FUEL CMS Has Some New Friends!

We’ve just released FUEL CMS 1.2.1 which has a number of minor improvements and bug fixes. Normally, this release wouldn’t warrant a blog post. However, we thought it appropriate to write about a couple new FUEL advanced modules that were quietly added to GitHub—Forms and Locations. Their documentation can be found at docs.getfuelcms.com under the Forms Documentation and Locations Documentation.

Forms Module

The Forms module provides a flexible way to create simple to complex forms. Functionality includes:

• Create forms in the CMS, as static views or a combination of the two
• Use one of the additional custom field types to combat SPAM including a honeypot, a simple equation, reCAPTCHA, Akismet, or StopForumSpam
• Email specified recipients upon form submission
• Save entries into the database which can be exported as a CSV file
• Validate required and common field types like email as well as setup your own custom validation
• Submit and validate forms via javascript as well as server side
• Specify a return URL
• Hook into various parts of the processing of the email that gets sent
• Automatically attach files to emails

For more information and examples, view the documentation.

Locations Module

The Locations module adds to FUEL the ability to plot locations on a map and do a zip code radius search using Google’s mapping API. Other functionality includes:

• Ability to include your own custom pin and information windows that appear upon clicking a pin
• Create a list of returned results to accomodate your map
• Associate plot points to a category and customize the map pins accordingly
• Customize the maps styling
• Automatic lattitude and longitude lookup for addresses

See versions of it in the wild at www.meadowoutdoor.com and www.jvrspirits.com. To learn more, read the documentation.

Both modules are at a 0.9 version number and are awaiting your feedback and testing.

Blog Module Improvements

In addition to adding the Forms and Locations modules, we’ve been steadily working on some updates to the Blog module which includes multi-language support, post image size configuration, and flexible social associating with authors. To test out, use the develop branch on GitHub.

CodeIgniter Has A New Home

One final important note about CodeIgniter, the PHP framework behind FUEL CMS. Ellis Lab has recently announced it has entrusted CodeIgniter to the British Columbia Institute of Technology. This is great news for CodeIgniter developers and means there is the potential for a lot of resources to be put behind CodeIgniter’s development. We are excited to see what the future holds for CodeIgniter. Read more about the announcement on Ellis Lab’s blog.