I had planned to do so much with Furasta.Org, but I have been forced to narrow it down to a small list of features. Additional features will be added through the plugin architecture, and in time to the main CMS.

• Editing Pages – the most obvious and fundamental feature, but I have added a few thing to this that I haven’t seen elsewhere.
• Users and Permissions – It will be possible to set who can view certain pages, and even who can edit them. In the future I hope to expand on this section with User Groups, though they will not be included in this release.
• Website Configuration – General settings, also including some new ideas I haven’t seen anywhere.
• Template Management – Set what template or theme to use for the website’s appearance. Though not in this release, I hope to add an online template repository which one can browse from the CMS admin panel.
• Plugin Architecture – One of the largest and most important features of the whole system. This complex architecture will allow other developers to use Furasta.Org to their advantage. Through the use of a “hook” system, vaguely similar to wordpress’s, I hope to offer the developer total control over almost every part of the CMS. In the future I also plan to add a plugin repository to the website, which will include verified, safe plugins and which will be installable from the admin panel.
• Upgrade Manager – Regardless of what I have said so far; this is the most important feature. I was of two minds as to including this feature so soon, but I decided that If this was enabled then systmes would be updated smoothly along with new releases.

So there’s a lot in store – and the first website running the CMS will be Furasta.Org – live on the 1st August 2010.

Below I have attached a screenshot of the new admin interface.

A sneak preview of what is to come in Furasta.Org 1.0

The release won’t be feature packed, but the plugin architecture should be working. Note that the SVN has not been updated in ages, but I should get around to it next week as well.

I started working on the design on Thursday and I like the way it looks, If anyone has any layout suggestions I would like to hear them though! Anyway I do realise that it is not 100% cross browser compatible. I looked at it in Internet Explorer 7 today and was shocked as to how all over the place it was. But theres nothing to major there, I might get a chance to fix it tonight. To be honest it took me 3 times what I spent on the design to come up with the content!

In the new website you will see everything you need to get you started. It includes an extensive help page that will teach even my granny how to set up the CMS! But if you still have problems you can email support as the forum is on it’s way. I plan to write something soon on how to take full advantage of TinyMCE because I was messing about with it the other say and is really amazing how much power it has! There is also a short but sweet F.A.Q.

<legal crap>One thing that I need to mention. I have to emphasise that the name of my Content Management System is, and always has been ‘Furasta CMS’, not ‘Furasta’ or any other variant of the word. </legal crap>

There are two incomplete aspects of the website, the Forum and the Template Repositary. I will work on the Forum – I don’t know when, I have evil genious plans for this thing and it might take a while to design. The release of the Template Repositary will co-inside with the release of v.0.1.5 and will support people uploading and advertising their own templates.

Well sin sin. I might write something else later about Writing Your Own Templates and make full use of the Codex that I spent so much time writing!