After a long pause in development I have begun writing the first stable version of Furasta – 0.2. I haven’t really done anything with the project since I set up the website a few months ago. But since then I have been building up experience by examining other open source projects, such as Webme, Wordpress and Joomla. I learnt a lot from those projects and they have contributed a lot of ideas for Furasta!

I have abandoned all of the old code and opted to write the whole thing again from scratch. Considering how long it took me to write v0.1.5, about a month of flat out coding every night, I expect v0.2 to be completed in the same sort of timescale. One thing is for sure – there will be no micro-optimisation this time! After all the effort I put into that last time the damn program was still slow. This time I will invest my executable time in more important tasks, ones that only directly affect what’s going on as you load the page, and perform tasks such as server side caching through AJAX so the user doesn’t notice it.

The project is also going to be available from svn from now on. Since I am writing it from scratch there are only a few files in the svn at the moment and there’s also no installation script. But that will come in time!

http://code.google.com/p/furasta-cms/source/checkout

I am taking a completely different approach to writing the CMS this time. In fact I would go as far as calling it an engine rather than a CMS. Basically what I plan to do is build a solid framework that on it’s own does nothing, but has the ability to do everything. There will be no pages except the essential homepage. Everything, I mean everything that will give this program the characteristics of a CMS will be achieved by the plugin architecture. So for example to edit and display pages, I will create a plugin. Obviously the CMS will have to be shipped with a few default plugins, which it will be possible to disable through a plugin manager plugin! I might be going a bit overboard with this idea but in theory it seems like a good one!

So enough talking, time to start writing!

When finishing off a few of my webme templates today I thought to myself, What if the people buying the templates don’t like the banner image? As they are very general and random images.

So what is the solution? Webme Banner Image Plugin v0.1! This plugin creates something very similar to the in-built logo function. It allows you to upload your own banner image and display it in your banner area. You could actually use the logo function in the exact same way, but I thought that some people would like to have a logo and still change their banner image.

All you need to do to make this work is:

• Activate the plugin with the new Webme inbuilt plugin manager.
• Put the code {BANNER} in your template where you would like the banner to appear.
• Go to options>banner image and upload your image.

Simple as that. You can download the plugin with svn:

svn checkout http://webworks-webme.googlecode.com/svn/ww.plugins webme-plugins

Or you can download the plugin by clicking here.

During last week I started work on a webme mailing list plugin. It is now 100% stable (as far as I know!) and ready to release. Features include:

• Customisable mailing list form on the sidebar so that visitors can subscribe to the list.
• Verification email to the person registering to confirm their subscription.
• Easy to follow, sortable list of emails collected in the admin area.
• Ability to send email to everyone on the list at once.
• Options section which enables you to customise everything!

This type of plugin will be usefull for many organisations out there. I am currently working on making it compatible with Wordpress.

Download Plugin | Visit Webme.eu Download Page

I would appreciate any feedback or feature requests on the plugin here. Thanks