Blaze

Hello again!
After looking at the ideas in the Roadmap post, I’ve decided, that there is a need to have other contributors in the project. So, I’m looking for people who fit into these categories:

• Slick Designers - someone who can build a kick-ass, clean, intuitive, web-2.0 backend design… and a nice front-end design to go with it.
• Translators - the whole of the blaze system is going to be multi-lingual. I’ve already started porting the views over to the new multi-lingual system. I need people who can translate the language files into other languages.
• CodeIgniter Gurus - people who love CI, and have solid, efficient, and kick-ass programming techniques.

If you think you’re good at what you do, and you want to use your skills to build Blaze… Let me know.
Post a comment with what you do, and some examples of your work (translators don’t bother… you don’t need to prove you can speak your native language!).

Post them in the comments so the rest of the community can get excited about some of the talent that may be joining this project.

I’m moving the SVN over to my new dedicated server, which will let me give public svn access… as well as a ‘bleeding edge’ demo.

Edit: Demo now available! - See link in sidebar >>>

Elliot

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For a few weeks now I’ve been trying to evaluate exactly what I want to build into Blaze, and where I want to take it. But now, I’ve realized that’s the wrong way to plan this project.

Afterall, although I want to use this system, you’re the guys who want this. You’re the people who are going to be installing it, hacking it, styling it, and hopefully loving it.

So, what do you want Blaze to do? How do you want it to work?

Essentially, this is an open roadmap, where you, the users decide what you want it to do.
I’ve already come up with the basic set of tasks to ‘finish’ the current 0.91 version features, including completing the blog, pages, users, and navigation sections of the CMS.

I’m aware that asking you all what you want could be very dangerous afterall, there’s reasons great engineers, architects, geeks, don’t ask this question.

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
- Henry Ford

So, I want to know ‘what’ you want to use Blaze for. What kind of sites, what kind of content you want to manage, and ‘how’ you want to do that.

Please leave your comments, and from them, I’ll look at the recurring points, and come up with a plan to build a kick-ass version 1.0 release.

Which, as always, will be:

• Free
• Open Source
• Sexy

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Here’s a new version of Blaze for you guys to get digging into.
The main upgrades with this version are the basic blog administration section.

There will be a 0.92 release in the next week which completes the Blog administration section, so there’s not such a big fuss over this release.
But the important thing is: The project is making progress!

I’m currently in the process of documenting Blaze in-time for the 1.0 release too, so for now just go with the flow and hold on ’till I can get this documentation finished.

There should also be a roadmap, task list, feature request and bug reporting next week too!

Download the latest version here

Elliot

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OK guys, there were a few of you having login problems…
Well, I’ve fixed them now. Just download the latest release, and make sure you clear out your database and execute the new SQL.

The new code creates your first user on first login, and the encryption is now handled by CI’s encryption class to make sure that it works across different platforms and environments.

There’s also now a critical fix to the simplepie library, which was previously breaking the admin dashboard on some versions of PHP.

Please download the very latest release and comment with any bug reports or praise

Elliot

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Hey guys, I’m glad to let you know that Blaze 0.90 is now online and available for download.
There’s been some notable improvements, most of them in the core template rendering methods.

New features/functionality:

• Themes are fully contained directories with their templates and static content (images, css, javascript)
• Themes can now use ‘blocks’… just put in {area.1} as an example, to render a block (block 1) in that area
• Caching functions revised - turning cache off now deletes all cached pages
• New admin layout
• New frontend layout
• Migrated whole database over to UTF-8 (should solve some login problems)
• Added Akismet library for future blog comment spam checks
• New breadcrumb navigation… modules can add items to the breadcrumb

The next release will have this very flexible ‘core’ to work with, and I’ll be building a cracking Blog module, and improving administration for: Pages, Navigation, and users.

To make installation as simple as possible:

1. Create your database and execute schema.sql
2. Edit application/config/database.php - and put your database settings in here
3. Set the following directories to writable (chmod -R 777): application/cache, application/logs
4. Check your ‘RewriteBase’ is correct in .htaccess (By default set to run at the root of a domain, like booya.com… if you’re running blaze in a subdirectory, set the RewriteBase appropriately… i.e. /blazetest/ for: server.com/blazetest/)

The default admin username is: ‘admin’ and the password is: ‘test’ (both without quotes).

Download Blaze Now!

Important Note
Blaze will be relicensed before version 1.0. The purpose of this is to make Blaze more free and open.
I’ve read a lot of comments about the licensing issue, so standby for further news.

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Hey guys… After a good amount of progress this week, I’ve been hit by the flu this weekend
However! Blaze 0.90 will be out this coming weekend!

I’ve already built one of the key improvements: ‘Blocks’ (partials) rendering, allowing different content from other modules to be displayed in a template.
Once I’ve built some ‘useful’ blocks for the basic modules, I’ll be ready to roll out another release this weekend.
So hang on to your trousers, and write it in your diaries!

Elliot

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Martin Vašina sent through a draft of a new admin interface that could well feature in one of the future updates of Blaze.

What do you guys think?
I love it!

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Blaze is one of the first CodeIgniter Content Management Systems…
And it’s got a bright future ahead!

I’ve decided to post here the ‘direction’ of Blaze, and where I’m hoping to take this project.

• Firstly, Blaze will always be ‘dynamic’ and flexible, allowing developers to customize and modify everything about it.
• There will always be 3rd party modules for people to download and add extra functionality to their install.
• Blaze templates will allow developers to assign different content to different blocks, from any module.
  For example:
  On the home page you may want the latest news stories, latest store products and a welcome text…

  This will be possible by assign different template areas to diffent controller methods.

• Blaze will always be free for personal use, and fairly licensed.

In the next few releases I’ll be pushing to build:

• Simple installer - helping you to get things up and running easily.
• New template system
• Account module for front-end (login system)

I hope this gives you some confidence in Blaze and its future.

Elliot

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Hey guys, I forgot that the .htaccess file isn’t included in the zip…
So here’s a copy of it:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c> 
	RewriteEngine On
    RewriteBase /
 
	# Add Trailing Slash (Force it!) - It looks cool :)
	RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
	RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.*)/$
	RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://cms.dev/$1/ [R=301,L]
 
	# Admin 'dashboard'
	RewriteRule ^admin$ index.php/admin [L]
	RewriteRule ^admin/$ index.php/admin/ [L]
 
	# Admin functions within Admin module and controller
	RewriteRule ^admin/(navigation|users|settings|login|logout)$ index.php/admin/$1 [L]
	RewriteRule ^admin/(navigation|users|settings|login|logout)/(.*)$ index.php/admin/$1/$2 [L]
	RewriteRule ^admin/nav_(.*)$ index.php/admin/nav_$1 [L]
 
	# All others, push to the module in question
	RewriteRule ^admin/([a-zA-Z]*)$ $1/admin [L]
	RewriteRule ^admin/([a-zA-Z]*)/(.*)$ $1/admin/$2 [L]
 
	# Any request were the file or directory doesn't exist...
	# Push to CI
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php/$1 [L]
</IfModule>

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Here’s a fresh update for Blaze. This release should keep you on your toes; progress has been pretty good recently, and there’s another weekend up ahead to really get cracking on this…

Changes:

• Modules now have their own routes file, letting you build urls like: blog/2007/06/first-post/ without changing the main routes.php file
• New ‘Blog’ module now standard - backend will be in next release
• New System library and system preferences in admin backend
  • Switch caching on/off in backend
  • Site title is set in backend
• Basic User library built… backend is now locked with authentication

Install instructions.

1. Unzip the file.
2. Place it in your web directory.
3. Make sure that your RewriteBase is correct in /.htaccess …. if you are in a subfolder like site.com/blaze/ - your rewritebase should be /blaze/
4. Run the schema.sql on a clean database… set up your config/config.php and config/database.php accordingly.

Note: Default admin username is ‘admin’ with password ‘blaze’…
Future releases will be taking care of proper salted hashes for passwords, but that’ll come with the installer.

So, I’m thinking that by the end of March, we could have a pretty sweet CodeIgniter CMS here!

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