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ACRcms 0.3.5 released with libacr 0.7

New features introduced are:

  • Assets manager, Upload your videos and images using the Asset manager instead of the RDisk if you want to create slices from them. Assets manager will also create thumbnails for everything and will convert the videos to support HTML5
  • BlogPost view (an HTML view with a title)
  • Attributes for Pages and Slices
  • Hide Pages from menu with hidden=1 attribute
  • Reorder Pages in menu menu-weight attribute
  • Add metatag description to pages with description attribute
  • Automatic Database migrations, never care about changes to the schema when you upgrade acr again, it will be automatically upgraded by acr itself on first visit
  • Hide edit bars in edit mode to view the slice as a standard visitor
  • Abstraction layer for encoding data, now each view encodes using EncodedView, so that it will be possible to switch to any key/value encoding or store in the future
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ACRCms web page renew

Spent some time renewing the ACRCms web page, I was a bit tired of the old style and wanted something more structured, so here is the new look and feel. Hope everyone enjoys it 😀

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libACR 0.6 and ACRcms 2.0 are out

As we are going deep with ACR our cms, it’s becoming a full featured product, we are using it more and more in production and we decided to release a new version on pypi.

New features include:

  • Plugins Support. You can now add your own sections to the administration panel, views to the add slice menu and implement new functions or views.
  • Multisite support, serve multiple sites from one single WSGIDaemonProcess
  • Themes Support, create your own themes for the ACRCMS
  • A simple Scripting language to automate some actions on theme setup
  • User Defined Views, create new type of contents without having to write a single line of code
  • SliceGroup Admin to permit to editors to change content of image galleries and news without have to need access to the admin panel
  • Support for Disqus comments
  • Export html slicegroups as RSS feeds
  • Various Plugins for Slideshows, Image Galleries, Accordions, etc.
  • New Script type and Script menu to make easier to add and manage javascript inside your pages
  • RDisk should now be faster and has content caching
  • Change My Password for current logged in user
  • Permit to store binary data inside contents as base64 and serve them through the /data call.
  • Integration with the Stroller eCommerce (stroller will be released opensource in the near future)

Here is the complete changelog since our latest release:

* work around to make it go with buggy sprox 0.6.10 (patched version still not released)
* Fix problem with Tg2.0 not casting headers to str
* Add delete udv and preview template for udvs
* Finalize user defined views with support for single selection fields, html and files
* Permit to serve fields encoded as per HTML5 base64 data source definition
* Add etag caching to rdisk based on file modified time
* Skeleton for user defined views
* Merge changes from master branch which improve multisite support
* Move every reference to stroller inside the stroller plugin itself
* Working delete action for slicegroup admin
* ACR might be mounted averywhere, never suppose its url, always use url() from libacr to generate acr urls
* Fix for TG2.0.3 (before tg2.1 remainder is a tuple and is not editable)
* SliceGroupAdmin plugin seems to work fine for adding things
* Make it work with Pylons1.0
* First import of sgadmin
* Stroller plugin preparatives
* Google Analytics change section
* Added new LinkedImage view same as the Image, just with a link utility. Must be evolve it, in the future to make him reuse the original view, without code duplication.
* Try to solve problems with repoze.who and repoze.what when running multiple acr sites inside the same daemon process and group
* Remove code render template from views as it collides with plugins
* Add setup script support to themes and fix default page url
* MCE options
* Fix icons and section for new plugins
* Fix for setup-app failing due to plugins
* gmap working (hopefully)
* gmap.js from static to plugin
* Merged single process mode, seems to be stable enough
* Moved GoogleMaps viewer to GoogleMaps plugin
* Disqus plugin
* Google Analytics from plugin static to site instance
* GoogleMaps key moved to database & added modify plugin
* Added tag classes for slices
* Add slice cloning
* Make rdisk_root dynamic to be able to run multiple instances in same process
* Permit to force lang from request
* Use genshi dict dotted access instead of a module
* permit to access and manipulate content from genshi slice
* add tabs plugin
* Added a class to the page as the uri of the page to make possible Custom css classes for page, hence different style for different pages
* Style fixes to administration menu
* fix crash when unable to contact pypi
* multiengine
* tests with multiengine
* engine from config
* first attemp at making a single process acr in the simplest way
* bind engine at each request
* cache session per db
* More experiments to make acr work on single process
* try to make acr work inside one single process
* Automated merge with ssh
* make section use id instead of class and declare in a less colliding way
* detect script slices also derived from default page
* Removed unused imports
* Fix done to correct the position of the excerpts under IE7
* Closes #43 it adds exception handling in case of failure of pypi version check, and just logs a warning to notify
* Minor edits
* Replaceing file templating, with python's Template string module
* Removed javascript putting css rules in place to allow 100% with of the edit menu; So added a relative container to the absolute positioned edit menu
* Minor edits
* Added new plugin to insert google analytics tracking to the site
* removed useless import
* Moved update check under helpers as it is more appropriate and, changed naming convention to follow standards
* Added new plugin to add uservoice feedback tab to pages
* add slice type class to slices, refactor properties management and add find_by_property helper
* Added help on accordion plugin, to help user interaction on creation
* Added same size of the edit button menus as the slice/slicegroup element
* Created new container for the heading admin section as pseudo-tabbed links + minor style edits on the css
* Added release update notification
* make script view wrap content with script tag and migrate existing plugins to use it
* add script slice type and menu
* Make rdisk upload view type dependant, fix videos and make deletion work on actual slice content instead of slice name
* Removed oops, console.log + Removed timestamp from end of slicegroup names to allow, reusability of the acrodion within a page, if you edit and recreate the sliceroup
* add description placement management for image slice
* Added Accordion Plugin, it will put a template for creation of Accordion galleries filters by tag on uploaded images
* fix problem with image thumbnails not showing if not logged in and add Slideshow plugin
* plugin injected resources
* add image, video and file slices to add slice menu if there is rdisk available
* themes plugin for acr
* initial work to make acr_cms working on multiple sites with only on installation, necessary to implement themes support
* improvements to edit bar

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ACR goes for “Packt Open Source CMS Awards”!

Like every year Packt Publishing organizes the Open Source CMS Awards, right now they started the nomination phase.

The following categories make up the contest.

  • Open Source CMS

  • Hall of Fame CMS

  • Most Promising Open Source Project

  • Open Source E-Commerce Applications

  • Open Source JavaScript Libraries

  • Open Source Graphics Software

We decided to propose ACR for the Most Promising Open Source Project and Open Source CMS.

Even if young our CMS is already interesting since it’s quite easy to deploy,  it integrates in other turbogears applications (like we did for iJamix) in a breeze and has already most of the features you would expect from a full fledged CMS.

In our humble opinion is the best and most promising Turbogears2 based CMF/CMS out there.

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ACR plugins and themes

Recently we decided to move our Turbogears 2 CMS, ACRCMS, from an example of how to use libacr to something more complete. Consequently to this decision we implemented the plugins architecture inside libacr, which permits to add plugins to libacr at run-time.

Until now there were no real plugins, the only available plugins were the three acr slice templates which have been moved from an internal function to a plugin.

Today the first real plugin for ACR has been pushed in a separate branch, the plugin is the Theme engine, which permits to add theme support to ACR. The plugin is available inside the ACRCMS acr_plugins directory and is now loaded by default by ACRCMS, it will be officially part of ACRCMS in the next release.

We decided to distribute it with ACRCMS instead of libacr as we felt that theme management is a function deserved to a CMS, not to a CMF.

For now you can test it from the themable branch of ACR

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ACR got support for user permissions

ACR opensource Turbogears2 CMS got support for user permissions to allow users to edit only some pages and create children only in some sections. This should permit to separate work between multiple people in ACR based sites.

ACR also got support for blog/news slice template. This permits to create blogs in ACR with just two clicks instead of having to declare the ACR slicegroup youself.

As usual you can download ACR from http://repo.axant.it/hg/acr by using mercurial

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ACR gets Slice Templates

ACR is a flexible and quite powerfull CMS library, but users have to learn Slices and Slicegroups to be able to insert more advanced content like photo galleries, videos and a news section. To simplify this process we created “Slice Templates”.

Slice Templates are actually a set of common ways to use slices to insert more advanced content. The first two slice templates implemented are:

  • Youtube Videos which make easy to insert a youtube video inside an ACR Page.
  • Photo Gallery which makes easy to insert a photo gallery with cool effects inside an ACR Page.

Next template to come will be a news section, for now you can upgrade your libACR and start using the templates feature or take a look at the screenshots of the currently implemented templates

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Rehearsing new ACR look and feel

As some turbogears projects are starting to use ACR as their CMS library we received the first few requests by real users and the most prominent one is to have a better administrative section. Currently administration section is implemented by using the great tgext.admin and sprox, even if those are really good to quickly implement a CRUD section they might not couple very well when a more interactive and advanced user experience is required.

So a transition phase that will end with a totally new administration section for ACR has been started, currently the system implements a new user interface still using the same backend as before to handle the operations, but on the long time the backend itself will be rewritten to handle easier contents creation and management. In the mean time also support for multi-language, versioning and authors has been added.

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ACR divided in ACRcms and libACR

As new projects started to use ACR to implement the content management part of the site we started to divide the ACR application from the content management framework to permit to other people to embed the cmf inside their own applications.

Now has been divided in libACR which is the content management framework and ACRcms which is the cms application. This should make easier to use libACR to implement your own CMS or extend your web applications and also fast for anyone who needs a quickly available CMS solution to just use ACRcms and tune the graphic theme and layout.