Beta Launch Announced
If you’re on my announcement list, you just received an email with an invitation to try out my BETA version of the CMS software I’ve created.
Deadline Blues
Remember my last post where I said nothing happens without a deadline? Well, I definitely felt the heat from the deadline and I really wish I had more time to tweak “this” and modify “that” - but a promise is a promise and besides… it’s time to get your feedback.
The other headache of mine is that today I have to leave the office on a family event that I just can’t get out of… [sarcasm]great planning on my part[/sarcasm]. So I won’t be able to respond to your emails until later tonight… much later.
Oh well.
Last Minute Side Notes
My apologies for the rambling and less-than-spectacular video… I only had time for one take.
My goal was to give you a step by step guide to get you off the ground and up and running with my software so you could test it out.
The installation guide will become more detailed as your questions roll in and I start to answer them. I also have plans for a support forum, help desk, and FAQ section when the new site is launched.
Bakshish Sakra says:
September 15th, 2006 at 4:46 pm
I signed up for the list, but it not come through for beta testing.
Id would like to try it, and help fix bugs, but can you email me the beta?
Thanks you,
Richard says:
September 15th, 2006 at 6:14 pm
Just got your email Jack. Unfortunately it’s Saturday morning here in Australia so I can’t promise to be able to do too much with it before monday. I’ve run your test script on my local development server and on the webserver I host my clients on successfully and I’m uploading the files so at the very least I hope to get it installed today. More later…
Richard says:
September 15th, 2006 at 6:46 pm
I’ve mentioned this to you before I can never view more than the first few minutes of your movies. After that I get a message saying “A script in this movie is causing Flash Player 8 to run slowly. If it continues to run your computer may become unresponsive. Do you want to abort the script?”.
Whether I chosse yes or not everything freezes up shortly after. Is anyone else having this problem?
Richard says:
September 15th, 2006 at 7:58 pm
Okay not going well so far. I’ve gone through the setup phase fine. Although unlike the video the setup sections lacked any of the formatting you can see in the video. It was straight white pages with just the input boxes. Uploaded the new config and htaccess files fine then entered the username and password which where accepted. The next screen I get is as follows.
http://www.tpdevelopment.com.au/testing/cms1.jpg
As you can see no page layout at all. Also neither of the links work. The first “Pages” link fails because it is generated wrong. That link points to “/cms3/admin/pages/” which seeing as the page is in the “cms3/admin” directory already it can’t possibly work.
The second link which says “click here to go the the main page” actually links back to this very same page but if I do click it it wants me to login again before bringing me back here.
Now I manually fixed the pages link which got me to this page.
http://www.tpdevelopment.com.au/testing/cms2.jpg
Again no formatting. None of the pages,category etc links work and clinking the “add a new page” link gets me.
http://www.tpdevelopment.com.au/testing/cms2.jpg
A page with only half a form script. No submit button nor even a tag.
Sorry Jack but this is not starting well.
jackborn says:
September 15th, 2006 at 10:29 pm
Richard,
I’ll contact you tomorrow morning. You have something strange going on with your install that others have not reported.
Jack
jackborn says:
September 15th, 2006 at 10:33 pm
Richard,
As for the movie, I apologize… but no one else has mentioned this problem. If anyone else has the same issue, please let me know.
Jack
Richard says:
September 15th, 2006 at 10:45 pm
Thanks jack. I’m buggered if I can work out whats wrong. I did wonder if it was because it’s not installed in the root directory but it probably not as simple as that.
jackborn says:
September 15th, 2006 at 10:49 pm
Richard,
I’ll email you tomorrow and we’ll figure it our together. It’s late here… off to bed. Been a very busy week.
But rest assured, I’ll work with you on this. That goes for anyone else. I’m committed to this project.
Bakshish Sakra says:
September 16th, 2006 at 2:35 am
It because your style sheet is linked to look for the file at the root, like this:
/cms3/admin/adminStyle.css when you put it in subfolder called testing.
CSS should be relative like this:
./adminStyle.css
I still not hear word about being beta tester. Please email me.
Michael MacDonald says:
September 16th, 2006 at 3:58 am
Hi Jack, I’ve downloaded the beta and like Richard I can get to the login successful stage only to have it present a link to the same page where it asks me to login again. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to fix it like Richard. But unlike Richard all the style is present like in your movie so that’s fine (I suspect it’s because Richard has created his cms3 directory as a subdirectory rather than at the root level).
As for the movie, I also have problems with it, mostly the audio starts before the actual video begins and if I ever pause it then I get the error that Richard has mentioned.
Finally, for those people using a Mac (as I am), download the ioncube stuff for Mac and exchange this for the contents in the ioncube folder. That worked for me.
jackborn says:
September 16th, 2006 at 10:22 am
A quick update on the movie issue. I just downloaded a patch for the multimedia software I use and so hopefully future videos will be better. If I have time this weekend, I will upload a re-do of the current video.
Thanks for your patience.
Aaron Heimlich says:
September 17th, 2006 at 7:39 pm
I have the same problem that Michael McDonald Reported (with it continually asking me to login).
I’m using:
Windows XP Pro SP2
Apache 2.0.59
PHP 5.1.6
John Faulds says:
September 17th, 2006 at 8:10 pm
I get an interal server error in the iframe whenever I edit or create a new page.
The javascript alerts are a bit annoying when you’re editing categories. It’s OK for the first edit, but if you’ve got a few to do, you have to click OK to get rid of the alert each time.
Are there going to be more admin control panel options in future versions? Because it seems there is fairly limited functionality there at the moment. I’m thinking of things to edit/manage templates, menus, images/files, site settings etc.
jackborn says:
September 17th, 2006 at 8:41 pm
The reviews have been mixed. Some, as seen here, are having some issues that need to be resolved. Others have emailed saying they had success with the Beta version and look forward to the launch.
I’ve emailed almost all of you to follow up, troubleshott, investigate further.
John Faulds says:
September 18th, 2006 at 6:40 am
Is the CMS going to be limited to using FCKeditor or will other rich text editors be offered?
Also, will there be the ability to edit which features are enabled through the editor via the admin interface or will we need to edit the js files manually?
Of particular concern from my point of view at the moment is that FCKeditor uses <br>s for all line breaks instead of using paragraph marks.
jackborn says:
September 18th, 2006 at 8:12 am
John,
Out of the box will be FCKeditor but you should be able to use any you want. These wysiwyg editors take up a lot of file space, so I don’t suspect I’ll be including other editors in the zip arhive, but with a minimal amount of hacking, it should be easy to install Tiny MCE or whatever system you want.
Currently, the FCKeditor buttons would be changed by modifying the js files, not through the admin, but this could be added in future versions.
As for the br line breaks, in my experience, this is only for Firefox. IE creates paragraph breaks. But since I haven’t used IE in eons, I’m going off memory here. It also seems (from last I remember) that this is true of other editors… not just FCKeditor… but your mention of it probably means that you know of an editor that creates nice line breaks in Firefox.
If so, please let me know so I can test it out.
zee beedee says:
October 3rd, 2006 at 8:53 pm
i’m in your announcement list but no beta invitation came for me.
thanks.
SystemSam says:
October 12th, 2006 at 9:12 am
I’d love to check out the beta. Is there some whay I can download that? Thanks!
Anand says:
May 12th, 2007 at 10:23 am
I am also in the announcement list, but I didn’t receive an invitation. Perhaps it went in my spam folder. I would love to try it out.
Could you give me the email address that will send the invitation? Then I can add it to my addres book and the invitation won’t end up in my spam.
Thanks.