MySource Matrix Developer

MySource Matrix Developer Newsletter Issue 80
Friday 23rd June 2006

covers versions 3.6.9 stable, 3.8.3 stable, 3.9.0 development

News

No News Is Good News

There is no general MySource Matrix developer news this week.

New Features

Simple Edit Changes: Site & Redirect Page

Added to: 3.9.0 development

Previously, when using the Simple Edit suffix (eg. "/edit") on a Redirect Page's URL, the system would redirect you to the asset pointed to by the Redirect Page, before opening the Simple Edit interface. Now, it will always open the Redirect Page's Simple Edit interface.

Also, the Site asset was unable to be used with Simple Edit, instead opening the Simple Edit of its home page, if set. Although the default behaviour of this has not changed (given the proper URL of the home page may not be seen by editors, it makes sense that the site's URL should edit the home page when used in Simple Edit), the Site asset can now be edited through Simple Edit by using the Simple Edit suffix in conjunction with the "limbo_assetid" GET variable set to the Site's asset ID.

Log Failed Login Attempts

Added to: 3.9.0 development

Failed login attempts are now logged in the MySource Matrix system log (located at [SYSTEM ROOT]/data/private/logs/system.log). Previously, only successful login and logout attempts were recorded.

The message in the system log states the reason why the login attempt failed - whether the user was not found (or an incorrect password entered), the user exists but is not live, or if it exists but is in the trash.

Metadata Fields No Longer Exclusive

Added to: 3.9.0 development

Previously, metadata fields were exclusive to the sections they were attached to; they could not be moved or shared between different sections. This has been changed so moving or sharing fields between schemas is now possible.

Pagination of Remap Manager Screen

Added to: 3.9.0 development

The Remap Manager screen is now paginated in the development version, to avoid time-out issues when a system contains a large number of remap entries - as is common after a system has been in existance for a long period of time. Entries are displayed in pages of 100.

Calendar System Improvements

Added to: 3.9.0 development

Further improvements to the Calendar system have been implemented. The major improvements in functionality are listed below:

- Calendar cells that represent today's date (according to the server clock, not as represented by the SQ_CALENDAR_DATE variable) now have an additional "today" CSS class applied, so these cells can be styled differently if desired.

- Links to events on Calendar Pages can now be set up to either use the event view of the Calendar Page, or the URL of the Calendar Event itself. This option is configurable on the Details screen under the "Enabled Views" section.

- The format of an event's label in a calendar view can now be configured. There are 'event label format' attributes for each view that default to the legacy behaviour of showing MySource Matrix Developer Newsletter - Issue #80. All keywords for an event asset can be used in these formats.

Keywords in Form Question Default Values

Added to: 3.9.0 development

A new feature has been developed to allow certain keywords to be used inside the default value of a form question. This feature was originally written with the current user's information in mind, so keywords will be available to paint information from the current user (if any). These keywords will begin with "%current_user", and any keyword normally associated with the current user can be used by replacing the usual "%asset" prefix with this one.

Other standard keywords are also available, for example, MySource Matrix Developer Newsletter - Issue #80 will be replaced by the name of the form question.

Sticky Values for Custom Form Questions

Added to: 3.9.0 development

A new feature has been developed to allow a question in a custom form to be defined as "sticky" for a certain period of time. The most recent value stored in a question marked as "sticky" will be saved in the session variables and be used to pre-fill other forms with questions of the same name and the "sticky" flag also set.

Any sticky value will pre-empt any default values entered for the form question, including the "keywords in default values" feature. Sticky values survive until the end of the Matrix session, however that is set up in the Global Preferences screen.

Submit Listing Engine to Current URL

Added to: 3.9.0 development

A new attribute has been added that affects the form submission action for a Listing Engine. Submitting a Listing Engine can now be done from the listing asset's URL, or to the URL currently being displayed. This will be different from the asset's URL when a listing engine is nested within another asset (such as a design or paint layout).

This functionality has been built into the Listing Engine, however the Link Manager is the only asset that currently exposes this functionality.

Listing Engine: 'Random' Sort By Option

Added to: 3.9.0 development

All Listing Engine assets now have a new "Random" sort by option, that can be selected in the Asset Sorting screen. Unlike a Random list format, content printed with this option can still be cached by the Cache Manager. Existing listing assets will get this option once you re-commit the 'Asset Sorting' screen (an upgrade script will be available shortly to add the "Random" option during step_03.php).

Planned Development

No new generic features are currently scheduled for development.

Upgrading

3.9.0 Development

Additional queries: No additional queries are required for upgrades.

Additional comments: No additional upgrade steps are required.

New Bugs Added To Bug Tracker

Notes:

Bug #1344 (Custom Form Recipient Email badly encoded) was submitted by Edward Braddock on 5th May 2006 but was marked as not being a bug after developers were unable to reproduce the problem and no similar reports of this issue have been found.

Bug #1423 (Oracle constraint violation error creating thesaurus terms) was submitted by Anthony Barnes but was marked as Can Not Replicate after a developer was unable to reproduce the problem.

Bug #1433 (Metadata tags generated by matrix invalid XHTML) was reported by Anthony Barnes but was marked as not being a bug as the issue was found to be not one caused by MySource Matrix.

Bug #1439 (Grouping in asset listings - order of groups and sub-assets) was reported by KateN but was marked as Will Not Fix because the changes required to get this to work is not justifiable, due to the scale and range of changes required to core systems to implement this request.

Bug #1444 (Unable to use user groups in Bulkmail) was reported by Deborah Sherwood but was marked as not being a bug because the "Generate As" feature requires a user to be temporarily logged in to generate the bulkmail. This requires a user, rather than a user group.

New Feature Requests Added To Bug Tracker

No new feature requests were added to the MySource Matrix bug tracker.

Bugs Fixed In The Bug Tracker

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