LifeType Development Journal

LifeType 1.2.11 released

jondaley — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 18:25:17 -0500

New version 1.2.11 with a couple fixes was released in January 2011.

TinyMCE was upgraded, and a couple of important security fixes. See the release notes page for more details.

LifeType 1.2.10 released

jondaley — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 08:08:38 -0500

One significant security bug in 1.2.9 (and all previous versions) forced us to release yet another release in the 1.2.x series. Check out the Release notes for more details. Someday we'll kill off this 1.2 branch and get to the fun 2.0 stuff.

Update: 01/27/2010, 7PM EST: If you already grabbed the release, please see the release note on sourceforge regarding an updated file for a quick bug fix.

LifeType 1.2.9 released

jondaley — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 20:18:30 -0400

Lifetype 1.2.9 is primarily a security release, but also a large handful of smaller bugs that were fixed while waiting for 2.0 to be release.

Official release notes and download page

Important notes with this release:

If you (or one of your users) is using a login that is on the "forbidden_username" list, you should remove that username from the forbidden list, otherwise that user will not be able to upgrade after installing 1.2.9.

Comprehensive Security Review on Lifetype 1.2

reto — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 16:12:39 -0400

We are in the process of doing a comprehensive review and rework of our input validation framework for the upcoming 1.2.9 release. We advise you to not update directly from the 1.2 branch in our SVN repository as we may leave it in an unstable state for a couple of days. Please wait until we release 1.2.9 before you update again from the 1.2 branch.

If you don't know about Subversion (SVN) and usually upgrade your installation from released packages, you don't have to worry. We will announce the next realease as usual.

Thank you for your understanding and have fun!

LifeType 1.2.8 released

reto — Sun, 04 May 2008 04:18:42 -0400

Lifetype 1.2.8 is another security release fixing an XSS vulnerability, a problem with category search in the admin interface and some more minor bugfixes (please have a look at the release notes for details).

Official release notes

Download

These are the links to the full Lifetype 1.2.7 packages:

Lifetype 1.2.8 (.tar.bz2)

Lifetype 1.2.8 (.tar.gz)

Lifetype 1.2.8 (.zip)

If upgrading from Lifetype 1.2.7, there are packages available which only include new or modified files and will allow you to upgrade from Lifetype 1.2.7 only. These packages can not be used to upgrade from 1.1.x or any other 1.2.x release:

Lifetype upgrade package from 1.2.7 (.tar.gz)

Lifetype upgrade package from 1.2.7 (.zip)

LifeType 1.2.7 released

jondaley — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 20:18:04 -0400

Lifetype 1.2.7 is primarily a security release, though a number of issues with resources have been fixed as well.

Official release notes

Download

These are the links to the full Lifetype 1.2.7 packages:

Lifetype 1.2.7 (.tar.bz2)

Lifetype 1.2.7 (.tar.gz)

Lifetype 1.2.7 (.zip)

If upgrading from Lifetype 1.2.6, there are packages available which only include new or modified files and will allow you to upgrade from Lifetype 1.2.6 only. These packages can not be used to upgrade from 1.1.x or any other 1.2 release:

Lifetype upgrade package from 1.2.6 (.tar.gz)

Lifetype upgrade package from 1.2.6 (.zip)

LifeType 1.2.6 released

jondaley — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 12:18:33 -0500

Lifetype 1.2.6 is the latest maintenance release of the 1.2 branch and though we said that 1.2.5 was "as rock-solid as it gets", there continued to be a number of improvements and at least one significant bug fix. There haven't been very many support requests on the forums and we attribute that to the success of the 1.2.5 release. This release just adds icing to the cake.

Official release notes

Download

These are the links to the full LifeType 1.2.6 packages:

Lifetype 1.2.6 (.tar.bz2)

Lifetype 1.2.6 (.tar.gz)

Lifetype 1.2.6 (.zip)

If upgrading from Lifetype 1.2.5, there are packages available which only include new or modified files and will allow you to upgrade from Lifetype 1.2.5 only. These packages can not be used to upgrade from 1.1.x or 1.2 to 1.2.6:

Lifetype upgrade package from 1.2.5 (.tar.gz)

Lifetype upgrade package from 1.2.5 (.zip)

Lifetype 1.2.5 released

oscar — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 14:47:17 -0400

Release notes for Lifetype 1.2.5

Description

Lifetype 1.2.5 is the latest maintenance release of the 1.2 branch and after five maintenance releases, this is as stable and rock-solid as it gets. Continuing with the trend started in the 1.2 branch, Lifetype 1.2.5 delivers a couple of minor new features and some polish under the hood, specially concerning the API. We have noticed that as of late, there has been a somewhat remarkable increase of support issues and bug reports related to the API, so it finally seems like users and developers have started to realize the potential of the fully-featured and documented API that you get with Lifetype (and for free!) We're happy to see such trend and we'll continue to support and encourage enterprising users to make the best out of Lifetype classes and libraries.

Download

These are the links to the full Lifetype 1.2.5 packages:

Lifetype 1.2.5 (.tar.bz2)

Lifetype 1.2.5 (.tar.gz)

Lifetype 1.2.5 (.zip)

If upgrading from Lifetype 1.2.4, there are packages available which only include new or modified files and will allow you to upgrade from Lifetype 1.2.4 only. These packages can not be used to upgrade from 1.1.x or 1.2 to 1.2.5:

Lifetype upgrade package from 1.2.4 (.tar.bz)

Lifetype upgrade package from 1.2.4 (.zip)

New features

The following features have been introduced in Lifetype 1.2.5.

"Bookmarkable" filters

Some screens in Lifetype support filtering based on certain conditions but so far there was no easy way to save those filters so that for example we could quickly access the list of users marked as disabled and whose username starts with "a". As of Lifetype 1.2.5, there is a small icon that looks like a link next to each group of filters. This icon is nothing but a link pointing to the current page with its filtered values, so all you need to do is bookmark this link in your browser for future usage.

Totally disable the data cache

So far there was no way to disable the data cache, the layer that is responsible of saving data loaded from the database to disk for faster access later, so we have added some additional code for the very few cases where disabling the data cache is needed.

In order to disable the cache, edit the file config/cache.properties.php and make the following change:

$config["cache_method"] = "null";

Setting cache_method to 'null' will effectively disable the data cache.

Notification of new blogs

When a new blog is registered via summary.php, administrators can now optionally receive a notification message informing them of the new regsitration regardless of the status of the blog.

Issues fixed

In addition to the API fixes mentioned above, there's two long standing issues that have been addressed in this release: Lifetype can finally handle backslashes comfortably and the size of thumbnails is correctly calculated when keeping the aspect ratio and using the GD backend. An important issue that was allowing spam comments to be saved to the database instead of being rejected as spam has also been fixed has also been fixed.

This is the full list of issues fixed in Lifetype 1.2.5, extracted from the project's bug tracking system:

1359: Fix for Blogs::getAllBlogs()
1366: Files uploaded to the wrong destination when using the API
1367: "Default article category" not working
1141: Backslashes getting filtered
1356: Font options greyed out after preview
1376: Joomla user data provider not working with Joomla older than 1.0.13
1382: In the edit categories menu, a 0 is shown incorrectly if there aren't any published articles in a category.
1380: Conditionally show categories on the main page is broken.
1386: Spammers are able to post comments even if comments are disabled for a particular post
1387: comments with article_id = 0 created by some spam bots
1392: PluginTemplatedView not using cache anyway
1395: BlogNameValidator() will cause add blog error even the Chinese blog name is valid
1396: Templates directory hardcoded in baserequestgenerator.class.php
1400: PDbResultSet::GetArray() missing
1409: Problems displaying article categories
1413: Dots as part of a category name do not work with custom URLs
1407: final_size_thumbnail is calculated wrong

Lifetype 1.2.5-beta available

oscar — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 16:22:13 -0400

We released a beta version of the newest bugfix release of the 1.2 branch, Lifetype 1.2.5.

We've upgraded TinyMCE to 2.1.2, worked out some annoying little issues related to using backslashes as part of post contents and fixed a few more minor issues, all to make Lifetype 1.2.5 an even more stable and fine release for our users.

A more detailed list of fixes and improvements will be provided when the final release is available, but in the meantime you can check the list in the project's bug tracker: go to the "view issues" section of our bug tracker and select "Fixed 1.2.5" as the filter.

Packages containing the full Lifetype 1.2.5-beta release are available by following the links below:

Lifetype 1.2.5-beta (.zip)

Lifetype 1.2.5-beta (.tar.gz)

Lifetype 1.2.5-beta (.tar.bz2)

If you're already running Lifetype 1.2.4, it is possible to upgrade using an incremental release:

Lifetype 1.2.5-beta upgrade package from Lifetype 1.2.4 (.zip)

Lifetype 1.2.5-beta upgrade package from Lifetype 1.2.4 (.tar.gz)

Please report any issues with this beta via the project's bug tracker, or feel free to discuss any topic in the project's forums.

If there are no major issues reported related to this release, a final release of Lifetype 1.2.5 will take place during the next few days.

Best Open Source Social Networking CMS - Vote for Us!

reto — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 13:57:09 -0400

Packt Publishing is hosting the 2007 Open Source CMS Awards and LifeType made it to the final in the category "Best Open Source Social Networking CMS". We have some serious competition in our group: Drupal and Wordpress. (Although I don't think Wordpress can be considered "Social Networking CMS" as it's only a single blog installation, but that's another story. ;-)

Please help us win the contest and vote for us (fill in your name and e-mail in the top right corner).

Roadmap

oscar — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 05:13:16 -0400

Some of you have been wondering where Lifetype is headed, when the next version will be released or what we've got in the pipeline... so here you go.

Lifetype 1.2.x

The 1.2.x branch of Lifetype will go on as expected, there will be as many maintenance releases as needed as long as there are bugs to fix. If there is any interesting minor feature that can be implemented, it will be considered but otherwise there will be no major changes.

Lifetype 2.0

The next major release will be Lifetype 2.0. We had some plans to develop a small 1.3 release and then tackle most of the changes below in 2.0, but those plans have been scrapped and instead we'll go for a bigger 2.0 release. The major version bump is justified by two important changes that will happen with Lifetype 2.0:

UTF-8
PHP 5

First of all, we're moving Lifetype to work internally in UTF-8.While some of the current translations are already using UTF-8 and the core is able to work fine with it, we're going to have a close look at it and make sure that it all works as expected. Also most of the western languages (English, French, Spanish, etc) are still using ISO-8859-1 as the character encoding and while this means that the ugprade process from the previous version will be a bit more challenging than usual, it also means one single encoding will be able to support all current and future translations.

With full support for PHP 5, Lifetype is finally entering the 21st century as far as programming languages are concerned. While old code will not be rewritten unless strictly necessary, developers are now free to utilize any of the new language features provided by PHP 5. The minimum required version for which we are developing is PHP 5.1, as that is considered by the development team the first truly usable version of PHP 5.

The two features outlined above have little or no effect on end users, so this is what we have planned for them in Lifetype 2.0:

Integrated friends list and private messaging.
Integration with Google Maps.
Ajaxification and clean-up of the user interface.

The integrated friends list will allow users to keep a list of their "friends" within a Lifetype community, much like LiveJournal does. Additionally, users will be able to exchange private messages with each other, and we're hoping that these features will increase the interactions between users and help grow the feeling of community.

Also, thanks to the integration with Google Maps users will be able to tag their posts, blogs and files with geographical information (known as geotagging) All you need to do is get a Google Maps API key and Lifetype will take care of the rest.

Last but not least, we're also working on creating a more dynamic and friendly user interface. For the first part we're using Javascript and the Ajax approach, and we've already got some things working, like dynamic paging of data without reloading the page, dynamic validation of forms, etc. For the second part (i.e. a more friendly interface) we're trying to reduce the number of options, buttons, links and gadgets in general used in the user interface to make it feel less daunting and more appealing to new users. Sometimes in our quest to provide the biggest amount of features we forget about usability and user friendliness and no we're trying to make up for that.

Now about the estimated release date... We usually don't commit to any release date(s) and we're not going to do it this time either. Our estimations are that Lifetype 2.0 should be in a usable state at some point in late 2007 and ready for mass consumption in early 2008. [Update 03/2008: this date has not been accurate for quite a while, but I hadn't realized we had published a date. 2.0 is currently in alpha stage, and I don't think anyone is using it for their own blog. I think historically the final release has been about 6 months after the developers start using it for their own blog] We've made good progress lately in the development area and things are already looking pretty good, but there's still a lot to do and we're in no hurry anyway: Lifetype 1.2.x is now rock solid, offers a pretty good amount of functionality and we're committed to provide as many maintenance releases of the 1.2.x branch as needed.

In the meantime if you'd like to help us develop Lifetype 2.0, we've created a Lifetype 2.0 TODO list in the wiki including most of the open items so far. Have a look at it and if you think you can help us, let us know. Otherwise in case you're just interested to see how things are coming along, the code in trunk in our Subversion repository is perfectly usable at the moment and things like the friends list, the Google Maps integration and about 50% of the interface has already been ajaxified.

After Lifetype 2.0

It's still early to say what will happen after Lifetype 2.0 and to provide a list of potential features would be foolish. We have a bunch of things in our roadmap that would be good to have but that have not been assigned to any release, so some or all of those could potentially end up being implemented in Lifetype 2.1.

We'd also like to hear feedback from our users because after all we're doing this for you guys, so please make sure that you use any of the suitable channels to send us your feedback!

Lifetype tidbits

oscar — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 03:40:42 -0400

Some Lifetype titbits...

The guys at Codango.com have got a review of Lifetype 1.2 up and running. The feedback is very positive and Lifetype scored a deserved 9! The review also highlights some areas that could see some improvements and the development team is planning to work on them accordingly.

In other news, Lifetype has been nominated as a candidate for the 2007 Overall Open Source CMS, 2007 Best PHP Open Source CMS and 2007 Best Open Source Social Networking CMS awards organized by PacktPub.com. Only the 5 CMSs with the most nominations in each category will proceed to the final, so show us your support and click the links below to submit your vote in each one of the categories:

2007 Overall Open Source CMS

2007 Best PHP Open Source CMS

2007 Best Open Source Social Networking CMS

Forum Maintenance

reto — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 16:45:57 -0400

Due to maintenance work, the forums will be offline in the evening (european time) of the 21st of July for about 1.5h.

Thank you for your understanding.

Lifetype 1.2.4 released - UPDATED

oscar — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 13:42:40 -0400

The newest maintenance release of the 1.2 branch, Lifetype 1.2.4 is now available. As with any other release, it is focused mainly on fixing most of the issues reported since the last release but it also incorporates a few interesting features (this time in the area of core version and plugin version management)

Read on for the release notes and report any issues or bugs via our bug tracking system and the project's support forums.

UPDATE: There was a bug in the original 1.2.4 package. If you downloaded Lifetype 1.2.4 before July 19th at 19:00 GMT, please download it again and update your files. The issue affected only Lifetype 1.2.4 running in PHP5 servers and consisted of unnecessary characters added to all fields when adding new comments to a post.

Release notes for Lifetype 1.2.4

Description

Lifetype 1.2.4 is the fourth maintenance release from the 1.2 branch and brings a couple of new features in addition to fixing all the issues detected since the release of Lifetype 1.2.3.

Download

These are the links to the full LifeType 1.2.4 packages:

LifeType 1.2.4 (.tar.bz2)

LifeType 1.2.4 (.tar.gz)

LifeType 1.2.4 (.zip)

If upgrading from Lifetype 1.2.3, there are packages available which only include new or modified files and will allow you to upgrade from LifeType 1.2.3 only. These packages can not be used to upgrade from 1.1.x or 1.2 to 1.2.4:

LifeType upgrade package from 1.2.3 (.tar.bz)

LifeType upgrade package from 1.2.3 (.zip)

New features

The following features have been introduced in Lifetype 1.2.4.

Lifetype version check

A new button labelled "Check" is now available in the "Versions" page (inside the "Administration" page) This button will check an RSS feed listing the latest version available of Lifetype and report whether we are up-to-date. If we are not, it will display the link to the release notes as well as to the downloadable package so that users can immediately download and upgrade to the most recent release.

Currently these checks are performed on demand, Lifetype will only check versions when asked to.

The RSS feed is available at http://www.lifetype.net/feeds/1.2/lifetype.xml. Although not necessary, users may choose to subscribe to this RSS feed via an RSS reader to stay up-to-date.

Improved plugin centre with version check

The plugin centre has also been improved in Lifetype 1.2.4. Next to each one of the plugins there is now an additional link pointing to the wiki page describing the plugin operation and configuration. Some users have had trouble finding documentation for plugins so we hope this will make things easier.

Similarly to the main Lifetype version check described above, there is a new button "Check versions" at the bottom of the plugin centre that will verify that we are running the most recent version of all the installed plugins. In case we are not, the plugin centre will display a warning message and display a link to the downloadable package of the plugin.

This check is based on the contents of an RSS feed available at http://www.lifetype.net/feeds/1.2/plugins.xml and checks are also performed on demand. Please use this feature to make sure you are running the latest version of a plugin before reporting an issue related to a plugin.

Other features

Thanks to Lifetype.ru, the Tatar translation as UTF-8 is now available for Lifetype 1.2.4.

Issues fixed

Extracted from the project's bug tracking system, this is the full list of issues fixed in Lifetype 1.2.4:

1357: Local Youtube sites not working with the insertvideo plugin
1355: Dashboard should try to send the correct locale
1280: Comment added to non-existant article_id
1336: add comment URL error / validator
1284: no admin login from subdomains after upgrading from 1.1.x to 1.2.x
1326: Strings not localizable in the Admin core (and other related problems)
1346: Error uploading resources with ' on the file name...
1344: Error in purge post process
1343: png thumbnails and JPG uploads will break the previews
1340: Send a 404 response header for page not found
1334: Article order defaults to older_first
1339: Security issue in PHPMailer
1358: .m4a files not recognized as audio files (and therefore cannot be used as podcasts)

Привет, русские пользователи Lifetype!

oscar — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 13:42:16 -0400

Since the very beginning, Lifetype has always been about diversity. First we had the Chinese speaking community, then the German speaking community and today we are happy to announce that we have got a new official community in our landscape, the Lifetype Russian community!

The centre of the new community will be www.lifetype.ru which will provide their own localized news and activities. For Lifetype support in Russian, we have also created a Russian section in our support forums so that native Russian speakers can feel more comfortable when looking for help.

Communities don't grow alone, Lifetype needs you! If you feel that you can help the project, the Russian community (or any of the other regional communities), don't hesitate to drop us a message at contact__AT__lifetype.net or support__AT__lifetype.ru and we'll be have to listen to whatever you have got in mind! For now, let's warmly welcome our new Russian friends and hope they will have a great stay.

LifeType Development Journal

LifeType 1.2.11 released

LifeType 1.2.10 released

LifeType 1.2.9 released

Comprehensive Security Review on Lifetype 1.2

LifeType 1.2.8 released

Download

LifeType 1.2.7 released

Official release notes

Download

LifeType 1.2.6 released

Official release notes

Download

Lifetype 1.2.5 released

Release notes for Lifetype 1.2.5

Description

Download

New features

"Bookmarkable" filters

Totally disable the data cache

Notification of new blogs

Issues fixed

Lifetype 1.2.5-beta available

Best Open Source Social Networking CMS - Vote for Us!

Roadmap

Lifetype 1.2.x

Lifetype 2.0

After Lifetype 2.0

Lifetype tidbits

Forum Maintenance

Lifetype 1.2.4 released - UPDATED

Release notes for Lifetype 1.2.4

Description

Download

New features

Lifetype version check

Improved plugin centre with version check

Other features

Issues fixed

&#1055;&#1088;&#1080;&#1074;&#1077;&#1090;, &#1088;&#1091;&#1089;&#1089;&#1082;&#1080;&#1077; &#1087;&#1086;&#1083;&#1100;&#1079;&#1086;&#1074;&#1072;&#1090;&#1077;&#1083;&#1080; Lifetype!

Привет, русские пользователи Lifetype!