-02-20 : Website Template Updated : v2.6.0

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Any users upgrading will have to update their style sheets as all validation icons required a new <div> to fit them (see enhancement 1). Page stats moved into same <div>.

Also, the ./images directory has been tidied up - validation icons and style sheet images have been put into sub-directories.

Enhancements

Added a news feed in RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 formats with new validation icons to go with them. Icons moved out of page lists into new division defined in style sheet.
News page name can now be changed to any name, "Blog" for example. New variable in <setup.php>.

New Setup Variables (see <setup-sample.php> for details)

$my_news_page

Bug Fixes

Fixed array lookups if arrays are empty on the very rare occasion that the software installed and no pages are present *at all*
Stopped page / image calls outside of their designated directories, i.e. if someone specified a page / image with "../../another_file"

See the downloads page.

2009-02-10 : Website Template Updated : v2.5.0

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Enhancements

Changed how the software adds "IE Fixes" code into the generated XHTML. This involves looking for specific file names, e.g. <lt_7-pencils.css> which will contain fixes for IE less than version 7. See the website template for a full description. Any user upgrading to this version will have to re-name their IE_Fixes files.

New Setup Variables (see <setup-sample.php> for details)

None.

Bug Fixes

None.

See the downloads page.

2009-02-02 : Website Template Updated : v2.4.0

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Enhancements

Added the ability to have IE_fixes style sheets for any "extra" style sheets. These must live in ./style_sheets/extra/IE_fixes
Allowed the default page to be something other than "Home" - see new variable $my_default_home_page in <setup.php>.

New Setup Variables (see <setup-sample.php> for details)

$my_default_home_page
$my_disable_w3c_validation

Bug Fixes

None.

See the downloads page.

2009-02-01 : Website Template Updated : v2.3.1

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Enhancements

None.

New Setup Variables (see <setup-sample.php> for details)

None.

Bug Fixes

Discovered that if a page or sub-page is purely a number, the function to display the category was just displaying a blank line (missing check when checking for leading numbers for numerical sorting).

See the downloads page.

2009-01-29 : Website Template Updated : v2.3.0

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Enhancements

Cosmetic change to the "page updated" flags: now if a sub-page has been modified, but the parent page has not, the * is shown as (*).
Passed the definition for the initial page view counter value into the user's control - $my_page_count_start now in <setup.php>

New Setup Variables (see <setup-sample.php> for details)

$my_page_count_start

Bug Fixes

None.

See the downloads page.

2009-01-26 : Website Template Updated : v2.2.0

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Enhancements

Enabled page stats for <News.php> - "last update" based upon the top news article and a count based on any time the page is called, i.e. irrelevant of news_year and news_month.

New Setup Variables (see <setup-sample.php> for details)

None.

Bug Fixes

Fixed the "page updated" feature - when making the new <Home.php> it was looking for <Home.php> time stamp instead of <Home.php> / latest News item.

See the downloads page.

2009-01-23 : Website Template Updated : v2.1.0

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Enhancements

Added Home.php which displays Home.html and then displays the latest News item.

New Setup Variables (see <setup-sample.php> for details)

None.

Bug Fixes

None.

See the downloads page.

2009-01-15 : Website Template Updated : v2.0.0

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Enhancements

Optional page stats can be displayed at the bottom of the page body with date modification time and a hit counter. New variables in <setup.php> to control this. A wee cheat on creating the initial stats files though - a random number between 10 and 30 is chosen ... but you'd never know ;-) The stats are recorded regardless if they are displayed, so you have the option at a later date (with the actual numbers), if they are not displayed initially.
Added the ability to include extra style sheets which can be defined in <setup.php>. They must live in the <./style_sheets/extra> directory.
Added the ability to do a complete change of style sheet, not just wide or narrow. The order of precidence ("i" is highest level) for final style sheet selected is as follows:
1. $my_force_css_width
2. $my_force_css
3. Cookie style sheet (if allowable)
4. $my_default_page_style
Tidied up the <title> and <meta description> by removing leading numbers in the case of numerically sorted pages.
Added a Text Viewer page for displaying text files in the standard layout. There is an option to display as code which adds line numbers.
Managed to get the pages displaying better in IE 6 and below (CSS changes).
Constructed a more informative demo website to explain the workings of the software.
Contact form now accepts pre-defined subjects (if defined in <setup.php>) and also has the ability to re-direct e-mails for a particular subject to a different e-mail address (again defined in <setup.php>).
Changing the name of the "Contact" page now updates any links in the pages, assuming you change the variable in <setup.php>

New Setup Variables (see <setup-sample.php> for details)

$my_contact_page
$my_contact_subject[]
$my_contact_redirect
$my_stats_active
$my_stats_date_format
$my_extra_style_sheet[]
$my_force_css[]

Bug Fixes

HTML pages displayed will no longer display empty lines from the file.
The "acknowledgement" screens for the <Contact> page were hard coded to display "Gavin" on the page. A couple of string replacements that I missed when making the software generic. It will use $my_company_name if it is defined in <setup.php> like the rest of the page does.
(Thanks to Bruce Levick for spotting this one too.)

See the downloads page.

2009-01-05 : Website Template Updated : v1.4

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Users are highly recommended to upgrade or warning messages may (depending on your hosting server's setup) be displayed at the head of the page once your pages start to become "old."

Enhancements

Version numbers added to *all* <*.php> files (in the package) with a sanity check of them performed at the end of <index.php>. This should ensure compatibility in case anyone upgrades software and forgets a file or two. Obviously this will only work from this version onwards and if they use the new <index.php>. Warnings added as XHTML comment text.

New Setup Variables (see <setup-sample.php> for details)

$file_version["setup.php"]

Bug Fixes

<Image.php> didn't have a couple of \n so the XHTML looked messy.
Added an extra parameter to mail() in <Contact Me.php> as some servers have been set up to require the "envelope sender address" when using sendmail.
(Thanks to Bruce Levick for spotting that one.)
Removed unnecessary XHTML comments from <News.php>.
Searching a NULL "haystack" in <find_all_pages.php> when looking for hierarchical updates if the first page found had not been updated. So, set the starting gambit from "" to " "

See the downloads page.