Upgrade/major changes on the way!

My team and I are in the final stages of the newest version of our main content management system and will be deploying it to all of our current clients within the next several weeks. Here's a breakdown of just a few of the new bug fixes and features:

Since PerpetualMotion is built on the foundation of FwP-CMS v1.5.0, this section will highlight the major features enhancements available since FwP-CMS 1.5.0.

Integrated Knowledge Base
PerpetualMotion now includes easy online help and an integrated knowledge base full of inside information on starting a revolution with your new website! ONLY FROM FIREWIND PRODUCTIONS!

HTML Strict / XHTML v1.0 Compliance
PerpetualMotion has been enhanced to provide much cleaner, and valid, HTML output. For the first time, the CMS can now support a true XHTML layout from top to bottom! What does this mean? Your pages will load faster and more reliably on more browsers.

Story Editor / Submission Updates
The internal code that handled story authoring has been completely rewritten and is now much cleaner and functional. Most notably is that what you type is actually what you’ll get.

Online Configuration Editor
Almost all base configuration options can now be changed via an online configuration editor.

Web Services API
The Web services API provides an interface for client software to talk directly to PerpetualMotion and perform certain operations. Typical usage would be to use a desktop client to publish and edit stories without having to visit the website.

User Story Submission now has both an Intro and Body Section
Added ability to have Body Text in user submitted stories. Previous versions of PerpetualMotion only allowed user submitted stories a single entry field; the site administrator would have to break the stories into the Intro and Body parts.

Comments can now be closed
Existing comments will still be displayed but no new comment can be posted.

Caching Template Library
PerpetualMotion includes the new Caching Template Library. The Caching Template Library dramatically improves the overall speed of the website. Everything on the website loads even faster!

Instance Caching
Instance caching refers to the ability to cache high load functions such as the What's New block. For example, in the old version of the CMS, each time the main index page was loaded, the What's New block was built by the system, requiring several MySQL queries to determine what is new. Instance caching allows us to store a pre-built copy of the What's New block in HTML format. This means that PerpetualMotion does not have to go to the database to ask for what is new each time the page is loaded.

This provides a significant speed increase for your site and a significant load decrease for our server!

HTML Filtering
PerpetualMotion has replaced the no longer maintained KSES HTML filtering system with a more up-to-date and supported filtering engine. With PerpetualMotion, you no longer have to define all the allowed HTML tags, instead, you can simply specify safe mode which will automatically remove JavaScript, XSS exploits, and other non-desirable items from your user contributed HTML. PerpetualMotion's filtering engine also attempts to fix invalid HTML markup to help maintain valid HTML in user submitted stories and comments.

KSES recently had some vulnerabilities discovered, since the project is no longer maintained, there was almost a 2 month lag in providing updates. This is one of the main reasons why PerpetualMotion no longer uses the old, unsupported KSES filter.


Firewind Productions would like to thank all of the developers who have been hard at work on these feature enhancements, especially our core team of developers, the glLabs team, and the Geeklog team of developers.