The “Carbon Copy” beta update is all about sharing your site’s genetic
code with other sites (or at least, um, its HTML and CSS code). This update
adds site cloning, allowing you to create a new site as an identical
copy of another site in your system. Also: You can now save your custom site
design as a theme that can be applied to other sites. Plus: Lots of other
miscellaneous improvements and bug fixes.
Site Cloning
What’s more cuddly than a clone? Friends, isn’t it time that you got
your very own? Breathe easy, the magic of Big Medium lets you do
just that. The new “Clone This Site” feature in Big Medium’s
“Settings” menu allows administrators to add new sites
by cloning an existing Big Medium site.
The clone has all of the properties of the original site: The same
section structure, design templates, theme style sheet, and preferences.
You can also optionally choose to copy all of the original site’s
content and user privileges.
Use clones for site backups, for “sandbox” sites to experiment with
template changes, or to create a network of related sites that share
the same design... your own clone army.
For the details, check out the “Cloning a Site” section of
Chapter 15, “Managing Multiple Sites” in the Big Medium
book.
Add your own themes to the theme library
The new “Save Theme in Library” feature lets administrators add a
site’s custom design to Big Medium’s theme library. The theme can
then be applied to other sites in your Big Medium installation.
Designers and web hosts can build a library of custom themes for
their customers. Managers of site networks can use custom themes to
quickly apply design changes across the network.
These saved themes are also portable, so you can also share your own
custom themes with other Big Medium installations.
For more, check out the “Add Your Own Themes to the Library” section of
Chapter 8, “Themes and Site Designs” in the Big Medium
book.
Go forth and multiply
Download the latest version of Big Medium here.
The download package includes complete installation instructions, including
notes for upgrading from previous versions of the Big Medium 2 beta.
Shortcut instructions for upgrading from 2.0b50 are
provided below. (If you’re upgrading from a version prior to 2.0b50,
please follow the full installation instructions in the download package;
along the way, those instructions include special notes for upgrading.)
The Nitty Gritty
Here’s what’s new in this update:
New features and improvements
New “Clone This Site” feature lets you create new sites with the same
design, preferences and section structure of another site in the system.
You also have the option to copy content and user privileges from the
original site.
New “Save Theme in Library” feature lets you save a site’s
master templates and style settings as a theme so that you can apply the
design to other sites. Bonus: These saved themes are portable so that you
can share your custom themes with other Big Medium installations.
Custom preferences for tag links let you customize the display of links
on tag pages (they previously followed the preferences of the homepage’s
<%links%> widget). These preferences are located in the new
“Widget:taglinks” panel of the “Links” HTML preferences.
Images in links generated by the news gadget are now hot-linked.
Modest performance improvements when building search-engine sitemap files.
All popup/preview windows are now resizable and include the location
field, status bar, scrollbars and toolbars for improved accessibility.
The Markdown cheatsheet now includes notice that, when adding your own
HTML to Markdown text, you should not indent the opening or closing tags of
the enclosing block-level element.
Content deletion is now logged in the system log.
Bug fixes
Fixed a bug that could cause severe slowdowns when saving or building
large sites whose page directory URLs are not within (or the same as)
the homepage directory.
Fixed a bug that could cause a miscellaneous item (image, document,
author) to stop appearing on pages after you remove the last instance of
a tag from the site (effectively deleting the tag from the site).
Fixed a bug that prevented the Markdown cheatsheet window from sizing
properly.
Fixed a bug that allowed links to appear in the spotlight
position of a section page even when the “suppress on section pages”
option is selected, if the “suppress on parent pages” option is also
selected.
Improved “Paste from Word” function in the rich-text editor to better
detect single line breaks (it was previously treating them as full
paragraphs).
Fixed a bug on tag pages that inserted an incorrect URL for pages with
the “suppress on homepage” option checked.
Fixed a bug that allowed pages from inactive sections to be displayed on
tag pages.
Fixed a bug that caused imported leggacy sites to display image-based
navigation incorrectly for individual sections if no rollover image was
provided for that section.
Fixed tool links to work properly with URLs with query strings
(specifically, for compatibility with a plugin that promotes compatibility
with the Google News spider).
Fixed a bug that caused an unfriendly error message if Big Medium
encountered problems processing an image.
Improved cleanup of uploaded image files if there’s a problem processing
the image for resizing.
Removed unused code from the bm.js JavaScript file used in public sites.
Fixed a bug in the legacy site importer that could cause the cryptic
“inappropriate ioctl for device” error message to appear under certain
conditions.
Fixed a bug that left some orphan data in the system when deleting items
from the media libraries.
Upgrading from 2.0b50?
If you’re upgrading from v2.0b50, you can update to the new
version by following the instructions below. (For earlier versions, follow
the full installation instructions in the download package; along the way,
those instructions include special notes for upgrading.)
To upgrade from v2.0b50:
1. Set your FTP client to “plain text” or “ascii” mode. Upload to moxiebin/Modules directory:
BigMed.pmBigMed (directory and all contents)
2. Upload to moxiedata/templates/cp_templates directory:
screen_help_markdown.tmplshell_cp_bottom.tmplwi_themes_preview.tmpl
3. Upload to moxiedata/templates/site_templates directory:
JS (directory and all contents)
4. Upload to moxiedata/support/assets:
5. Change your FTP client to “automatic” or “binary” mode. Upload to bmadmin/img directory:
6. Upload to bmadmin/js directory:
bigmedium_cp.jsbm-theme.js
7. Upload to bmadmin/wysiwyg/editor/dialog directory:
8. Run the updater
Browse to the bm-update.cgi file in your site’s moxiebin directory.
For example:
http://www.example.com/cgi-bin/moxiebin/bm-update.cgi
This completes the update from 2.0b50 or later.
Tags:
beta,
bigmedium
