Geeklog

One of the new features in Geeklog 1.3.10 are the so-called autolinks which provide new tags (called autotags) to link to objects under a plugin's control. For example,

[staticpage:cvs Learn all about the Geeklog CVS]

will be displayed as this link: Learn all about the Geeklog CVS

But the full potential of this new form of links has yet to be explored. For example, autolinks could provide a solution to the often requested ability to let normal users upload images with their stories. If you have Gallery installed and allow image upload for your users there, a plugin could provide an autotag that not only links to the image in Gallery but also displays the preview in the story. Another example would be a request from a client I had who asked for attachments to stories (just like attachments in an email), which could be done by adding autotags to the File Management plugin.

Starting with Geeklog 1.3.10, Geeklog ships with a new default theme. We've chosen the Professional theme, kindly provided by Victor B. Gonzalez (of Aeonserv fame).

We've also decided to remove the old set of themes (Classic, Clean, Digital Monchrome, Gameserver, Smooth Blue, XSilver, Yahoo) from the distribution. They are now available as a separate tarball.

Once Geeklog 1.3.10 is offically out (after the Release Candidate phase), we will also remove the old themes from CVS and stop updating them. Instead, we would like to ask the Geeklog community to continue to support and update them. If you have any ideas how this could best be accomplished, please post your ideas and thoughts below.

And last but not least, a Big Thanks to the theme authors Jason Whittenburg (Classic, Digital Monochrome, Yahoo), Matt Jones (XSilver), Simon Lord (Clean, Gameserver), and Mark Limburg (Smooth Blue) for their themes which have served us so well over the years.

If you started your server with one language, and want to move to a multilanguage system later on, it can be quite difficult if you need different charachter sets for the different languages. With UTF-8 you can display all langauges and letters at the same time in the same page without any problems.
The best solution therefore would be to convert your _complete_ data into Unicode in one go. You dont want to go through each story and comment and edit letters by hand after you switched the encoding of the page.

For this procedure to work you need (1) a text editor like notepad that can save raw text data while choosing the encoding (Notepad unter windows for example), (2) direct access to you MySQL executable (Windows cmd or Linux Shell) and (3) a NON-Unicode-Capable Editor (!) such as PHPEdit (or linux shell editors AFAIK). You can find out which editor cannot handle Unicode by saving a small text containing a "xxöxx" or similar with notepad as UTF-8 (See step 3) and opening it with the other editor. If you the letter "ö" appears now as "ö" you have the right one.

Now let's start.