You might have noticed that all of the nucleuscms.org sites have been down for quite a long time today. Here's a quick update of what was/is wrong: we're using too much MySQL resources. The hosting provider pointed to the Japanese forum and Skins site archive as the reason for disabling the site.
Short term solution was to disable these two parts of the site. An upgrade to another hosting plan has also been started. Once complete, we'll re-enable the temporarily disabled sections.
The deadline for Nucleus CMS Skin Design Contest submissions is getting closer (JanuaryJune 30th). If you haven't started on a design yet, the time to do so is now :)
I'm not such a stats freak. But when Google unleashed Google Analytic some weeks ago, I installed it on the main nucleuscms.org site. Some interesting findings are collected in this post.
From the inbox:
Hi, I wrote an italian installation guide. I'm going to close my site if you are interested about it you can download it from ...
Best Regards, Elena.
I'm posting this document here, so it doesn't get lost: Italian Installation Guide for Nucleus CMS
I've been experimenting with Wink today. Wink is a freeware screen capture tool which allows to create Flash presentations. Capturing can be done manually (hitting a shortcut key whenever a frame needs to be captured), time based (x frames/sec) or input driven (mouse/keyboard). After capturing, notes and previous/next buttons can be easily added to the presentation.
As a test, I created a tutorial on how to install Nucleus CMS. It isn't quite a polished presentation and probably runs too quickly (I've might have cut out too much frames), but it shows what Wink is capable of. The flash file is 666 KB.
You might have come across the security bulletin already, but there's quite a serious security issue in the PHP XML-RPC Library that is used by Nucleus and a bunch of other projects. Untill we have a new package available for download with the updated library, here is how to disable XML-RPC support on Nucleus:
/nucleus/xmlrpc/ directory on your server. This will remove the XML-RPC server from Nucleus. As a result, nobody will be able to connect to Nucleus using external tools (wbloggar to name just one) anymore./nucleus/libs/ directory, replace xmlrpc.inc.php and xmlrpcs.inc.php by empty files. These are the actual libraries. Though this step is optional, you should do this just to be sure.After these steps have been completed, the XML-RPC library is fully removed and your Nucleus installation is safe again.
Update: Nucleus v3.21 has been released!
I stumbled across TagCloud today, which combines a feed list with data from the Yahoo! Term Extraction Webservice to create a tag cloud. To test it out, I created a Nucleus CMS Cloud, using the feeds from the Nucleus Planet. Nothing much to see there, but one word definately stands out from the rest :)
It's raining new skin designs on the redesigned Nucleus CMS Skins website these days, so I decided to throw out the old NUDN skin and go for the Laila skin. Really nice work from Thomas, and nicely ported to Nucleus by Moraes!
I noticed that there's a new skin available on the Nucleus Skins website: Stanch. It looks pretty neat, if you ask me.
I'm posting this message to let you know I'm still alive :) While this blog has been neglected somewhat over the past few weeks, it does not mean that Nucleus development has stalled. Behind the scenes, lots of activity is taking place.
You could also look at it in this way: less blogging means more time to work on Nucleus :)
Updated the Plugin API - Event List documentation on the developers version of the docs site. Newly listed events are FormExtra and ValidateForm. (At the bottom of the page)
I think it was immediately after the Nucleus v3.0 release that I was playing around with CafePress. One of the first days of June, to be exact. I set up a nucleuscms store with some products bearing the new Nucleus logo. Just for fun.
Curious about how such a t-shirt would look like, I ordered two. Shouldn't have done that. Really :) The expected two weeks for delivery turned out to be a whopping two and a halve months. The main delay was caused by the customs office, which seriously took its time to calculate the amount of taxes I had to pay. If you're ordering from Europe, shipping charges and taxes take up more than half of the total price. Be warned :)
Anyway, I finally received both and they look quite nice:
Some pictures:
Sure, you can order products as well. If you really want to walk the streets wearing a Nucleus outfit, that is :) Just visit the Nucleus store. The products have a 0% profit margin, and it's not my intent to change that.
Stuff to read: Sending XHTML as text/html Considered Harmful (Ian Hickson). The main issue is that lots of authors are using XHTML doctypes without actually knowing what they are doing.
The Nucleus admin area uses XHTML 1.0. When in debug mode, those pages are sent as application/xhtml+xml to browsers that accept it. The only advantage there is that "UAs will immediately catch well-formedness errors". When debug mode is off, the pages are always sent as text/html. I don't think this is a problem. We're expected to know what we're doing.
The default skin (grey) however, has a HTML 4.01 doctype. Main reason is that I think it's a bad idea to expect users to write well-formed and valid XHTML when editing skins/templates. Actually, we probably can't expect them to write valid HTML4 either :)
btw, the default skin doesn't validate because of the short closing tags (/>), which have a different meaning in SGML.
I've created a few bug entries. There free to take:
Wouter Demuynck is 25 and lives in Izegem, Belgium. He has been working on Nucleus since 2001. In real life, he's a software developer developing in C++ and C#.
As he's not quite good at graphical design, this site uses the Laila Skin that's available at the Nucleus CMS Skins website.
This development blog is updated at a highly irregular basis.
