What's FUEL CMS Been Up To?

In May, we posted about what’s on the horizon in FUEL CMS and looking at our blog activity, one may think FUEL CMS development has slowed down lately. However any look on GitHub or the Forum would tell a different story.

Since our last post, we’ve made a number of improvements and bug fixes which are easy to miss unless you follow GitHub closely. Here are some of the ones we’d like to highlight.

Module Hooks

One of the more recent updates, Module Hooks, has extended CodeIgniter’s hooks and allows you to execute your own code before or after saving and deleting simple module items. This allows for greater integration between modules without the need to modify core FUEL CMS code.

Module Overwrites

Another recent update, Module Overwrites, allows you to overwrite any existing simple module initialization parameters. So for example, perhaps you’ve extended the fuel_users table to include additional information on a user but you don’t want to overwrite the existing model located at fuel/modules/fuel/models/users.php. Instead, you can add a $module_overwrites variable to your fuel/application/config/MY_fuel_modules.php to override any core FUEL module initialization parameters including what model the module should use.

// MODULE OVERWRITES
$config['module_overwrites']['users'] = array(
	'model_name' => 'my_user_model',
);

Redirects

Often times we make updates to a site that require us to create redirects from the old page locations to the new ones. To make this process easier and as an alternative to using .htaccess, we’ve added a redirects.php configuration file which acts similar to CodeIgniter Routes and allows you to redirect to a new page instead of a 404 error.

$redirect = array('mypage' = 'http://www.mysite.com/my_newpage');

Image Manipulation

Another improvement we’ve made since our last post was incorporating the CodeIgniter Image Manipulation Class with the Asset module. When uploading a new file, you will now see the the following additional image manipulation options:

• Create thumbnail
• Maintain ratio
• Width
• Height
• Master dimension

Other Improvements

• Added fuel_var_append() function
• Added ability to easily call an ajax request with your module by specifying an "ajax_" method on your module’s model
• Added ability to style individual column information in the Data_table class (and thus the list_items method on your module’s model)
• Added "map_query_records" and "map_to_record_class" to MY_Model
• Added "get_query_string" and "clear_query_string" to the MySQL database driver ($db object on your models)
• Added ability to customize which pages to display after logging in and out of FUEL through the main FUEL configuration
• Added ability to cache blocks with fuel_block() function
• Added ability to specify the jqx controllerPath directory so you can point it to your own module’s javascript folder
• The ability to open a preview into it’s own separate window
• A bunch of other smaller improvements and bug fixes

What’s Coming

We are in the thick of it with the next release 0.9.4 (no timeframe yet), and it will contain some major changes:

1. A Fuel master object to allow for greater flexibility (e.g. $fuel->admin->render(‘my_view’))
2. Custom field types for module forms by extending Form_builder
3. Improved interface and simplified code for inline editing
4. And maybe a few other ones we’ll sneak in

Want to Help?

If you are interested in helping, 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 forum.