What's Coming in FUEL CMS

It’s been a while since our last blog post (and according to my own RSS reader), so we felt it was time to give an update as to what we plan on releasing in upcoming versions of FUEL CMS.

Extensibility

We wanted the main focus of the next release (and possibly subsequent) to focus on extensibility. What this means is that we will be working on key areas of FUEL that often need to be extended for custom modules. This includes:

• Making it easier to create custom field types for your modules. This will provide a whole new level of customization to modules that wasn’t possible before by being able to map a field type to a PHP class or function as well as javascript code.
• Hooking into other modules without the need to modify there existing setup.
• Making it easier to use Javascript (and the jQX Framework) with your custom modules.
• Custom inline editing toolbar hooks. For example, being able to use the Validate or SEO module to validate and analyze your page from the inline editing toolbar.

Blog Module Updates

As you may have guessed, we at Daylight Studio use FUEL CMS as our primary platform for creating websites for clients. Occasionally, clients request certain features of FUEL to be built and eventually some of those make it into the main FUEL CMS distribution. This next release will have a few of those features, particularly in the blog module including tagging, replying to other comments and user login for comments.

Image Manipulation

One feature that has been on the list for a while, is the ability to resize and create thumbnails of images directly from the Assets module upon upload. You should expect to see that in one of the next releases.

Core Class Structure

Other changes we are starting with the next release is making some improvements under the hood to the core class structure. This will most likely not affect most of you but just know that we plan on making it easier to access certain elements of FUEL through a better organized class structure.

When is the Next Release?

That’s a good question and we don’t have a solid answer. Just know that we are throwing as many hours as we can at it while running the day to day business. We are currently pretty far along in in the core class structure changes, the blog changes as well as the custom form field features all mentioned above.

Want to Help?

If you are interested in helping with the project, feel free to fork the project on GitHub and/or submit pull requests (we love those).

If you’ve found a bug, please submit a ticket on GitHub.

If you are wanting to contribute your language expertise to the project, checkout our FUEL CMS Languages repository.

See ya in the forums, or on #fuelcms IRC