PolarLava::Blog

Being my weekend consisted of a couple of inches of rain from Ernesto making 2/3rd's of it a wash out, I made the best of it…

I've not done any AJAX coding until this weekend when I realized I needed to do so in order to make my Weather page work as I desired.  With the new station selection logic I added to my new weather class, it was the best way to handle it.  Thus began a forray into installing PEAR on my shared hosting and then looking into how to do what I wanted to do.

Actually I knew what I wanted to do, that being use HTML_AJAX which was the quickest easiest way to accomplish the task at hand.  And at this point is seems to be working well.  I can definately see adding some other AJAX functionality to other areas of my site and my projects.  To do that though I will need to start looking at some of the other AJAX solutions I have found.    This way I can use them without depending upon PEAR being available.  And shockingly, I might even have time to do this now that I finally got PolarBlog V1.8.0 (Swainson's Hawk) Released!

PolarBlog V1.8.0 (Swainson's Hawk) has been released.  The major focus of this release is the addition of real-time IP blacklisting (RBL) to the commenting system and numerous bug fixes.

Enhancements

• Comment IP Blacklisting
• Added support for MySQLi extension (requires PHP5 & MySQL >= 4.1)
• Added automatic detection and (limited) support for PHP5 SPL.
• Calendar and right column CSS changes.  See css/left_nav.diff or css/standard.diff for more information.
• Added topic_icon_image CSS class to control topic icon display. Default now sets this to (float) display on the right.  title margin should be changed from 0px to -10px if you opt to change to this right side icon display.  See css/left_nav.diff or css/standard.diff for more information.
• A number of minor tweaks were done to the CSS files plus the addition of the RBL Admin CSS.  See css/standard.diff or css/left_nav.diff for more information.
• Changed RSS $config['rss']['feed']['encoding'] to use I18N_CHARSET by default so you don't have to change it in two places.
• Added $config['rss']['entry_count'] to set RSS feed entry count.  Falls back to DEFAULT_DISPLAY_CNT.
• Consolidated all JavaScript deletes to use confirmDelete() with localized message now passed.
• Added data validation for all input variables that weren't already being validated.
• Improved security checking by validating logged in users.
• Added additional entry table index to improve performance.