Blog Search

The blog now has a search feature which can be found at the bottom of the blog page. Give it a try here: ​http://pulsedemo.net/blog.php

New Lightbox

We finally found a suitable replacement for the outdated Slimbox. The script is called Magnific Popup by Dmitry Semenov, you can read more about it here: ​http://dimsemenov.com/plugins/magnific-popup/

And try it on the demo site here: ​http://pulsedemo.net/gallery.php

Plupload

Plupload, which handles the uploading of photos to the gallery, has been updated to 1.5.7 and fixes some minor issues.

A word about Redactor

I know many of you are looking forward to getting the new version 9.0 in Pulse but it looks like it will have to wait for 2.6. They just released the beta a few days ago so we are probably a couple weeks away from the final version release. But in my testing over the last several days I can say that the code it generates is much, much cleaner. It also adds font controls for those that wanted it (font familty and font size).

To download 2.5, go here: ​http://pulsecms.com/getpro/

Hot on the heels of 2.3, we have another version ready for release. This release, as the title suggests, adds a bunch of new options to make customizing your Pulse install easier.

Form Options

There was always an option to add 2 custom fields to the contact form, but you had to manually edit the form.php file. Now, you can do it right from the from the form admin. Not only that, but you now have the option to disable the captcha.

Block Renaming

Many users have requested the ability to rename a block after it has been created, now you can.

Just make sure you realize that if you rename a block, you will need to re-embed the block with the new code since the name changed.

Thumbnail Size

You can now set the size of the thumbnails for the gallery in settings. This is a global setting so if you change it on one gallery, all will be affected.

Blog Captcha

Just like the form, you can also now disable the captcha on blog comments if you wish. There is still some hidden anti-spam protection so in most cases it should not be a problem to do so.

Frontend Changes

The frontend template design has been tweaked and now features a responsive navigation. Go to http://pulsedemo.net to view it. Resize your browser to mobile width to test out the new responsive navigation.

Upgrading

To upgrade from 2.3, replace the following folders:

pulsepro/includes/ (backup your config file first)
pulsepro/plugins/
pulsepro/css/
template/

To get the latest version go to http://pulsecms.com/getpro/

Drag and Drop Re-Ordering

One of the most exciting new features is drag and drop image re-ordering for gallery images. While recent updates brought the ability to sort images, it was a somewhat tedious process as you needed to click into each image and assign a number to it. Now you just click and drag the images around to whatever order you like. To truly appreciate the new feature you have to try it for yourself, it's completely fluid and somewhat addicting. Head over the demo site and give it a try.

Thumbnails

Previously, the gallery thumbnails were just the full images resized using CSS. Now, there are dedicated thumbnails saved for each image. This will greatly improve the speed of the gallery since you are downloading tiny 10k images instead of multiple 100k + images. The images are also cropped to square with no distortion.

Slimbox Updates

A bug with IE 9 was recently discovered and patched.

Misc Gallery Updates

You can now upload PNG and GIF files instead of only JPG images. Also, the size limit is now 5mb instead of 2mb.

Access Logs

A brand new feature in Pulse is access logs. This is used to monitor all login activity should you need to. For example, if you are suspicious your Pulse admin is compromised, you can view the logs to see the IP's and times of all logins. The logging is not visible from the admin, so there is no way to tamper with it unless you have ftp access.

Other Improvements

The frontend template has been updated with some minor visual and layout changes. Redactor has been updated to v 8.2.3. I was hoping to get 9.0 (a major upgrade coming soon) into this release but the guys at Redactor are still finishing that up. I have used the beta and it's a huge improvement. The generated code is much better and font controls are now included (Font face and size).

Two small bugs were fixed, one in the backup and another layout bug in the blog when comments are disabled.

Upgrading

The usual upgrade process is to be used (http://pulsecms.com/support.php) with one exception. After you have put all the new files in place, run update.php. This will create some new folders in the data folder that are required.

If you are upgrading from version 2.0 and higher, you can just replace the entire "includes" and "plugins" folders, then run the update.php file inside the pulsepro folder.

To get 2.3, go here: http://pulsecms.com/getpro/

Frontend Template

The frontend template has been completely rebuilt using the Kube CSS framework (http://imperavi.com/kube/). The framework is very minimal yet very powerful. It comes with excellent pre-styled typography, forms, tables, buttons and a grid that makes it super easy to set up pages with various types of columns and layout styles. See it live on the demo site: http://pulsedemo.net.

Turn Comments on/off By Post

Another new feature is the ability to turn off comments by individual posts. So let's say a blog post is a few months old and you want to disable comments on it, just open up that post in the admin and set the comments to off. See this sample on the demo site: http://pulsedemo.net/blog.php?d=7.

Other Improvements

While Pulse has always been available in German, in Redactor, you had to download the German lang file for that separately and install it. Now the German file is included and all you need to do is edit header.php to switch it on. 

Speaking of Redactor, is has been upgraded to 8.2.1 in this version.

Downloading

To get the latest version, go to http://pulsecms.com/getpro

One More Thing

I'd like to introduce Ulli (http://twitter.com/ulw8) to all Pulse users. Ulli is a PHP developer and has been helping out with Pulse on the last few versions. She will be working on a lot of the backend PHP code and helping to add more features. Say hello!

The only other change in this release is that Redactor has been updated to version 8.2.1.

To get the latest version, go to pulsecms.com/getpro

New UI

Many of you may not be doing much work on your phones or tablets at this point, but I think this will be changing more and more as we go forward and I want Pulse to be capable on any device. 

So what might be some use cases for mobile usage? Maybe you just pushed out a blog post and noticed a typo but you're away from the desktop. Just log in from your phone and make the edit. Or perhaps you're on the road and want to check stats for the day and see how the site's doing. The stats page looks great on even a phone so you can see what's happening anywhere. And since version 1.9 added emailing of comments, now you can take action on them more easily. Let's say you get an email notification about a new comment on your blog but it turns out to be spam or something offensive. Just log in from your mobile device and delete the comment. These are just a few ways you can take advantage of a mobile optimized admin.

Gallery Improvements

The gallery has always been available in two formats, Slider or Thumbnails (Lightbox).  But in order to switch back and forth you had to change a setting on the settings page to get the different embed codes. Now, the setting is removed and both embed types are available right from any gallery you create. Not only that, but the preview button will show both gallery styles so you can see how each will look before you choose which to use.

New Stat - Users Online

The stats page features a new metric, users online. This tells you how many people are currently browsing your site. This can be useful after you launch a new product or send out a press release to monitor traffic in real time.

Other Improvements

-Redactor upgraded to 8.03 and blocks now auto adjust to the height of your content
-Formatting bug fixed in comment emails
-Multiple thumbnail galleries on one page now works
-Jpegs uploaded to blog/blocks are automatically resized to 800px max (Prevents clients from uploading massive 2500px pics)

Try the DEMO 

Upgrading

The normal upgrade procedure applies for this version, but there is one new folder that needs to be created inside of the "data" folder. In "stats", add a folder called "sessions".

Stats

The stats feature is a great way to quickly see what's happening on your site today. It lets you see your overall traffic, where it's coming from and what pages users are visiting most. But there was a problem with the previous version. It was over reporting visits by about 25%. The reason? In a word, bots. Bots traverse the web and ping your site for all sorts of reasons, some legit and some not.

The stats tracking script had been filtering out some of the most well know bots like the Google indexer, Facebook, Yahoo, MSN, etc. But there are literally thousands more that slip though and can get counted. The new version of the tracking code is called by Javascript, which almost all bots do not execute. It's far too resource intensive for them to crawl the web and run all the JS it comes across. The downside is that some real users who disable JS will not be counted, but recent worldwide stats show that only about 1% of web users disable JS. So it makes more sense to under report visits by 1% than over report by 25%. I have compared the new stats results to other analytics services and they are now matching almost exactly.

In addition to being much more accurate, there is also a new metric, "Pages Per Visit". This is an average of the pages each visitor views before leaving.

Stats Demo 

Events Calendar

The events calendar is a new block that comes with Pulse by default. It is basically a pre-styled block that you can fill out and embed on your website. There are two blocks included to start with, one for the current month and one for drafting the next month. The intended workflow is that you start with the current month and replace it (via simply copy/pasting source) with the draft month as the current month ends. Or you could show 2 or 3 months on your site a time for long term outlook of upcoming events. It's very simple and very customizable so you can really use it any way you like.

Frontend Events Demo 

Backend Events Demo 

Comment Notifications

The next feature is an improvement to an existing one. When your blog receives a new comment, it will now show the actual comment in the email as well as the user name of the person who posted it. This saves you time in that you don't have to go to your blog to read the comment, especially nice if you are getting the email via a smart phone.

Redactor, Jquery Upgrades

The version of Redactor (redactojs.com) that Pulse uses has been upgraded to the latest v8.02.  In addition JQuery is has been upgraded to version 1.8.

Design Improvements

There are many design improvements on the backend and the front-end.

Under the Hood

The blog code base has been completely overhauled as well as the front-end controller. These will not affect functionality, but it makes things work a little more efficiently under the hood and reduces some code bloat.

Upgrading

Download here: pulsecms.com/getpro 

To upgrade any 8.x version, just replace the following folders:

pulsepro/css/
pulsepro/includes/ (make sure to copy back your config.php)
pulsepro/plugins/
pulsepro/index.php

To upgrade, just replace the following files:

• includes/controller.php
• includes/stats.php
  
• includes/tracker.php

To download the latest version, go to pulsecms.com/getpro

The first is that Flexslider has been updated to v2.0. There are some visual improvements and a lot of under the hood changes that solidify its standing as the best responsive slider gallery out there.

The second part of this update is that CKEditor has been replaced by the fantastic new WYWISWYG editor Redactor (redactorjs.com ). While CKEditor served its role well for the most part, it has been outclassed by this new editor, Redactor. Visually, it has a gorgeous design and is incredibly intuitive to use.  Under the hood, it is extremely well built. CKEditor was a huge piece of bloated software and was by far the largest component of Pulse Pro. Version 1.8.3 of Pulse was about 4MB, version 1.8.4 is about 1MB. This reduced size means that the new editor is also lightning fast. It has all the typical features of an editor as well as built in support for uploading images, files and videos.

See a Demo Here

You can get the latest version here: pulsecms.com/getpro

UPGRADING

To upgrade from 1.8.x to this version here are the files and folders you should replace:

pulsepro/css
pulsepro/includes (make sure to copy back your config.php file)
pulsepro/plugins

Then you also need to add a new folder to the 'data' folder.  The new folder should be named 'files'.

• CKEditor has been upgraded to the latest version (3.6.3)
• Captcha added to form (same as blog)
• KCFinder has been updated, improves compatibilty with hosts, new theme
• Accidental double posting of comments to the blog (via refresh) is no longer possible
• Form data in both the blog and form is now persistent - even if an error occurs, no need to re-enter data (Thanks to Peter Nagl)
• The recent posts (recent.php) file has some minor fixes for improved compatibilty - should work better in sidebar situations (Thanks to Peter Nagl)
• JQuery has been updated to the latest version
• There is now a character limit of 1000 chars. on a blog post comment for security

To get the latest version head over to pulsecms.com/getpro

Flexslider

The current slider gallery option in Pulse, Galleria, is being replaced by Flexslider http://www.woothemes.com/flexslider/. It's a very nice, clean looking slider that is fully responsive and even has touch swipe support for mobile devices. If you previously set up a gallery with the old slider, it will be automatically replaced with Flexslider if you upgrade to 1.8.2.  

See Demo Here: pulsedemo.net

There are several options you can change by editing includes/gallery.php which are mostly self explanatory.  Here are the defaults:

slideshowSpeed: 6000,
slideshow: true,
keyboardNav: true,
directionNav: false,
controlNav: true,
animationDuration: 600,
pauseOnAction: true,

PHP code in blocks

For maximum security, PHP has always been disabled in blocks. If you tried to enter any in a block, it would automatically sanitize and remove the PHP tags making it useless. This was done both by the core Pulse code as well as CKEditor itself.

I have now removed the filtering in the Pulse code. So only CKEditor is blocking PHP code. But I have added a line to ckeditor/config.js that, when uncommented, will allow PHP code if you so desire. 

// config.protectedSource.push( //g );

This is more of an advanced feature and not everyone will need it, but it makes Pulse more flexible to those who want to use PHP in the editor. One possible use case is putting a gallery embed code inside a block.

Google + Button

In addition to a Facebook like button and a Twitter tweet button, the blog now has a Google + icon to round out the big three social sharing sites.

Small fixes in form.php

Some layout tweaks for the contact form.

Changed Files

pulsepro/css/blog.css
pulsepro/css/form.css
pulsepro/css/style.css
pulsepro/includes/blog.php
pulsepro/includes/footer.php
pulsepro/includes/form.php
pulsepro/includes/gallery.php
pulsepro/includes/header.php
pulsepro/includes/lang.php
pulsepro/includes/lang_de.php
pulsepro/includes/manage-photo.php
pulsepro/includes/stats.php
pulsepro/includes/view.php
pulsepro/plugins/ckeditor/config.js

Added Files

pulsepro/includes/gallery-preview.php
pulsepro/plugins/flex/

First, the contact form has some flexibility in that you can now add two custom fields if you need more than what it comes with. At the top of the form.php file you will see these two new lines:

$custom_fieldname1 = "";
$custom_fieldname2 = "";

Just fill one or both in and they will then show on the front end contact form.

The second change in 1.8.1 is that gallery sorting has been tweaked so that new picture uploads will always apper first or at the top.

If you are upgrading from 1.8, there are only 5 changed files:

-form.php
-manage-photo.php
-gallery.php
-gallery2.php
-footer.php

-Email notifications for new comments 
-Stats feature revamped and a bug fixed 
-Persistent login (via cookie), stay logged in for 7 days unless logged out 
-Ability to delete backups from admin 
-Slimbox theme (thumbs gallery) customized, must clear cache to view. 
-Security patch added 
-Bug fix, can no longer overwrite block with same name 
-Galleria plugin (slider gallery) updated to 1.2.6

Go to pulsecms.com/getpro to download the latest version or click here to view the demo.

To track visitors on your site, just add the tracker embed code to the footer of any page you'd like to track.  If your site uses a master template, you can just include it in the footer and it will track all pages that use the template.

-Recent posts feature added (The embed code is with the regular blog embed code) 
-Social media sharing buttons added to blog posts 
-Some inconsistencies cleaned up on forms (blog & contact) 
-Back button inside folders fixed
-Other minor cosmetic tweaks

Please go here to download. 

A user (Ricard L.) recently tried it out and successfully got it working.  I made a few minor tweaks and now am posting it as a new feature in Beta. Once its been tested by a few users and no bugs are found, I will probably incorporate it into the main version.  

To see how it looks in action, take a look at the Pulse home page.  It's pretty simple and just show the 3 most recent post titles and dates. You can tweak it and apply your own styles as needed.

To set it up on your Pulse Pro site, just copy the file recent.php into your "includes" folder. Then just use the same embed code you would use for the blog, but replace blog.php with recent.php and paste it into your home page html.

Download Here

Users often ask me how they can change the font face and size from within the Pulse editor, or how they can get the full version of ckeditor. But if you are asking this question, then you might be missing the point of a CMS.  I know some users love all those rows of buttons in ckeditor, but hear me out... 

If your site is built right, your frontend CSS file should have already declared all the font styles for your entire site. There should be a baseline font for all normal paragrah text as well as additional styles for your headings.  For example, at the very least your sites css file should set up the basics like so:

body {

font-family: sans-serif;}

p {

font-size: 12px;}

h1 {

font-size: 22px;}

h2 {

font-size: 18px;}

h3 {

font-size: 15px;}

Now all type on your site will have a unified font face with varying sizes for the different types of text.

Then when using the Pulse editor, you simply select the appropriate style from the drop down for the content you are editing.  By default, it will be normal or Paragraph text. For a headline, select H1 and for a sub-headline, h2 or h3. Then your content on the frontend will automatically obey your predefined CSS styles and everything will be uniform and consistent.  

Not only that, but it avoids the inline styling of every single bit of content and greatly reduces bloat while creating cleaner code. Another reason to do this is to prevent clients from using 4 different type faces, applying colors to everything, underlining words that are not links and generally mucking up your nice design.

Here is great article by six revisions that also speaks to this topic in more detail:

http://sixrevisions.com/user-interface/with-great-cms-power-comes-great-responsibility/

Which brings me to the next new item in 1.7.  With the release of ckeditor 3.6.2, it is now compatible with iOS 5 (due out in a few weeks). Once iOS 5 is released, you will be able to edit your site with Pulse right from an iPad.  Previously the wysiwyg textarea & toolbar would not load.

There is also a new, improved file manager in Pulse Pro.  This new file manager (kcfinder) is much more compatible with a variety of hosting environments.  Not only that, but it has some great new features like drag and drop uploading, folders, file rename, sorting options, etc.

Two other small improvements are updates to the gallery uploader and an update to the slider gallery script (galleria). 

To get the latest update, go to: pulsecms.com/getpro

If you experience any bugs, please use the contact form to report them.  Thanks!

1. The gallery feature of Pulse Pro now has the ability to add captions to each individual photo.  Just click on a photo in the gallery admin to bring up the caption editor.  Captions will be displayed on the frontend in both the slider gallery as well as the thumbnail gallery.

2. Also in this update is an upgrade of the gallery uploader (plupload.com).  It fixes a memory leak as well as adds image resizing to uploads.  By default, the images will be resized to be a max of 800x800.  So if a user uploads an image that is 2000x2000, it will be automatically scaled down to 800x800.  This prevents the image from falling off the screen and also reduces the file size.  If an image is less than 800x800, it will not be changed.  Since large images will now be reduced in both dimension and file size, I have increased the max upload file size from 200k to 1mb.  A 1mb file is obviously too large and not web optimized, but upon upload, it will be significantly reduced. The last thing that this upgrade to the uploader does is enable safari drag and drop uploading, previously it only worked with chrome and firefox.

3. There is a small update to the block/blog editor adds the “Remove Formatting” button to the toolbar.  This is handy for when you are pasting text from Word and it adds a bunch of extra formatting. Clicking the button will strip out all formatting and allows you to start with clean, unformatted text.

4. Embed codes have been changed to shorter, relative paths. Existing embed codes will still work, this is only for newly created ones. This makes it easier if you develop on a local server and later move it to the live server.  You can use the same embeds whereas previously you would need to edit them.

5. Finally, the settings page has been slightly updated for better organization.

Pulse CMS Demo Page: http://pulsecms.com/demo/

Please report any bugs to: http://pulsecms.com/contact.php

UPDATE:

I have made some slight modifications to the rewrites and they now include the blog title for better SEO

Also in this update is an image deletion bug fix for the gallery.  

This will be the last update for the year, with lots more coming in 2011, happy holidays to all Pulse users and thanks for your support :)

Mark

PS

Let me squeeze this into this post also, I'm playing around with a simple front end design pack that utilizes all the Pulse features (Block, Blog, Gallery). Just two files, index.php and style.css. Will eventually package it up and post for free if anyone wants to use it as a starting point for a simple personal blog site.  Here is the demo: http://pulsecms.com/front/

There are now two options for the blog dates:   MM/DD/YYYY  or  DD/MM/YYYY

The update also addresses an issue with the gallery that affected some users with Solaris based hosting.

http://pulsecms.com/getpro

Chrome and Firefox users can now drag and drop images to upload as well as select multiple files at once.

Other browsers that do not support new HTML5 functionality yet will automatically fall back to a HTML4 version of the uploader.

Other Items in this release:

-The default CKEditor toolbar now includes the table tool.
-CKEditor updated to 3.4.2
-jQuery updated to 1.4.3

What's New?

A new settings page (see demo) is now visible in the admin user interface.  This allows you to edit all the settings in config.php right from a browser.  For those who wish to hide this from clients, simply edit a setting in config.php ($settings_page = false;).

A security patch has been applied to the blog.

A bug was fixed in the thumbs version of the gallery.

Zip & Doc files can now be uploaded from the file manager in blocks and blog entries.

Blog html output formatting has been cleaned up

You can view both gallery styles on the demo page: http://pulsecms.com/demo/