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CMSMS Version 1.8 - Madagascar
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Onwards and upwards we go. The dev team is proud to announce the latest 
version of your favorite content management system.  This version is 
primarily aimed at rounding out some of the rough edges that our primary 
audience (experienced, professional web developers) have experienced with 
CMS Made Simple. There are a number of new features to enhance performance 
not only of the website itself, but to make doing some mundane tasks faster 
and easier. As well, we've added some power for the contributing programmers, 
and fixed quite a few nagging bugs. We will now have a lot more to talk 
about at the GeekMoot in Amsterdam this September.

The development team, and our beta testers have contributed countless hours 
in testing each and every change under as many different environments as 
possible. They've found a lot of issues, and tested each and every fix.

We've deprecated the {stylesheet} tag in favor of a {cms_stylesheet} tag.  
The replacement works by grabbing the content of the individual style sheets 
and passing them through smarty before writing them to uniquely named files 
in the tmp/cache directory. This is a huge feature. Processing the style 
sheets (individually) through smarty means that you will no longer have to 
search through each of the style sheets for individual colors, you can give 
them names. There are a lot of other cool possibilities as well.  
Additionally, developers can now be confident that browsers will be able to 
cache the style sheets properly to improve performance, and to reduce 
bandwidth. There is however a trade off. Because the style sheets are stored 
in the tmp/cache directory, the relative directory of the style sheets is not 
the same, users should use the [[root_url]] smarty tag in their style sheets 
to force absolute references to images that are specified in style sheets.

We've added the ability to bulk-copy pages. This means that if you have a 
page structure that you want to duplicate it becomes much easier. This is a 
big time saver for people who have multiple similarly structured groups of 
pages.

There's a new {content_module} tag that allows modules to provide different 
types of content blocks for use in Content pages. This is a huge feature, it 
means that a module developer could write a specific type of content block to 
provide specific type of content, and that content is stored with the page, 
not with the module (so copying the page will still work etc). Currently the 
CGContentUtils and Uploads modules support the {content_module} tag, but soon 
enough more modules will support it.

Our half-baked attempt at getting SSL support built into CMSMS was re-visited. 
We've fixed the {stylesheet}/ and {metadata} tags, and made other improvements 
to ensure that once you've specified that a page is secure, all of the CMSMS 
generated URLS are secure.

We've gone through the libraries and cleaned a bunch of unused code, and 
updated the documentation (the api doc stuff will be regenerated shortly 
after the release of CMSMS). This should help all of the budding module 
authors out there, however we still think that looking at a clean, well 
working module as a reference is the best way to learn how to do things. The 
API doc will only tell you what functions are available and what parameters 
they take, but not necessarily the context they should be used in.

We have also removed some of the very old, long deprecated callback methods 
from the module API. We now require that developers use the equivalent events 
that replaced them when events were introduced. These callbacks have been 
deprecated for a long time so therefore should not break any modules. However, 
if you are using some modules that haven't been maintained for a long time...

We've also cleaned up the language stuff a bit. This should provide a modest 
performance improvement in the front-end, and in the admin.

Module Manager has gotten a lot of attention in this release. We've listened, 
and now it should be much easier to install or upgrade modules, including all 
of their dependencies.

There are a lot of bug fixes, some of them related to stuff introduced in 
1.7.x, and some very old ones. We hope that CMSMS 1.8 will be a very stable 
release. Please note that because the database schema has changed, and the 
upgrade procedure must be followed, there will be no diff packages in this 
release.

There have been hundreds of hours of development, testing, and documentation 
effort put into this release, proving once again that the CMSMS user community 
is active, strong, and cooperative. We would like to give a big thanks to the 
following users:

Ted (The Benevolent Dictator)
calguy1000 (Project Manager)
RonnyK (leader of the QA Project)
reneh (leader of the translation team)
Rolf
DrCSS
JeremyBass
Nuno
tyman00
_SjG_
Utter
ajprog
Nullig
Peciura
jce76350
Duketown