Preview of RC2

[andrei]

I just finished the installer for Xpression News RC2, hopefully, the last experimental version before we hit the big 3. I will spend a couple more days testing it, making small adjustments and after that, the RC will be publicly launched. Until that happens, here's a list of major changes that have been made:

1 Added a caching system for templates
This will reduce loading time as the script now creates a php version (incorporating news variables) of the HTML files in the template folder. That php version will be loaded instead of the HTML files (that needed to be parsed every time, thus wasting more resources)

Warning: Templates should only be edited with the provided template editor (in the control panel) because that editor will delete cached PHP files when the HTML source is edited. If you edit the template externally, you will have to delete the contents of the ./compiled/<your template>/ folder by hand

2 Added an SQL caching system
This considerably reduces load on the MYSQL server. If the client is not logged in while browsing the front-end, no MYSQL connection is made at all when SQL caching is activated

3 MySQL becomes MySQLi
The old MYSQL interface driver is no longer supported. Communication with the MySQL server will be established via PHP's mysqli functions that provide better protection against SQL injections

4 Advertising is a paid feature
The advertising module is only available to commercial (paying) clients

5 All pages are encoded in UTF-8

6 Language File Structure
The two language files (for the back-end and front-end) have been broken down into multiple files that are loaded selectively to limit memory usage. Some new tags were added.

7 Fixed AJAX requests

8 Completely SEO friendly URLs

With the help of an .htaccess file, you can get URLs such as yourdomain.com/news_article.html

... And finally, a modification that I have to make: Some key files of Xpression News will be encoded with IonCube in order to enforce the terms of the license. The database driver will be completely encoded and some files from the backend also. I will, of course, leave unencoded the files that you might need to edit in order to best integrate the script into your website.

IonCube encoded files run in about the same speed/memory parameters. There is no difference in functionality. Your host will need to have the IonCube decoder enabled. The decoder is free and is enabled on most web servers.

[rokxer]

Great to hear some news after a long time Keep up the good work.