The CMSMS Dev team is happy to announce the latest release in the 1.11.x series. This release brings a few minor features, some performance improvements, documentation improvements, a Smarty upgrade, and a number of bug fixes (including a minor security issue).  There is something for everybody in this release; everyone is encouraged to upgrade their websites as soon as possible.

There are numerous reasons for issuing another release of the 1.x series.  Whilst CMSMS 2.0 is still in heavy—and active—development, it is still not ready for a beta release and won't be ready for a few months yet.  Additionally, since numerous improvements and fixes have been committed to the 1.11.x series, releasing the update makes sense.

The News module received a new dropdown custom field type.  This improves the flexibility of the News module, allowing the creation of numerous dropdown fields, which editors (or frontend article submitters) may choose from when adding or entering News articles.

We have added a new core event, 'TemplatePreFetch', which is called before a template is fetched from the database and is useful for modules like CmsTouch that allow template switching, or modules like TemplateExternalizer, that allow editing your templates on the filesystem instead of the CMSMS admin interface.

The Search module received some improvements and optimizations.  It is now possible to prevent individual page template content blocks from being indexed. As well, we removed some non-functioning code with the result that page templates and GCB's are no longer indexed.  This should improve performance a little bit in the admin interface, and when doing searches.

We've done a fair bit of work optimizing page load times, particularly in the listcontent and editcontent areas, and anywhere where a page list is displayed. This should be a great improvement for those users managing websites with several hundred content pages.  Additionally, the route handling code has been optimized, which should significantly improve the performance on the frontend for larger sites, or sites with lots of custom URLS.

Amongst other bug fixes, we've improved the way that modules are loaded, which should solve problems loading modules with dependencies.  Now, when a module with dependencies is loaded, its dependencies are loaded first.

Additionally, Smarty has been upgraded to the latest released version (v3.14). This release fixes some obscure—but important—issues for our advanced users.

The sample htaccess.txt file that is distributed with CMSMS has been improved and better documented.  You are encouraged to read and understand this file before implementing it.

In general, this release provides a little bit for everybody. It adds some useful features, solves some important problems, and makes your favorite, flexible content management system just that much faster, better, more secure, and more powerful.  Upgrade and enjoy!