The first update in a few weeks serves up a chilly-fresh set of new features including a "lightbox" effect for enlarging photos and viewing slideshows; auto-publishing and unpublishing of pages; and much more. (A healthy dash of bug fixes, too!)
The "Crushed Ice" beta update offers some cool new features to soothe the
fevered brow of any overheated webmaster (speaking of overheated, how's that
for marketing copy?).
In addition to some wide-ranging improvements and optimizations under the hood,
the new version also includes several new features and loads of bug fixes. Among
the new features are auto-publishing/unpublishing of pages and a nifty new
"lightbox" effect for enlarging photos and viewing slideshows. Click the thumbnail
images on this page to get a taste.
Download the latest version of Big Medium here.
Some installation notes
These features and fixes do require a few new installation steps; if you're
upgrading from a previous version Big Medium 2.0, I recommend that you
carefully follow the complete update instructions that come with the
download package. Because very few files have gone untouched in this update,
I'm not providing a list of the changed files as I usually do. I recommend
that you reupload all of the files as described in the instructions.
In particular, Big Medium 2.0b15 introduces a number of JavaScript changes that you will need to clear from your browser's cache ("refreshing" your browser won't do the trick). Anyone who has used previous versions of Big Medium 2.0 should follow these steps:
- In Internet Explorer, go to "Tools>Internet Options," click the "General" tab, and then click the "Delete Files..." button in the "Temporary Internet Files" button.
- In Firefox, click the Privacy tab in Firefox preferences and then click the "Cache" tab. Click the "Clear Cache Now" button.
Then follow these steps:
- Sign into Big Medium.
- Click "New Article" to bring up an edit page.
- If you are using Internet Explorer, hit CTRL+F5. If you are using Firefox, Camino, Netscape or Flock, hit Shift+CTRL+R (Shift+COMMAND+R for Mac).
- Click OK when you're asked if you really want to navigate away from the current page.
Okay, now onto the fun stuff...
New features
- "Lightbox" effect for enlarging images, including slideshow-style next/previous views for images assigned to the gallery of any page.
- Auto-publishing and auto-unpublishing of pages. This feature requires some server configuration, specifically setting up a recurring task (or "cron job") to run Big Medium's maintenance script.
- Several widget enhancements:
- New
<%modified%>; widget to display the date/time when a page was last edited.
- New preference for indicating the image size to display when enlarging images.
- New "main" attribute for
<%pulldown%> specifies that they display the subsections for the current main section (instead of the current subsection).
- The
<%subnavigation%> widget now has "main" and "slug" attributes to allow you to control which section's subsections should be displayed.
- The
<%sectionlink%> widget now has a "slug" attribute that allows you to specify which section's name and link to display.
- The WYSIWYG editor has been updated to add, among other things, faster loading of the rich-text editor.
- New version updater to automatically update your site(s) after installing a new version of Big Medium.
- The name of the last person to edit an item is now shown in the edit menu.
- System event logging to record Big Medium actions (logs are stored in moxiedata/logs).
- Changing a section's slug name in the "Section Layout" page now automatically moves all files to the new slug name directory.
Bug fixes:
- Fixed bug that prevented login for Windows IIS servers.
- Fixed bug that caused rich-text editor to stop working when switching between editor tabs in Firefox 1.0. (Thanks to Steve Carter).
- Fixed a crashing bug that prevented section-specific page building from the "Rebuild Pages" menu. (Thanks to Sander Feinberg).
- Fixed crashing bug that could occur when Big Medium encounters directory permission errors or missing files when creating a new site.
- Fixed a bug that caused the
<%subnavigation%> and <%navigation%> widgets to ignore the navigation depth setting in the Navigation HTML Preferences. (Thanks to Sander Feinberg).
- Fixed a bug that made it difficult to select and change the publication status menu on an edit page in Internet Explorer. (Thanks to Steve Carter).
- Fixed a bug that could cause an error message when you delete an item immediately after signing in. (Thanks to Sander Feinberg).
- Fixed a bug that caused an "Unknown content type" error when using the pagination links to navigate among a multi-page editor menu in the control panel.
- Fixed bug that prevented accounts with publisher, editor or writer permissions from seeing or editing the homepage in the edit menu. (Thanks to Ellen Livingood).
- Fixed bug that could allow pages to have "index" as the slug name, causing a conflict with main section pages.
- Added missing breadcrumbs on account-related control panel pages.
- Fixed a CSS issue that could cause inconsistent site-title color in the Cup o' Joe theme. (Thanks to Sander Feinberg).
- Fixed problem that could cause some characters to become garbled on printer-friendly pages (incorrect character encoding).
- Fixed bug that caused the
<%tips%> widget to ignore the sort order preference set in HTML preferences.