http://blog.expansecms.org/News Murky Depths is the online blog of Expanse. It explores the dark underbelly of artwork, design, juicy CMS gossip, business, marketing, and whatever else we feel like posting. en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss I have been busy for the past few weeks, thus the lack of news and blog posts around these places. Today though I have some exciting news to bring you. Mainly in the world of Expanse, but we have some other applications for your downloading needs. Its Free too, which makes it even better. Firstly Expanse now has an improved text editor. Changes will start to be rolled out this week to all current hosted users. The improvements bring better handling of images and uploads within the text editor, and a new shortcut, CTR + S/Command + S, which when pressed will save your post without you having to click add (or edit).  Twitter has a new plugin. AutoTweet for Expanse allows for a CronJob to be set up on the server to check for new posts and automatically notify your twitter followers with a direct link to your article using the CMSURL shortener. You can of course tweet a message from within the Expanse Content Management System, so you don't have to log into the twitter website. Expanse is now fully compatible with PHP5. Before we were seeing problems with Session handling, but we have worked hard to allow for sessions to be saved whilst Expanse is installed on a PHP5 powered server. Plugins are currently available direct from me, simply DM me on twitter if you would like the AutoTweet, or ask me for a specific plugin which will help you out. You can send me a direct message on twitter here. Aside from Expanse development, I am please to announce a new Short URL service called CMSURL, of course there are plugins for Expanse, soon for Wordpress, and of course it works with the AutoTweet plugin. There is a really simple API, and the whole package is available for free. CMSURL has many options, including a secure service so you can create your own url shortening service that only you can use. CMSURL also handles images, simply by uploading your image to the CMSURL site (or your own service running CMSURL). Follow me on twitter for updates to the service. Finally, for all the latest updates and blogs you should follow me on twitter here. http://blog.expansecms.org/news/plugins-and-short-urls Thu, 17 Dec 2009 03:42:04 -0700 I came across an issue whilst developing a rather large website for a local church this week, where by a category would show the results for itself and its sub categories, whilst this in some events is not a problem, I wanted to be able to really separate the sub categories from the parent categories.  So here is the solution, though not a perfect one, it does work to separate the items from each other, but because everything is still fetched in the content loop, {_first} operators do not work, as the first item in the array may be in one of the subcategories. A ticket has been raised for the next update of Expanse to find a true work around for this. Firstly display your content for when you are in a category, loop the content, but before rendering the content set the cid of the item to be 0. i.e. has no sub category id. {set:category} {loop:content} {set:cid:0} Once you have looped your content for the category you will need to do the same for when the user is viewing a subcategory, this time you need to use the {mis} variable to show the looped content for the subcategory.  {set:subcategory} {loop:content} {mis:cid:0} Now you have a way of separating the content between your categories and subcategories. http://blog.expansecms.org/news/separate-your-subcategories Tue, 13 Oct 2009 05:14:47 -0700 Comment spam just sucks, so using Akismet, you can try and keep the comment spam down. The plugin for Expanse works great, and as Nate intended does actually help reduce spam on your blog. But the latest update to the plugin makes it even better. Using the latest Akismet class for PHP5 and altering the code even further, by making the HTTP request 1.0 instead of 1.1, the Akismet plugin for expanse is even faster, no lag time, no delay. Just fast comment and contact processing with all the advantages of reducing spam. You can always change your existing plugin to work faster, by changing the following line: $http_request = "POST " . $path . " HTTP/1.1\r\n"; with: $http_request = "POST " . $path . " HTTP/1.0\r\n"; Alternatively grab your latest copy here. Its free.     http://blog.expansecms.org/news/making-akismet-quicker Tue, 13 Oct 2009 04:09:41 -0700 With iSkip, another jQuery plugin from Ian Tearle, being released for FREE today, here is a nice little tutorial on how to get it to work within your Expanse templates. Obviously the first thing to do is to add jQuery and the iskip.js files to your javascript folder, and reference it within your header.tpl.html file. Once done you will probably need to head to your gallery.tpl.html file, unless of course you are adding the iSkip to another page. Start by adding a small piece of script within the content loop of your page. <script type="text/javascript"> $(function() {# { #} var arr = [{loop:image_set}'{thumbnail}'{set:_not_last},{/set}{/loop}]; $("#mousemove").iskip({#{images:arr, method:'mousemove', 'cycle':3}#}); {# } #}); </script> For the example, and for my purposes I am using the image set (additional images) of the page to display the images. Note the use of using special characters within the template. Next you will need to add the Key image for the set in your image_set loop, this will give the initial image that loads, allowing the javascript to load the other images in the set hidden in the background. {loop:image_set} <div id="image_set"> {set:_first}<img src="{thumbnail}" id="mousemove" />{/set} </div> {/loop} Now iSkip will work seamlessly inside your templates. There will be an additional tutorial once the jQuery iSkip project allows links on indiviual images. http://blog.expansecms.org/news/making-iskip-work-in-the-templates Fri, 26 Jun 2009 08:06:44 -0700 Its official, the URL shortening service from Expanse Content Management is finally finished. Shorten all your long url's for micro blogs like Twitter. Even better news, Expanse version 1.4.1 will have this functionality built in, so you can share your blog posts and pages even easier, Expanse will automatically create a short URL for you when you save any item in the Expanse admin, all you have to do is share that link in as many places as you like. Look out for the next deployment of Expanse soon. Work is flying! For now though you can visit Expanse CMS URL and start shortening your long web addresses. http://blog.expansecms.org/news/short-url-service-for-cms Thu, 18 Jun 2009 10:16:45 -0700 I wanted to share an improvement over Expanse 1.3 that we have provided inside the latest version 1.4. That is with the new display of the comments, and how you manage them from within the admin panel. Rather than a list of all your comments I have ported the accordion effect found elsewhere in the Expanse admin pages, and altered the format of the table that holds the information. It is now a lot easier to find comments on a specific article, and subsequently manage each comment. Do let us know what you think, and if there is anything we can do to improve your experience. Enjoy. http://blog.expansecms.org/news/comments-control Thu, 18 Jun 2009 04:50:37 -0700 We are working hard on even more improvements to the Expanse Content Management System, including some new modules, even more plugins, and great tutorials so you can start making the most out of your copy of Expanse. The question is, what would you like to see added, changed or even taken away from the Expanse system? http://blog.expansecms.org/news/do-you-need-a-cms Wed, 17 Jun 2009 04:28:20 -0700 It is now official that Expanse CMS is alive again in a brand new version of 1.4 featuring many minor bug fixes, additions and alterations. This version also brings with it a more comprehensive look at plugins. Although Expanse is seemingly alive, the original Expanse team are still not at work with the development of Expanse CMS. Since they ceased development of Expanse CMS 1.3 in 2007, Expanse has been going through minor development changes, and is now finally ready for release at version 1.4 and for a whole new price. Expanse CMS is available right now for just £14.99, with 10% still being donated to charity, and 3% going to the original developers, (not that they know it yet, as they are not responding). You can grab your copy now by heading on over to Expanse and logging yourself in. If you already own a copy of Expanse 1.3, please contact me with your URL (with Expanse installed) and ill sort you out with a copy at a discounted rate. Expanse is also offering hosting for a mere £10.99 per domain per month. A nicely managed service with your copy of Expanse installed for you. http://blog.expansecms.org/news/expanse-is-alive Thu, 11 Jun 2009 08:48:47 -0700