Explay CMS 3.1

Good day to all! For quite a long time, as my passion for creating an engine for the site began to occupy the lion's share of free time. And since in the summer I was completely left to myself, I sat down at the computer as if I were working :) At the same time, the absence of even a little tangible income does not even stop me, it’s like an addiction. Hoping that I will still help someone, I want to share the result of my work.

Explay CMS is a management system for social networks or blog-social communities. It is still completely free and is licensed under the GNU GPL 3 version. Let me remind you the main characteristics:

• Team blogs
• Photo Albums
• Friendly relations and news of friends
• Comments
• Ratings
• Internal mail
• Update system

More information about the characteristics can be found on the official website.

Version 3.1 is an evolutionary continuation of version 3.0. In the course of development all known bugs were fixed and the main functions were improved. In the new version, CMS has acquired a full-fledged administrator panel, which makes it possible to implement the main function that I declared in release 3.0 - managing the fields of publications, users, and everything.

Further on innovations in detail and in order:
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Modules

One of the highlights in the latest version is the interface for working with modules. Now the user can download the module from the official site and install it from the admin panel. The developer can “export” (create an installation archive) the module he developed and place it in the office. site. Since the developer can create his own data types and use them in his own module, the function of exporting the data types themselves is available to him. In future versions, it will be possible to browse the module directory and install them directly from the admin panel, similar to wordpress.

As for the changes in the modules themselves, the ability to redefine methods, language constants and access rights was added, which allows us not to lose the changes made during the update.

By the way, now on the official website, when placing a module, you can (or rather, need to) describe its API. As an example, I described the API, accessible from templates, for standard modules.

Managing data types and their properties (fields)

As mentioned above, you can now independently configure (add / change / delete) the properties of data types: publications, photos, users, blogs, and everything else. Suppose if for your publications (articles, posts or topics, as you please) you need to add the ability to attach an image, then using simple manipulations, a field for uploading an image will appear in the edit form of the publication (while you can adjust the output format and image size) . You can also add plain text fields and even tag fields.

In one of the comments on Habré, I read about the fact that now only two domestic CMS (Bitrix and UMI.CMS) can create “directories” (drop-down lists), so now it is also available in Explay :)

Such manipulations with the properties (fields) of data types are possible thanks to a well-established ORM system. It should be noted here that for each data type, a separate table in the database is allocated, in which objects of the desired type are stored. When you add, for example, a new text field to a publication, a new column is created in the table. Maybe this is not the most ideal approach, but it allows you to optimize the table and thus increase the speed of the entire system, as well as reduce the headache when transferring the site from another or to another system.

Admin panel

The admin panel is pretty easy, no frills. Administrators now have access to such small joys as a file manager, moderation of publications, deleting users, creating site backup, managing static pages, dragging links from icons to favorites, and much more.

Innovations from the user side

There are not many innovations here, here are the main ones:

• Created "live broadcast"
• Added password recovery feature
• Added the ability for users to delete their profile (or, more accurately, leave the removal request to administrators)

Another innovation that does not fit into one paragraph is the new Banners module. The developer of the site is given the opportunity to highlight in the place of the place where the so-called. banners (in fact, a banner is a piece of HTML code). Banners make it easy to manage the blocks on a page with static content, without having to edit templates.

Where to get?

All builds and updates, as usual, are laid out on Google Code in the downloads section. Nearby is the SVN .

System requirements: PHP 5.2, MySQL 5, XSLT, Multibyte string, Zlib, GD 2.
PHP 5.3 is not yet supported.

Tech support

For beginners at the office. The site has a FAQ section, where you can get answers to popular questions and tips on solving possible errors. For those who plan to engage in the development of modules, there is documentation describing the principles of the modular system, as well as the main classes of the kernel.

I will gladly help you to provide simple technical support and answer all your questions.

Thanks for attention!