Global Moxie

The “Fashionista” update is the sixth (and, I hope, final) release candidate for Big Medium 2. The new version adds four new designs to Big Medium’s theme library, plus a variety of changes and bug fixes.

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

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.

Four New Themes

Although the main goal of Big Medium is to allow designers to automate their own highly original custom designs on behalf of their clients, Big Medium 2 comes with several design themes to help non-designers get started. This version adds four new themes, rounding out Big Medium’s starter-kit of six varied designs.

Here’s a quick glimpse of the latest additions to Big Medium’s wardrobe.

Bitter Sweet: A lime-flavored layout, with special thanks to Viktor Persson of Arcsin for creating and licensing the original design.

Effervescence: A bright and bubbly design for a high-energy online identity.

High Gloss: A rich but restrained design featuring subtle highlighting effects.

Jetsetter: A sky-high design with a cosmopolitan look and a friendly feel.

Try It On

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, rc3, rc4 or rc5 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 four new themes to Big Medium’s theme library:

• Bittersweet: A lime-flavored layout, with special thanks to Viktor Persson of Arcsin for creating and licensing the original design.

• Effervescence: A bright and bubbly design for a high-energy online identity.

• High Gloss: A rich but restrained design featuring subtle highlighting effects.

• Jetsetter: A sky-high design with a cosmopolitan look and a friendly feel.

Changes

• Setting the auto-publish time for a page, announcement or tip with a time in the past now backdates the publication date to that time; the publication status is also set to “published” if necessary. (The auto-publish time remains available only to publishers, webmasters and administrators.)

• The rich-text editor now trims any empty paragraphs at the end of submitted text.

• Widows are now prevented in the <%headline%> widget (a widow is a single word that is left dangling on its own line, separated from other words in the headline).

• For sites with the “Include content/detail page title in breadcrumbs” option selected, Big Medium no longer displays the current page title if it is exactly the same as the current section title. This was commonly the case for section pages and, while technically correct, resulted in a double title that looked like a mistake.

• Removed <%related%> from the default homepage template, since homepages do not have related links.

• Updated the “Newsprint” theme

  • Removed <%related%> widget from the theme’s section page, since section pages don’t have related links.
  • Added improved styles for the subheadings (when enabled).
  • Added 1px pad to bottom of columns to enforce proper layout when a column is empty.

• The class name for the homepage navigation menu is now bmn_sec-__HOME to fall in line with the __HOME value that is returned by <%sectionslug%> for the homepage. (If you have custom styles for the homepage navigation, you’ll need to update them to reflect this change.)

• Added “rebuild all pages” link to confirmation message after applying a new theme.

• Email-this-page and status-update emails now convert ~ tildes in URLs into “%7E” to accommodate buggy URL handling in Mail for Mac OSX Leopard.

• Changed some default preferences:

  • Link elements are now: Headline, description.
  • A line break is now inserted before link description if there is one.
  • Related links are no longer included with links.
  • Number of links in <%links%> is now 10.
  • Number of links in <%latest%> is now 5.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed bug that caused last page of search results to redirect directly to the final search result URL if that last page consisted of only one result (i.e. for searches with a number of results ending in one: 11, 21, 31, 571, etc).

• Fixed a bug that prevented a custom template file for search results (wi_search_result.tmpl) from being loaded properly from the moxiedata/templates_custom directory.

• Search-results page breadcrumbs now formats properly (was just the “search results” title; now includes link to home page, too.)

• Fixed bug that prevented Sendmail’s -f “forge” flag from being set on outgoing email; bounced messages are now properly returned to the sender in the “from” address instead of to the Big Medium server.

• Fixed rare crashing bug in the media library and in Big Medium’s image thumbnailer for Windows servers that do not support Perl’s IPC::Run module.

• Fixed XHTML validation error under “XHTML strict” mode in <%search%> widget.

• Fixed a rare and inconsistent crashing bug with message “Unrecognized line: foo@bar.com” when parsing email form fields on Perl 5.8.0 servers.

• Fixed bug that caused the theme library to slip out of “new site” mode when applying a theme to a brand new site if you clicked on a theme category tab. This meant that pages were not built for the new site as they normally would be after applying the theme.

• Fixed bug that caused the setup wizard layout to be displayed when previewing a theme for a new site, even long after completing the setup wizard.

• Fixed bug in theme library that prevented the confirmation message from displaying after applying a theme whose assets directory is not present.

• Fixed a typo in email alerts for page changes.

• Added missing breadcrumbs to the main tag page and to the news gadget page.

Upgrading from Big Medium 2.0rc1, rc2, rc3, rc4 or rc5?

If you’re upgrading from v2.0rc1 or v2.0rc2, v2.0rc3, v2.0rc4 or v2.0rc5, 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)
• Mail (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)
• JS (directory and all contents)

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

• _home.txt
• wi_content.tmpl
• wi_content_image.tmpl
• wi_htmlhead.tmpl
• wi_navigation.tmpl
• wi_oneclick.tmpl
• wi_search.tmpl

6. Upload to bmadmin directory:

• css (directory and all contents)

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

8. Upload to bmadmin/themes directory:

• _general (directory and all contents)

9. 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, rc3, rc4 or rc5.

Tags: beta, bigmedium