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Big Medium 2.0 Release Candidate 4: "Cub Reporter"

The fourth release candidate for Big Medium 2 adds the “Newsprint” design to Big Medium’s theme library and fixes several bugs.

By Josh Clark

The “Cub Reporter” release candidate for Big Medium 2 adds the “Newsprint” design to Big Medium’s theme library and fixes several bugs. The Newsprint theme features a compact, efficient presentation for high-volume news and magazine sites, packing lots of content into a clean and clear design while carving out space for advertising, if that’s your bag.

The “Newsprint” design theme.

This brings the tally for Big Medium’s theme library to... two! Yep, count ‘em: two design themes. Never fear, there are more themes on the way for the final release of Big Medium 2, just a few weeks away. Although the main goal of Big Medium is to allow designers to automate their own highly original custom designs, the final version will come with a handful of useful themes to help non-designers get started. Stay tuned.

For more info on what’s new in this version, see the complete list of changes.

As noted in previous release announcements, Big Medium now requires Perl 5.6.1 or higher; if you’ve been running Big Medium on a server with Perl 5.6.0 or earlier, you’ll need to upgrade your Perl installation in order to continue. Not sure what version you have? Download the compatibility checker from the system requirements page.

Complete list of changes

Get the scoop!

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 2.0rc1, rc2 or rc3 are provided below. (If you’re upgrading from 2.0b52 or earlier, 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

Added Newsprint design to the theme library (“Layout>New Theme”).

Changes

Added a “skip navigation” link to <%navigation%> and <%subnavigation%> widgets. These links are hidden in most browsers but enhance accessibility for vision-impaired site visitors.
Added Windows Vista fonts to the style editor’s list of Windows fonts.
Improved the markup for dropdown menus to eliminate a one-pixel gap that sometimes appeared below menus in Internet Explorer.
<%content%> widget no longer builds any html at all if there’s no content to display.
Added metadata <link> tag to the <head> tag of all pages to point to the homepage URL for improved accessibility in alternative browsers.
Shuffled order of the main “Layout” menu screen to reflect the order in the dropdown menu. Added “Save theme in library” panel to this screen.
Updated installation instructions to clarify info for configuring the maintenance script on Windows servers.

Bug fixes

Fixed bug that prevented the style editor from working in Internet Explorer when editing a site at a domain other than the one where Big Medium is installed.
Fixed bug that prevented batch upload from working correctly on the “individual” tab of the library editor’s batch uploads page.
Fixed bug that allowed <select> pulldowns to obscure dropdown menus in Internet Explorer 6.
Fixed a bug that prevented the “suppress links to the current page” feature from working correctly.
<%tagcloud%> widget now suppresses tags that contain only unpublished or inactive pages.
Fixed bug that caused the edit menu to reset the content type you’re browsing when entering a new display filter. Entering a new title/section filter now maintains the current content type (e.g., announcements, tips or page subtypes) instead of resetting to the “all” view for “pages.”
Fixed crashing bug (“wide character” error) when editing some Markdown files in servers running Perl 5.6.1.
Fixed a rare crashing bug that occurred when submitting a badly formatted directory URL to, e.g., the Big Medium setup wizard when JavaScript is disabled or there’s a missing/corrupted JavaScript file in the bmadmin directory.
Fixed bug that caused text-format info (“RichText,” “Markdown”, “RawHTML”) to creep into page titles when page description was selected as one of the title elements in HTML preferences.
Fixed a bug that prevented external links on images from properly opening in a full-size window when the “open external links in new window” option is selected.
Fixed a bug that caused one-click editing links to open the Big Medium control panel in a too-small window.

Upgrading from Big Medium 2.0rc1, rc2 or rc3?

If you’re upgrading from v2.0rc1 or v2.0rc2 or v2.0rc3, you can update to the new version by following the instructions below.

1. Set your FTP client to “plain text” or “ascii” mode.

2. Upload to `moxiebin/Modules` directory:

BigMed.pm
BigMed (directory and all contents)
HTML (directory and all contents)

3. Upload to `moxiedata/support/assets` directory:

bm.js
bm-ie.js

4. Upload to `moxiedata/templates/site_templates` directory:

base.css
_navcss (directory and all contents)

5. Upload to `moxiedata/templates/site_templates/HTML` directory:

wi_content.tmpl
wi_content_image.tmpl
wi_htmlhead.tmpl
wi_navigation.tmpl
wi_oneclick.tmpl

6. Set your FTP client to “automatic” or “binary” mode.

7. Upload to `bmadmin/themes/_general` directory:

newsprint (directory and all contents)

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 2.0rc1, rc2 or rc3.

Tags: beta, bigmedium