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phpHaze 1.59.1 in Development

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 13:40:59 EST

I am now in the process of developing the first service release for the 1.59 series of phpHaze. My initial plan was to release hotfixes rather than full upgrades, but I have now retracted this decision and will continue with mildly large upgrades over a period of time.

The first priority with this patch is obviously the bug introduced in 1.59 when adding links directly to your link directory, causing the action to say success but never actually completing. I have already fixed this bug in my local version for the unfinished upgrade package so never fear!

Also, I have some good news for this patch. I will be fixing the Backup Admin area in phpHaze. Currently, the backup downloader instead displays the DB dump in a large textarea -- opening the way for errors in the backup data. I have already fixed it, and it will now download the backup to your computer as it should rather than displaying it in a large textarea. I have also tweaked the interface a bit and brought the drivers up to par for 1.59 standards.

However, the restore from backup feature will be formerly disabled until further notice. It has since been visible in the backup admin, but inoperable. I will now disable it so that it isn't even visible so that you guys don't attempt to use it, and possibly damage your data.

I've been vigorously testing the backup-to-file feature and it seems to be working pretty well. I've added a Windows/Linux selection for the file as line feeds will differ depending on which server environment your site is running on.

I will not be introducing many new features in 1.59.1 besides what has been said above. The rest will be minor bug fixes, re-writes of old code structure, etc.

Please let me know if you guys encounter anymore errors in 1.59.0 as I will release 1.59.1 in the next few days. I am already aware of the following bugs, so please do not report them again:

- Links Admin; cannot add new links
- Members List - Group Members Listing; tab invisible with group name and many MySQL errors
- Backup Admin; see above

[MI] phpHaze 1.59.0

Tue, 18 Dec 2007 04:00:32 EST

First of all, in case you have forgotten, here's the legend for news entries about phpHaze versions which was previously found here: SR (service release, i.e: 1.59.0.1), CU (child upgrade, i.e: 1.58.7), MI (minor upgrade, i.e: 1.59/1.59.0), MA (major upgrade, i.e.: 2.0/2.0.0)

It's about time, right? Yes people, it's finally here! phpHaze 1.59.0; with many new features and bug fixes. Not to mention an extra layer of admin panel security. It has been quite a while since I have updated phpHaze, well over a month; the longest yet since I started on my roll back in 1.57. I'm going to try not to let it slip like that again because I need to churn out the forums for all of you complainers! I honor those that want to be apart of this CMS though, so trust me -- keep up the complaining; it keeps me going!

[ -- NEW FEATURES -- ]

++ Added Submi...

For the rest of this news entry, please visit the official entry at JLN

phpHaze 1.59, what's up?

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 13:37:15 EST

Well, it gets old! As flattering as it is, constantly being asked about phpHaze's 1.59 release date does get somewhat annoying; even though as I said it is flattering! It is truly an honor that the few beta testers we do have are so supportive of phpHaze.

So surely it's been too long since I've blogged about phpHaze (or really blogged about anything for that matter) so on to the sneak peak that you all so on to what's coming in 1.59 that wasn't mentioned in the post at my network site.

As you already know, the biggest part of the upgrade will be the User Groups feature which will allow a better type of access control for various parts of your CMS, and this feature is required for the forum module to function properly (expected in 1.59.1).

I have also added some unexpected and unplanned features which were primarily intended for a Client but will be included in the core of phpHaze as well. One feature being an admin panel controlled staff listing, where you can add and update the photos and biographies of various staff members (if any). This is the one and only admin area that technically isnt located in the admin panel (besides plugins and separate modules). When you visit the Staff icon in the admin panel it will redirect you to outside the admin panel to the actual staff page itself which is built in with the admin controls necessary for maintaining the list.

I've also added some nifty features to the Link system in haze; including the ability to submit links, whether your logged in or not -- both protected by CAPCHA image verification. You can also now choose which links are Featured, and these appear directly on the link directory front page.

Among all of these new features, I have made considerable improvements to the Error checking system across the CMS as well as comprehensive updates to the general code structure. I really didn't want to add this many new features in 1.59 because it surely creates too many possible bugs and exploits that will have to be fixed in service releases.

That is all for now, there are many more things to say but I will leave that until the upgrade is released. Lookout for 1.59 Minor Upgrade by the end of this week!

...and I'm back!

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 16:36:07 EST

And here I am back from formatting the old HD... Actually, I haven't even done that yet. I got an entirely new harddrive and installed fresh windowsxp to that, and then installed all my software for web design and other things, etc. Things like games, my various documents, pictures, music, and web design work files... over 50GB of stuff I think is what the actual data part came out to be in the end.

But as I was saying, I haven't even formatted my old HD yet, its sitting on my desk still operational with my old stuff on it, and I'll probably leave it like that for another 2 weeks or so, because I did forget a few things in my first backup set of data; so atm I can plugin that HD and boot off of it (As slow as it is) and backup the remaining things I need.

But anyway, the status of my new HD so far seems great. It doesn't make all that noise, and its already loaded down with all my software and data. Took me from like 8am in the morning to about 2am at night to finish the ENTIRE process. That includes:

- Cleaning up old HD and re-organizing things to prepare for backup;
- Actuallly Compressing all of my data and organizing it to prepare to move to external HD for safe-keeping, then move to external HD.
- Loading up the new HD in my tower, and formatting it even though its empty, then reinstalling Windows XP Pro fresh.
- Updating Windows and installing all of my necessary Hardware drivers
- Installing all of my software such as Web design software, MSN Live, IRC clients, various things like that.
- Un-compressing and taking my data from the external HD
- Setting up all of my personal settings across windows and the various applications installed previously
- Setting up my local PC again as a local test server for web development
- Testing what I've done so far
- Fixing a few bugs
- Creating a few good system restore points

AND OF COURSE, so much more crap I can't think of right now. So right now, it's basically done as far as I can tell, my task list is all checked off Now my wrists hurt a bit, so I'ma leave it at that for now. The next post from me will be either about phpHaze or current projects, or another personal life entry about me and Brittney's relationship.

Formatting the Old HD

Sun, 04 Nov 2007 12:56:23 EST

Well it's come about that time... everyone knows how Windows XP over time seems to "break down" and develop its own random bugs that slow down the PC over time and make it generate other strange problems. My PC lately has been definately doing some wierd things and its starting to mess with my design and development process and time on the web. So it's time to format. Wipe it out. Start over!

I started backing up all of my data about a month or more ago, but never got around to moving the data to an external hard drive and beginning the format process. As of Friday, I decided not to do anymore development related work because I was finishing up the final backup files and those are all of my work files and various site backups; a very crucial part of my entire backup process. Yes, it's been hard to stay away.. but I have to do it! So today, I am finally starting to move stuff to the external harddrive. In the next few hours I will be plugging in the new hard drive and putting my stuff on it, and then formatting the old one.

I think my old HD has some serious probs, every now and then it sounds like its a Honda Civic that one of those annoying 16yr olds drive with the lawnmower muffler; changing gears every few minutes. It gets pretty loud and sometimes sounds like it shuts off and resets itself, very strange and tells me that it will soon go out completely, so better backup my shit while I have the chance!

So anyway, I will be down for the rest of the day most likely while im getting the new HD set up and everything going. This will be the last post made from my old harddrive . The next post I make will in fact (hopefully) be on the new hard drive and I'll be back in development mode by Monday morning. Until then, the next things I'll be working on is some more finishing touches to the JLN site, beginning the development of phpHaze 1.59, amongst other things like client work and etc.

Latest Project - Tabs4u

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 19:19:34 EST

A few days ago I have just finished my latest project for my newest client, Engelavdod. The project was to develop from scratch what is fundamentally a full-featured file database. This module was set for development on PHP-Fusion and greatly differs from PHP-Fusions current "Downloads" module. This file database was created for Eng as what he calls a "tab" database.

Some of the main features are as follows: Registered member tab submission capability, file search, "single sorting" (which is being able to select a single letter and it show results starting with that letter), and much more. The admin panel is fully featured as well, you can upload and delete and fully manage the files that go along with each file listing as well as everything else you'd expect. Here are a few screenshots, note the captions.

Click image to visit official Portfolio entry
Screenshot: The frontpage "index" of the tabs database.

Click image to visit official Portfolio entry
Screenshot: Category Listing, example for "Heavy Rock" with one result.

Click image to visit official Portfolio entry
Screenshot: Partial screenshot of the admin area, adding categories and tabs, submission management, etc.

Click image to visit official Portfolio entry
Screenshot: Partial screenshot of the admin area; continued of adding/editing tabs, existing tab management, etc.

Please post your comments .

How Rudy can beat Hillary in 2008

Mon, 29 Oct 2007 00:01:00 EST

I recently received another e-mail from Team Rudy; which is just a newsletter (the only one I actually personally signed up for). I haven't blogged about anything besides my projects and stuff lately so I felt it was time another blog about Rudy! So for those of you who didn't already know, the US is having an important presidential election in 2008 and it will push the Bush administration out of office (thankfully).

Here is the e-mail I received, please take a minute to read and comment!

Dear justin,
The last two weeks have been a whirlwind for the campaign! Rudy wowed audiences at the Republican Jewish Coalition, the Club for Growth and the Family Research Council's Values Voters Summit. Then at the Fox News debate Sunday night in Orlando, Rudy once again proved he is the only Republican capable of beating Hillary Clinton next November.

Watch Rudy on how he can beat Hillary, here .

As the debate demonstrated, the next four years will present the American people with a stark contrast. Do we want strong leadership and bold vision that will unleash the spirit and determination of the American people? Or do we want big government and runaway spending. The choice is clear.

Hillary has said she has so many ideas that America can't possibly afford them all. No kidding . We need a fiscally responsible leader who will lower our taxes, reduce the size of government and keep us on offense in the Terrorists' War on Us. Poll after poll shows Rudy is the only candidate with the record of results to unite the nation and defeat her next November.

Sincerely,

Michael DuHaime
Campaign Manager
Rudy Giuliani Presidential Committee

P.S. Don't just take my word for it, check out the Quinnipiac , LA Times/Bloomberg and Fox News polls out this week that all have Rudy leading by double-digit margins!

[SR] phpHaze 1.58.9

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 20:22:32 EST

Ok people! It's here. What will hopefully be known as the last necessary service release for the phpHaze 1.58 series. This version introduces a few new features, one new admin module, and fixes a few bugs and possible security flaws. We are now at a very stable version of phpHaze and are surpassing our "competitors".

Let me remind loyal phpHaze beta testers to keep an eye on their security logs and use the Maintenance Admin area to clear them from time to time. Don't forget to Optimize your database while your in there, too! Anyway, on to the change log!

[ == NEW FEATURES == ]
++ added new captcha image verification to replace old and outdated image verification in core
++ added new FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions Module). This is the "one admin module" I spoke about in the introductory paragraphs above. This module is exactly what you'd expect from a simple FAQ module in your CMS and it includes image support for categories and a ajax-tab driven admin interface.
++ Added ability to add new and update existing spiders of various types nestled within the Members admin area
++ Added ability to disable Hostname blacklist support in System Admin -> Misc Settings
++ Added new Captcha image verification to forgot pass feature

[ == CORE CHANGES/LOW LEVEL BUG FIXES/DESIGN FIXES == ]
++ Changed phpHaze official footer to include the Network copyright
++ Imposed comprehensive updates to forgot pass feature to 1.58 standards; error checking, general code structure, optimization, etc.

[ == BUG AND SECURITY FIXES == ]
++ Fixed unusual PHP4-Only warning error on external avatars in news comments when checking the image size
++ Finished off the Spider-bot fix. The upgrade checks your spiders data and updates it to what its supposed to be if it exists, if it doesnt, it adds the missing ones. We are using 4 default spiders now and they should all work appropriately.
++ Fixed notice error in panels admin
++ Fixed javascript bug when toggling WYSIWYG editor in pm center
++ Added image verify security function to avatars and miniavatars when updating profile
++ fixed all smiley codes [dis-require use of the nose "-" in :-) for example]
++ Added code to force user site index on forgot pass page if user is logged in and they obviously haven't forgotten their pass
++ Fixed multiple bugs in the internal phpHaze mail function, it works almost mirrored to the external sendmail function and either one should work appropriately now.

Existing phpHaze beta testers: Remember, I said last time with the release of the J Love Network site, you are now responsible for logging into that site and downloading this patch and applying it yourself. If you need help just let me know.

That is all for now. I'm not saying anything about the Forums yet, I'll update you in another blog entry in a few days, I have to finish a long overdue client project first and this patch to haze was in the way.

J Love Network Re-opened

Mon, 15 Oct 2007 12:16:54 EST

As previously scheduled, I have re-opened the J Love Network site as of October 15th. There is of course still a lot of work to be done, but the time was now to re-open the site to the public.

From this point forward, I will no longer single handedly visit each phpHaze beta tester to give them the upgrade packages. Instead, you will be required to now visit the J Love Network site and download it at your own leisure. I will also begin posting the new releases at that site (change logs) rather than here, but for the time being I will continue posting the change logs here and slowly transition to that site.

If you are not already a member of the J Love Network website, I strongly recommend you go ahead and sign-up now and claim your account. It is now your responsibility to keep up with phpHaze patches and upgrade your version accordingly (unless you have directly contracted me to maintain your site like Nathan has).

[SR] phpHaze 1.58.8

Tue, 09 Oct 2007 23:38:07 EST

phpHaze 1.58.8 has been released. People, we are VERY close to a stable release candidate. This is hopefully the last of the 1.58 service releases, as close as we are to 1.59 now. This patch addresses numerous bugs that were well-known to current phpHaze users and Beta testers as well as a few that you guys didn't even know about!

But surely, that does not suprise you! There is always almost 3 times as many bugs that I know about that you guys don't, which technically is a good thing; this way at least, I don't get so many bug reports . Anyway, onto the change log!

[ == NEW FEATURES == ]

-- The Last Seen users panel now displays the total Guest online on your site, this required a new database table and hopefully it will not fill up to fast, I will re-address this table in 1.58.9 and hopefully it will not need any further optimization.
-- Changed lengthy Category listing on categories page (when in a single category view) to use a drop down box. Added single RSS feed and permalinks to this page as well to comprehensively bring it up to speed with the rest of the CMS.
-- When adding Navigation links, you will now notice a "Add Another" link, which saves 2 clicks when adding multiple links at a time.
-- Enabled the TinyMCE WYSIWG editor to custom pages; note that if you use PHP code in your pages, the TinyMCE editor will strip it [re-write it so it won't be parsed as PHP]; in this case, be sure to flip back to non-editor mode to verify your code isn't bein altered too much.
-- Added quick-links to Custom Pages for admins, to edit/delete a page. This is, when viewing the actual custom page.

[ == CORE CHANGES == ]
-- Removed text from various Ajax-Tabs to decrease the chance of overflow in themes that use larger text size
-- Shrunk the width's of Inbox/Outbox/Trash toolkits in PM center to better fit narrow themes.

[ == BUG FIXES == ]
-- Fixed MSNBot and added new bot, MagpieRSS.
-- Fixed notice error when a user was reading a news item for the very first time; was related to the User Settings if anyone was curious.
-- Added code to prevent users of marking messages as read/unread that weren't theirs.
-- Fixed strange design flaw that caused other tabs in PM center to go blank when reading an inbox message
-- Changed RSS entries on RSS feeds to use the real permalink for entry link instead of the dynamic CMS/argument link generated by phpHaze [SEO Friendly]
-- Fixed bug with functions that require use of "function.parse_url" to detect version of PHP and act accordingly; note to readers, this is the bug about updating avatars.
-- Restored the use of full <p> and </p> tags to the phpHaze HTML editor for custom pages wheras before its missing the ending </p>
-- Various design fixes to the custom pages editor
-- Fixed broken image verification as a result of Super Global extraction removal in 1.58.7
-- Fixed BIG security exploit that would allow a user to login as one person then create an admin session for another. You now must be logged in as the same account.. It should of already done this.
-- Allowed more characters for News entry titles, increased limit from 50 to 100.
-- RSS: "description should not contain relative URL references: images/link.png "; fixed by adding site url to images in bbCode
-- Fixed; Notice: Undefined index: sesslength in C:\server\justinlove.net\admin.php on line 84
-- Fixed another super global issue with editing shouts
-- Fixed bug with bbCode not parsing in Inbox messages; added same popup preview to outbox messages.
-- Fixed bug with Forgot Password feature breaking when sending to popular servers like Yahoo! and Hotmail [result of an un-noticed Notice Error]

Latest Project -> WhiteEagles Aerie

Mon, 08 Oct 2007 00:13:53 EST

A few days ago, I finished one of Nathan's latest projects for me, converting his personal blog to phpHaze. I just now have found the time to post about it, so keep in mind the project was actually finished like 4-5 days prior to me makin this post.

Here is the finished conversion of Nathan's Wordpress blog, WhiteEagles Aerie , to phpHaze. I had to convert all of his HTML entries to bbCode for phpHaze, then import them accordingly. As well, I had to convert his theme from Wordpress to phpHaze; and both went very smoothly!

Click Image to Enlarge

Network Server Move Complete

Sat, 06 Oct 2007 13:38:21 EST

It is my pleasure to inform everyone that the Network Server move from my pitiful Shared hosting account to a Virtual Private Server has been completed.

I moved the last domain last night and deleted what was left on my Shared account. The entire move took about 2 weeks to perform, moving domains, updating DNS, and uploading 10GB+ of data, not to mention the 2.5GB of mysql data.

You should now notice no downtime and faster speed overall. Moving to the VPS should dramatically decrease the load on my MySQL server and every site should be in tip-top shape.

On a side note, the J Love Network was scheduled for release on Oct1st, but problems with the server move for this domain has caused me to extend the release date ONE LAST TIME to October 15th. So hopefully by this date, the JLN site will be finally finished. It's almost been offline for 6 months now, which is far too long for my main site to be offline.

phpHaze Beta Testers

I am aware of multiple bugs in 1.58,7, and I have already began development of 1.58.8. The continous emergence of bugs in phpHaze is delaying the Forum Module release terribly, I apologize to those who are patiently waiting for this module, but we must fix the other bugs first so we can consider haze's core 100% stable.

I plan to release 1.58.8 by the end of this weekend, hopefully sunday or Monday at latest, but I can't really make any guarantees.

Latest Project -> Dj's Auto

Fri, 28 Sep 2007 01:21:20 EST

As of the past few days with the help of a wonderful staff-writer from the J Love Network, I have completed a long overdue project for a loyal client, Dj's Auto Air & Electric . Dj's Auto is a prime example of phpHaze using its most powerful 3rd theme style, a professional layout. See the screenshot below or click it to enlarge to view a quick snapshot. Please also do not hesitate to visit the live site!

Click Image to Enlarge

Network Server Move

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 19:38:21 EST

First of all I am in kind of a rush so let me say that the reason I chose this category is because there was no other more suitable category, Security is a better choice than web design since a server move is more hardware related than software. Anyway, on to what's goin' on at the J Love Network!

The recent slow site loading speeds for every site in my small network were only to be blamed on MySQL database issues. The issues were caused by the fact that I am still stuck in the newbie shared hosting experience and that caused the databases to be extremely strained and lagged every site I owned.

As a result, I originally planned to stay with Shared hosting for one more year, as the next renewal is about 15 days from now and that would only be my 2nd full year of using shared hosting through Website Source (whom I might add will also be hosting the VPS server and was mentioned in my previous blog entry).

So this is the deal. I'll be moving all of my sites to a Virtual Private Server, which means that all of my sites will be faster than EVER! Not only that, but the random downtime and occasional 404 errors on pages throughout each and every day shold also cease. Not to mention the increased security (see category & first paragraph for recap).

This does mean the main J Love Network site which was originally scheduled for final release on Oct 1st may be delayed a bit, but most likely not. The good news also is that JLN will be acquiring its own domain name apart from the justinlove.net name. The new domain name will be http://jlove-network.net/ so please be sure to visit that in the next few days rather than http://justinlove.net/ (even though a redirect will be in effect for approx 3-4 months to allow Search Engines to update themselves with the move).

As a fallback maneuver and following my original plans when purchasing the domain justinlove.net, I will move this site, yes I said this site, my Blog, the phpHaze home; to that domain mentioned above, justinlove.net. After the first redirect session is over (see paragraph prior to this one) I will enact the same session for this blog so the same thing takes effect and both domains adjust Pagerank and Visits accordingly (obviously including Search Results).

Initial hosting and client accounts will remain unchanged for the next 7 days whilst we move our own sites first (obviously) to get the new network established. Once this process is complete (approx Oct 4th) we will notify you of the exact date/time of your server move which will occur against your own will (mwahahahah) but to your dearest advantage, and free of charge of course .

Why most beginning webmasters give up

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 14:00:55 EST

I can remember a time when I almost gave up the entire prospect of doing my own web design and development thing. I almost gave up because a year had past, I'd invested $150 in hosting; $500+ in advertising, and other various traffic boosters.

The only success I ever had during that slow first year of the launch of J Love Web Design (now known as the J Love Network) was sinking a single client through Yahoo! Search (my first client ever, and ever since I have been loyal to Yahoo! and everything they offer vs the Google-monster that's now trying to swallow and barf up Internet Advertising.

But Google is a different topic, on to why I'm writing this small article. Why do most webmasters give up? It starts because they spend a fortune on scam-shared hosting accounts and the ridiculous marketing schemes newbies find on the web today.

Most beginning webmasters also believe in what is ultimately not true: "You can make millions on the web just by starting your own website and blah blah blah...". This of course is a false statement; primarily because it involves more dedication and skill than money and a dream.

So my advice to beginning webmasters is this: Keep it Simple. You've heard that everyday phrase 5 million times in your life and sure enough it applies on the what seems complicated web as well.

Steps for Newbie Webmasters to K.I.S.
1. Start with a known hosting provider, and start with a small package as well. Don't invest $150 in the first year like I did, you'll regret it. Instead start out with those pay-by-the-month plans around $6/month; if you don't know a good host to start, try my first shared hosting provider (soon to be VPS) Website Source .
2. Don't buy advertising until your site is older than 12 months officially. Reason for this being you need at least in my opinion a year of experience with the way Search Engines and the actual building and developing of a website goes according to today's/W3C's standards.
3. If you can't build your site, find someone trustworthy and experienced who can that will fit your budget. If that person isn't me, try searching for web designer reviews across the web. Although, I should throw in, $39 for your first website isn't a bad price through the J Love Network which is scheduled for release on October 1st, 2007 [official release date].
4. When it's time to advertise, you'll know. You should be making money some other way, before investing into advertising for your company. The money needs to cover itself and come from somewhere, or you will give up and ultimately fail. For a starting advertiser, try SearchFeed (please follow provided link so I will receive referral credit), which I personally approve for this method of quick-paid-advertising to boost targeted traffic and sales.

For more webmaster tips, check out the tutorials and experience at Webdigity , which is where my foundation for PHP knowledge took a foothold and began; you can even see my beginnings roughly a year or so ago in their forum archives.

Debate: IE7 vs FF2

Wed, 26 Sep 2007 14:55:40 EST

The true debate! Which is better? Internet Explorer 7, or Firefox 2? I figured it was definately time to write this article and state my point of view on this popular webmaster debate.

I'll try my damndest to make this as accurate as possible, but mind you I'm not a primary user of ANY browser besides the two that I speak of here. The others are plain useless, I believe there only needs to be 2 maximum.

First off, browser consistency. It seems that IE7 made an effort to fit into FF2's method of consistency. IE7 also seems to be copying a few features from FF, but no worries, that's how you steal customers! IE has already adopted the RSS icon from FF as the official web-standard Icon for RSS feeds, so thats definately a start.

But what makes them different? Let's examine the pro's and con's of IE first, then FF. Note: all references for browsers relate to IE version 7+ and Firefox version 2+.

Internet Explorer
Most people, when turning on their PC, don't care what browser they use. They just use what comes with it. Microsoft took a great advantage of this by incorporating Internet Explorer into its Windows XP package. Kind of defeats the need to shop for browser software, unless your webmaster-savvy.

IE Pro's
- Text looks better in IE. Plain-text, is a lot smoother and easier to read in IE7.
- Most design elements operate fine in IE. Such as marquee's, javascript, and some minor CSS.
- It loads fast. I don't think I've seen any browser load faster at first startup than IE.
- It's common; all web users use IE whether they like it or not, if they are on a Windows machine. Face facts people, FF doesn't always do what you want it to do.

IE Con's
- IE doesn't have good cookie handling, cookies written by IE for a domain, and then written again for a subdomain, act up together and won't work together. You must delete one of the cookies, to get access to the cookie-domain or cookie-subdomain, respectively. Annoying.
- No good plug-ins; IE doesn't really have any useful/safe plug-ins for webmasters like myself, just stupid useless toolbars and crap.

FF Pro's
- FF has alot of useful plugins available. Including HTML validators and other things that are useful to web developers.
- FF had tab support before IE, that's why its even as mildly popular as it is.
- Better caching: Webpages themselves load faster and more smoothly in FF.

FF Con's
- The FF development team is arrogant and lame. They won't listen to any bug reports, or read any e-mail for support, etc. Alot like Microsoft except Microsoft replies to support e-mails.
- Javascript acts up in FF more often than in IE, because FF disables required javascript functions for most applications. Lame.
- FF is not as secure as it claims to be. If anything, its on the same level as IE, they have been lyin to ya. If you think IE is less secure, disable things like ActiveX and popups, and tell me which is more secure? They use the same engines, they are THE SAME.
- FF loads slow as hell when you first open the application.

In conclusion..
You are probably wondering by my little self-debate which browser I even use? Well, I use both. I use IE7 to surf the web normally, because IE fixes your web experience instead of destroying it like FF. But when it comes to developing a webpage and these types of things, I am forced to use FF. Why? because of the cookie handling and HTML validation features I mentioned earlier.

If you use Opera, Browsehappy, or whatever; switch to FF at least. I know you won't use IE, cuz your a communist or whatever, hehe.

[SR] phpHaze 1.58.7

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 17:16:02 EST

Yes yes people, another Service Release as titled above. I said before 1.58.7 would be the last one before 1.59, but I was wrong. I had previously planned to use 1.58.7 to lay the ground work for the Forums in 1.59, but as you will later read below, there was too much that had to be done and the upgrade got way too big, and I had to stop where I was at or face an upgrade that would generate too many new issues.

So, as you will again read below, this is mainly a Service Release. Fixing and changing various things to operate the right way, after this I don't recall that there is anymore bugs in phpHaze beside a few XHTML validity errors. So at this point, I'll state that there is NO KNOWN ERRORS, BUGS, OR SECURITY FLAWS in phpHaze.

Sure, there is probably some, if not definately. Nothing is ever perfect, all we can do is strive to get closer and closer. So please remember to PM me if you find any bugs or security flaws, and I will jot them down for 1.58.8, projected for release in one more week. Sorry to put off 1.59 that much longer, but we will probably have 1.58.9 as well as the actual prepatory update for 1.59. Read on loyal blazers!

[ == NEW FEATURES == ]

++ For admins, the IP# for each shout is now displayed on the shoutbox.
++ After posting a comment on news, you are automatically redirected to your comment instead of just the news item.
++ Added storage for your Hostname based on your IP#, updates regularly with your IP# and is viewable on the IP hover in the members admin area.
++ Added missing pagination feature to main Member list and admin members
++ Added ability to disable the parsing of user avatars and mini-avatars. When disabled, override is in effect and no avatars will display. This will be part of a new feature in 1.6, "Safe Mode".
++ Comprehensive updates to Blacklist Admin, adding the popular Ajax-Tabbed Interface.
++ You can now disable the blacklist, if disabled, users on the blacklist will be able to visit your site again without you having to remove their blacklist entry.
++ As mentioned above with storing your Hostname, you can ban users by their hostname OR IP, instead of just IP#. That is the reason for the above mentioned feature.
++ Adding missing ability to Preview news entries when editing old ones. You were already able to when adding new ones.
++ Attempted to fix MSNBot and Yahoo! Slurp, and got rid of the Topsites bot. Not sure if they work yet, bare with me. Googlebot seems to be doing great lol.
++ Added ability to users to edit their own shout; uses same interface as editing a comment.
++ Comprehensive updates to code for user edit comment and fixed a few possible security exploits, updated to 1.58+ standards.
++ Added security logging to user edit comment/shout features, all attempts are considered Hack attempts.

[ == CORE CHANGES == ]

++ Added new definitions for detections from blazeHaze such as is Allow URL Fopen enabled, curl support, etc. Inherited from the blazeHaze installer (Yet to be released).
++ Instead of forwarding you to Yahoo.com for the blacklist, it now instead fills the search query with a little phrase like so: "IP Blacklisted at $sitename"
++ Moved front-page security detections to the admin panel index (such as is config writable, does the install directory exist, is an upgrade file available, etc) <- Nathan's comment that it was annoying for public users to see these things, so i moved it to admin panel.
++ Changed the way rich text editor blends with easy buttons for the old phpHaze textarea editor. You can now easily enable/disable it at the click of a button (by default, it's not enabled, but you just click the link and its there). When toggling, the old easy buttons will re-appear respectively, and this method has been applied to all uses of the rich text editor. Expect to see this popup everywhere, now that I've figured out a way to make the page load faster, and have user-toggle support instead of admin only.
++ The image in the news area of the site (the title, the little newspaper) now will disappear if no other panel's for your site have images, the CMS assumes you don't want to use the images in this case and disables it respectively.
++ Removed all uses of Super-Globals and removed the corresponding bit of code from the Core that was used to extract super globals. This is a security fix.

[ == CORE OPTIMISATION { CONDENSATION & SPEED INCREASE } == ]

++ Added a check to see if a user's stored ip is different from that of the current one they are using before updating it. If it is different, it will update the new IP and set the new hostname respectively. The update also runs as a LOW_PRIORITY query to take off some of the MySQL overload generated by a CMS.
++ Changed the LATEST PHPHAZE panel in the admin area to use cURL first if available, instead of Filegetcontents (since its faster).
++ Removed Super Globals Extraction script from Core (see earlier mention of Super Globals)
++ Condensed and optimized function render avatar; operates 150% faster
++ Removed url_exists check from function.render.imge(), function now operates 300% faster (a 2 second parsetime difference to be exact)
++ Added the ability for the login panel to be collapsable or not, based on the settings in your admin area for panels.
++ Moved blacklist detection to new user-function, "isBlacklisted" so that separate modules and scripts can check the blackList separately

[ == CORE BUG FIXES == ]

++ When viewing a single news entry's RSS feed, it now updates the views as it would when viewing it normally through the CMS.
++ Added trimlink'ing to bbCode URLS that stretch the shoutbox, currently VERY experimental. Will revisit in 1.58.8
++ When using the old logout link versus the one in the new User CP the page didn't refresh, it now uses a new delayed refresh feature and is a lot nicer and smoother transition.
++ Added check if avatars and mini avatars exist before checking image size and updating avatars in profile to reduce the need to check if images exist in function.imge() used for render_avatar() (see above mentioned)
++ Patched possible exploit in cookie logins when a user account doesnt exist
++ Moved error reporting to if/else admin block statement to hide errors from non-admins and the upgrade script (c3 this means ur an admin now on my site. grats)
++ If avatar override is in effect, deter from using the min-height control for news comments (see above mention of Safe Mode)
++ Restored function.render_avatar control over comment avatars so the avatar override affects them (see above)
++ bug with URLs not parsing with containing possible semicolons has been fixed (experimental) <- thanks to Nathan for using a url with semicolons so i found this
++ Fixed bug with logging out through CP, then loggin back in through login panel (showed you as not logged in, needed some refreshes)
++ Changed message hover preview to show title and message (trimmed) instead of
just extended title in Private Message center
++ Moved message replying to above-script processor like others so they
immediately show up in folders Ajax-style instead of needing to swap pages instead of tabs. 85% refresh-less now people!!! On the PM center.
++ xhtmlValid function incorrectly encoding ampersands.. re-patched and hopefully
this doesnt mess anything else up. I patch this stupid function at least once every other Service Release...
++ Fixed comma bug in new page title rewrite from previous patch in 1.58.5 i think
++ Disallowed sending of blank private messages with no content, only the subject field can be blank
++ Fixed bug with admin panel and member list showing long weeks for spiders instead of Never
++ When not logged in, the shoutbox wasn't showing usernames.. Wierd, fixed. Pretty serious bug.
++ Fixed locale bug showing wrong values in links when no link cats exist
++ Rewrote message center message-send error checking and display errors instead
of sending all broken messages to self
++ Added code to prevent sending of messages to spiders and users who dont exist.
++ updated Delete User function to delete shouts, news, etc. Asks you for confirmation on each, so you don't have to delete it all if you don't want to.
++ Added a check to supress fsock error message when avatars can not be reached or getimage functions fail.

An E-mail from "Team Rudy"

Sun, 23 Sep 2007 01:22:36 EST

As I said, I would do a follow-up entry for Rudy, but this entry isn't really for my views personally on Rudy as of yet, this is about an e-mail that I received from his website.

When I was surfing the various candidate websites choosing who I was planning to vote for, I actually signed up for the newsletter at Rudy's site. I normally don't do things like that because I hate spam and junk-mail just like every other right minded e-mail user on the web. The difference here is though is that this is actually relevant info, and so far I'm reading each e-mail and enjoying what I see.

I'm going to paste one of the e-mails that I have received thus far, and felt that it needed a little more exposure.

Dear justin,

Earlier this week, before General Petraeus could even give a word of testimony to Congress, MoveOn.org set out to slander an American hero. With help from an enormous discount at The New York Times, this radical left-wing organization ambushed General Petraeus with baseless attacks on his integrity.

Today, by running his own ad in the New York Times, Rudy stood up and told MoveOn.org that there is no place in American politics for these kinds of attacks. Will you join Rudy in repudiating MoveOn's smear of General Petraeus? Please click here to see Rudy's ad and make a donation to take a stand against gutter politics. Your contribution of $1,000, $500, $250, $100 or $50 will send a clear signal to MoveOn.org that the American people will not allow our men and women in uniform to have their names dragged through the mud.

MoveOn.org is not alone in attacking General Petraeus. Senator Clinton furthered MoveOn's slander by telling General Petraeus that his testimony required "the willing suspension of disbelief." The way forward in Iraq demands proven leadership. As Rudy says in his ad, "These times call for statesmanship, not politicians spewing political venom."

Stand with Rudy and send a message to MoveOn.org and Senator Clinton that you will not tolerate these kinds of baseless attacks. Click here to view Rudy's ad and make your contribution to stand up against gutter politics.

Today, our campaign also released a web ad entitled "She Changed". This ad calls on Senator Clinton to apologize for her remarks and repudiate MoveOn.org's ad. Please visit joinrudy2008.com to watch the video.

The American people demand a Commander-in-Chief who puts people above partisan politics. Senator Clinton's comments undermine our troops' service and seek to divide the nation while our troops are serving in harm's way. The American people deserve more than Democratic Presidential candidates who refuse to denounce extreme liberal organizations. These times call for proven leadership. Click here to make a contribution and send a message that you will not tolerate gutter politics.

Sincerely,

Michael DuHaime
Campaign Manager
Rudy Giuliani Presidential Committee

Republican, Democrat, or none?

Wed, 19 Sep 2007 02:34:28 EST

Well with the presidential election coming up soon, I figured it was time that I declare my official status as I ultimately plan to vote this year to keep a certain person out of office lol, but I'll get to that later.

Before Bush ran for office back in 2000, I didn't care much about politics at all and barely knew the differences between the two most popular parties, Republicans and Democrats. But things changed that year, when in my 8th grade year in middle school we held a mock election of our own, Bush vs Gore.

Bush won, by a landslide (lol). Obviously because of the heavy Republican influence in my state, Georgia is usually a Red state overall. But you wouldn't think that would affect the choices of kids in middle school, so what's the deal? Parents? Who knows... I did vote for him in that mock election, because of what I had personally seen on TV and heard my parents talk about.

So that may tell you right there from the start, I supported Bush strongly, and I still do; before you stop reading and comment immediately on my view of Bush, do please read on.

I feel as an American its important to support your President overall, regardless if his plans are not working. I'm not going to go into a hell of a lot of detail on this, everyone knows the mistakes he has made but you can not honestly tell me any Democratic president has a cleaner slate?

I hate critics. You shouldn't even be allowed to vote. We should deport you from the country.

Either way, Bush has done what he felt he had to do, and in the end a Democrat is going to try to get us out of Iraq.

I spent alot of time recently watching Youtube video clips of presidential debates and various ads and things like that and visited each website of each candidate; not to mention spent a considerable amount of time on each.

So I think I'm a republican, because I like their energy and the way they get things done. Bush accomplished his own list of deeds but didn't do much for the Republican party and you can't judge the entire party on one Presidents actions, if you did that would you still like the Clinton family so much? Nah didn't think so. Don't forget about the other presidents in the past either; so it doesn't really matter what party it is.

Seeing how long this is so far, I'm gonna have to write a few parts to this, so consider this part one as my first entry to the Politics category .

So with that being said, I guess right now I'm a Republican, and it's because of Rudy Guilliani (prolly slaughtered his last name lol). Go to this guys website... He's making commitments and he's gonna make them happen -- he's the only candidate with a track record of making things happen...

Join Rudy in 2008

I have to cut this short for now as its too damn long, and Rudy needs his entire own entry.

phpHaze 1.58.6.1 [SR]

Sun, 16 Sep 2007 13:05:27 EST

I will begin titling upgrade releases as either: SR (service release), CU (child upgrade, i.e: 1.58.7), MI (minor upgrade, i.e: 1.59, and MA (major upgrade, i.e.: 2.0)

phpHaze 1.58.6.1 has just been finished. It simply addresses a few bugs which were introduced in changes made back in 1.58.6 a few days ago.

Here are some of the bug fixes:

-- Fixed 2 warning errors caused by new function "stripSmileys" added to core and currently only used in user profiles

-- User Level was showing "Member" for old versions of PHP on Spider List; fixed (shows Search Engine Spider)

-- For spiders who had never visited the site, the Last Seen Users Panel was showing "1637" weeks or something since last visit, this has been fixed and now spiders who haven't visited shouldn't show up as a Last Seen User.

-- Couldn't post on shoutbox on this site, seemed that we had so many shouts we had to alter the FIELD_TYPE for our MySQL DB on shout_id; this has been fixed for all versions.

-- the Security Logging system in phpHaze was showing incorrect hack attempts for news pages, an this has hopefully been fixed as well.|

All beta testers are strongly urged to upgrade to fix these bugs asap. Contact me via PM on this site for more info on upgrading.

Latest Project -> Joffee Publish

Sat, 15 Sep 2007 13:39:58 EST

I know this is kind of late, but I have been even more busy lately than usual working on one of my older sites... but anyway, this would be my most recent project, of course through my favorite client Nathan Pinno, a complete re-do of the first site I did for him, Joffee Publishing: applying my latest knowledge, skills, and phpHaze... and this is the result.

Click Image to Enlarge

Of course we gotta give a shout out to Shedrock, the resident phpHaze Theme Designer (not to mention the BEST CMS theme designer) who ported this theme from Fusion -> Haze for us!

I'm pretty proud of this one to... I have already submitted to Webdigity's design gallery as my second design that I feel good enough about to show to Nikolas and a guy i refer to personally as "piggy piggy webdigity", but I won't name any names lmfao...

Anyway, please let me know what you guys think . In the meantime, check out the site in its live-state, Joffee Publishing Inc.

phpHaze 1.58.6 Released

Thu, 13 Sep 2007 17:44:36 EST

phpHaze 1.58.6 has been released.

It's the biggest thing to hit phpHaze thus far since 1.58 itself. Read more!

Change Log Legend/Key
** = This feature is unique to phpHaze. No other CMS has this feature with the same sub-features and functionality. Guaranteed..
-- = normal change log entry
(j) = inside of a change entry means that that sub-entry has been completed
(x) = inside of a change entry means that that sub-entry w as left incomplete during this update

[ == NEW FEATURES IN phpHaze 1.58.6 == ]

Miscellaneous
** Added feature to Custom Pages to track page views. Uses a "Low_Priority" update query so your database isn't overloaded by constant page refreshes.
** Sitemap now encludes Permalink and RSS Image-Link for each News/Blog Entry

Private Message Center
** Extreme updates to the layout of the Private Message center sections themselves, Inbox/Outbox/Trash
-- Moved PM center search to tab section and removed entire section "Purge All"
-- Added ability to "un-purge" single messages in your Trash, as well as "un-purge" the entire Trash can back to your Inbox.
-- Added rich text editor to Inbox message-view reply box.
-- Added ability to search Trash in PM center, including the ability to search both (subject, content) and all (inbox, outbox, trash) for a truely unique PM Search experience in phpHaze.

SEO Optimization / (Google, Y!, etc) Search Engine Related Changes
-- AddedGoogle, yahoo, topsites, and msn live (experimental) detection to last seen panel
** Created sub-listing for Spider Members of phpHaze sites
** Tabbed interface for Member List. Includes all members, as well as Search Engine Spiders.

[ == CORE OPTIMISATION, CONDENSATION, & CHANGES == ]
** Completely rewrote Last Seen Users Panel code and changed layout.
-- Added highlight php function to core in prep for forum module in 1.59+
-- Completely re-wrote 'sorterfix' include for news comments. new code is half as long and twice as fast.
-- Now storing popup-hover profile in a functions.render function; popupProfile. Used for: LSUP (j), SB (j), Member List (j), Comments (j), etc.
** Added multiple instances of SQL Query-type "LOW_PRIORITY" to take some of the load off of your phpHaze database on data that isn't needed in the next 30 seconds. [Moves update query to the servers memory and executes it when the memory has more free spots available]
-- Moved multiple instances of locale variables for Private Message center to Globale locale. Same for Last seen users panel locale
-- Moved PHP4-only functions to include file and is only loaded for your CMS if your version of PHP is less than 5.
-- Moved popup-hover user online status image to a core function and use it in place of old one. Credit: Shedrock (Fuzed Shoutbox).
-- Renamed User "is Online" include to functions.users.inc.php and moved all user related functions from core to this file.
-- Merged functions "rssBb" (for RSS bbCode parsing) and "bbCode" for normal bbCode parsing.
-- Added new function: stripSmileys / smileyDecode; used on member profile comment listings and elsewhere where smileys are in the data, but aren't going to be parsed.

[ == CORE PHP/MySQL BUG FIXES == ]
-- Added |PHP|-function.str_ireplace to PM searching to better highlight all keywords in search results. Includes by default backward-compatible PHP4/PHP5 built-in core control.
** Repaired old-style Member List ordering from phpHaze 1.42 to 1.58+ standards.
-- Fixed width of CODE and QUOTE bbCode tags (350 some-odd pixels instead of no-width)
** Fixed notice error in banned-users tab in members admin
** Patched possible SQL Injection in Member List and Member Profiles
-- Patched annoying URL creation in function.chkVar: replace all instances of http:// with "" (nothing) [Fundamentally just deletes all occurances of 'http://' in a PHP-GET variable.]
** When deleting a inbox message, it didn't immediately show up in the trash onless you refresh. Fixed by moving message above the tabs. The same method has been applied to multiple Private Message center functions and the Private Message center is now roughly 80% page-refresh-free (up from 50% in phpHaze 1.58.5 and below).
-- Send-specific message in PM center was sending to self..solution makes send-multiple message break. Both problems fixed.
** Added trimlink'ing to paragraphs over a certain # of chars [Fundamentally adds "..." to the end of extremely long paragraphs on the front page if necessary]
-- Patched possible PHP-Core exploit in PM center rowstart variables.
-- Fixed a strange bug when viewing messages in the Inbox in your Private Message center. For some reason when viewing a message it showed your inbox listings above everything else in your PM center (all sections).
-- Fixed another strange bug when purging inbox, inbox listings that were purged were still showing in inbox.
-- Fixed bug with some MP3 Player settings not affecting the player itself.
-- Fixed error (the last one!?) in songs admin when adding song
** Fixed bug in security logger when testing for ip # (thanks to SeanC for reporting this error) -- 'mysql error after registering'
** In songs admin, it now shows "No Images Available" if no images found for dropdown select menu instead of an empty select menu.
** Changed "delete this FILE" in home to "DIRECTORY" for blazeHaze installer detection

[ == CORE DESIGN { FLAW FIXES & CHANGES } == ]
-- The banned user popup from the Shoutbox (now core-located) wasn't loading your theme stylesheet (from 1.58 upgrade). Same prob with the Private Message popup from Login panel, both issues fixed. Credit to Shedrock again by the way for supplying both scripts.
-- Shortened titles on all admin tab content titles (for themes with narrow center columns)
-- Fixed multiple layout bux with Shoutbox. Should look great in all themes now, primarily for Shedrock.
-- Changed Trash primary icon in PM center, now changes based on amount of messages in your Trash.
-- Fixed PHP.function.trim issue on News Comments
-- Your theme now controls the colors and styling of the hover-box script used across the entire CMS.
-- Added missing CSS form classes to: Login (j), Archives (j), Categories (j), All Search Boxes (j), System Settings (j), News Admin (j), Write PM Message (j), Edit Profile (j)
-- Fixed music player and shoutbox collapse bug from 1.58. Now all panels can be collapsable, and the Javascripts inside them work fine in both browsers.
-- Vertical-middle aligned the remaining table and panel icons to make all themes look better in both browsers.

[ == THEME SYSTEM { FLAW FIXES & CHANGES } == ]

-- Changed animated collapse script for entire CMS to non-animated collapse to fix all Javascript bugs in panels.

Sometimes you have to lose a feature to gain more important (better) ones... and yes, that will end 1.58.6. I'll see y'all in 1.58.7, then in 1.59. What to expect you ask? No more hints after this:

Forums

P.S. phpHaze is almost 1 year old from the day I started developing it, and no site running phpHaze has been hacked yet. I still have a LIVE site that runs v1.1 and it has yet to be hacked.
^ Yeah, thats unique to phpHaze, too.[/i]

Latest Project - The Friendly Hangout

Sun, 09 Sep 2007 18:44:52 EST

I have just completed my latest project for my favorite client Nathan Pinno, The Friendly Hangout. Niether of us really knew where to go with the layout, so I had to fish for some inspiration.

Searching through Fuzed Themes I came across a layout that I thought may work for the theme and logo design for this site. Looking at one of the older themes that Shedrock had designed, 247 Portal seemed like a great candidate. So in turn, I based the template for The Friendly Hangout on this theme and designed a logo and the layout from there.

Here's a small screenshot, click the image for a full preview or just visit the site yourself:

Again I stress the fact that I am not the best logo designer or theme designer for that matter, and this was inspired by Shedrock from Fuzed Themes ; but I did the best I could . Hope you enjoy the site Nathan, and remember for your next projects who to call!

phpHaze 1.58.5 Released

Mon, 03 Sep 2007 14:52:57 EST

Before I even begin, let me say a special thanks to Shedrock from Fuzed Themes , whom is now developing the first set of stock themes for phpHaze! Without Shedrock on the team, the themes system for haze would of never gotten this far. So please read on!

Another predominantly service release for 1.58, phpHaze 1.58.5 consists of a few new features as well! We begin by taking a look at the News/Blogging system within phpHaze. It was recently brought to my attention by a beta-tester that this system was too much "news" and not enough "blog". So in response, I have added a new feature to the news system, "Permalinking".

Each news item now has a static page which is referred to as a "permalink". These HTML pages do not contain the long PHP query strings that scare away search engines. Instead, the Permalinked URLS are now completely SEO friendly, check the Permalink icon in the credits area of this news post and see for yourself! Note that this feature will only work on Apache-based servers, and it seems to have troubles on local Windows test servers, so the old readmore pages are staying intact for now as well.

Here is the rest of the change log, with the list of bug fixes as well.

New Features in 1.58.5

Theme System
-- You can now have multiple themes installed to phpHaze and control which one is active from the System Settings area.

News System
-- You now have the ability to Preview new entries when posting them in the News/Blog admin area.
-- Restored bbCode parsing to the front page news listings
-- Instead of trimming news entries by a number of characters, phpHaze now trims the front page entries by number of paragraphs instead. (See front page of this site for a better example)
-- Created new function "render_news", and moved it to the theme system. Gives every theme specific control of how the news looks in your CMS.
-- Added hoverbox effects to all news-credit icons and each one now has an explanation of what each button does, the layout of the credits area has also been slightly changed.
-- Same as above has been done for the comment-icons such as editing and deleting your own posts or as a moderator for all posts.
-- Each news/blog entry now has its own RSS feed.

Bug Fixes in 1.58.5

-- Fixed broken view message link for Trash in Message Center
-- Comprehensive updates and fixes to cpage.php per changes to the new theme system (listed as a BUGFIX because i ran into a bug with this page as per the new theme system)
-- Restored missing admin navigation to admin areas for each plugin (now shows a navigation for plugins and back to main admin index)
-- Purge all button did not seem to work correctly in the Message Center, this bug has been fixed.
-- Fixed FATAL ERROR in the page that controls how users edit their own comments
-- Added missing pagination feature to Inbox
-- Fixed pagination not working for Outbox and Trash areas in message center

And thats it! Don't expect another update for at least a week because I will be focusing on some new lengthy features that will take some extra time, and hopefully NO more bug fixes.

phpHaze 1.58.4 Released

Fri, 31 Aug 2007 01:17:32 EST

phpHaze 1.58.4 is mainly a service release for various bug fixes and optimizations to the code structure of the core and other important parts of the CMS. We are getting closer and closer to a stable version of phpHaze and hopefully by 1.6 or somewhere in that range we will be able to move out of the beta stage, of course at this time that is only speculation.

New Features
-- The Main Settings, Miscellaneous Settings, and Time settings admin areas have been combined under the ajax-tab interface in a new admin area entitled System Settings (respectively replacing Main Settings)
-- Added a new experimental internal sendmail function in case users encounter problems with the packaged class-driven sendmail. You can toggle its usage in the Misc Settings tab of System Admin, "Internal Mail", and my default is set to FALSE (using the old method for now since new one is experimental).
-- You can now control the max dimensions and file size of both avatars and mini-avatars (see Core Changes below)

Core Changes
-- Moved MP3 Player to Plugins Admin
-- Converted Intro fields in the database from type BLOG to TEXT for various reasons
-- Heavily condensed maincore code: starting amount of lines for maincore was 1100+ lines of code, its now ~900 lines of code.
-- Merged functions "Encode_Ascii" and "Hazemail" under the old function "Encode_Ascii" and it is now used universally in all areas that display a users e-mail address to help fight spam.
-- New function added, "ExtractDefault", which has the ability to immediately on-demand extract the default setting for any of the setting's table values. Used mainly in maintenance restore, and failed-POST attempts
-- Added multi-level support for internal and external avatars and mini-avatars; also added Admin-control for dimension and filesizes on both. Experimental.

Theme System Changes
-- Added function "render_navigation" to theme functions file to give themes more control over how navigation links are displayed.

Bug Fixes

-- MP3 Player showed a big empty music box that was quite unattractive when no songs existed in the DB. This has been fixed and it now displays a little message instead of the flash object.
-- Added bbDecoding to all search functions, were supposed to be there but apparently missing.
-- Fixed broken RSS feeder for "Latest phpHaze" panel on upgrade page when upgrading to new versions [Theme Fix]
-- Completely re-wrote error checking methods in Edit Profile area of User Control Panel
-- Some things were displaying related to Sessions even when Session Control was disabled in the admin panel, this has been fixed. Applies to: Admin Info Panel, Logout Tab on User CP, Security Logs
-- Added missing SESSION_EXISTS check to User CP when logging out and killing a session
-- Fixed numerous bugs in the member list as well as XHTML Validity errors.
-- Squashed the remaining Notice errors (I hope!)
-- added ampersand encoding to shoutbox; in response, added new experimental ampersand encoding in place and integrated with old xhtmlValid function
-- Updated Restore Settings feature in Maintenance to reflect newest changes to the settings table in 1.58+
-- Avatars were not showing in user profiles after upgrade to 1.58.3 and this was fixed.
-- Panel content was not saving when editing it rather than Adding a new panel, and this has also been fixed.
-- Deleting an Inbox Message also did not seem to work and as a result this was the last part of the update! FIXED.

phpHaze 1.58.3 Released

Fri, 24 Aug 2007 00:10:56 EST

Welcome friends! Yes it has happened again and no, I won't stop! Again in this update, you will see my addition of the tabbed-interface in various places. Beta testers, as always, please be sure to read this full news item in case you are missing something!
Small Feature Additions & Changes

-- "The Latest" Panel, smileys are now automatically parsed rather than left as plain text.
-- You can now automatically kill your associated administrator session when logging out if you use the logout tool in the new user Control Panel rather than the quick-link on your sidebar. Of course its not automatic, you have the choice of whether or not the session is killed.
-- Small code structure improvements to Last Seen Users panel as well as :
-- LSUP now shows users online
-- LSUP now shows most users online ever

Big Feature Additions

-- The WYSIWYG Rich-Text editor has been integrated with the PM center for writing private messages. Note: Doesn't apply to replying to messages yet, it will in the next update. Only writing new ones.
-- The Members Admin now uses the Ajax-Enhanced Tab-Interface made popular in the last update of haze.
-- As well, in Members Admin, banned and non-banned members are now separated onto different tabs.
-- The News Admin area is also now using the Ajax-Enhanced tab interface
-- The admin area, News Categories, was deleted and moved to the News Admin in a tab.
-- When adding/editing categories, you can now preview the image before you save it rather than blindly saving the category, the image textbox also now uses a dropdown file list instead.
-- The Links Admin area now uses the Ajax-Enhanced tab interface as well, for some reason i don't sense that you are suprised!
-- Also as a result, like with News, the Link Categories admin area was removed and moved to the Links admin area into a new tab.
-- The entire links Admin area has been re-written and now uses a much more attractive GUI with the main link listing laid out much nicer.
-- The description for adding/editing links is now using the Rich-Text WYSIWYG editor.
-- added the ajax-enhanced tab interface to smileys admin
-- You can now preview smileys when adding/editing them rather than blindly savin them (just like with News Cats admin).
-- The smileys admin has also seen a large re-write and has had many improvements to the overall code structure.

Bug Fixes

-- It seemed that as a result of the last update, the back-color for your MP3 player was not restoring when you opt to restore the default settings, this has been fixed.
-- Also as a result of the last update, page-icons were failing to load on pages (page.php); this has also been fixed. Suprisingly, this was a core related issue.
-- If a member has never logged in, in the admin panel it would show their last visit as "37 years ago", this has been fixed and now instead of displays "Never".

Core Changes

-- The Plugin Settings part of phpHaze that was introduced in the last update to haze (1.58.2) was troublesome and was completely re-done to allow for more plugins to be added in the future at ease.
-- applied the necessary changes to the mp3 player and the mp3 player admin area respectively
-- move function colorPallette2 (based on fuzed colorpallete for shoutbox) from songs admin to functions.render; Credit Shedrock & Xandra by the way for this function which came stock with the shoutbox when it was ported from Fusion to phpHaze.

What's Up Next? (Things you should expect in 1.58.4)

-- Some new admin icons and other various theme improvements to the administrator GUI.
-- The ability to preview new News items rather than posting them then viewing then having to edit.
-- The ability to "draft" news, whereas you can post news and have the option to draft it instead of posting it actively; it won't show on your sites front page until you move it from the draft box to the active box.
-- Ability to enable/disable songs from showing as possible songs to listen to in the mp3 player.
-- Ability to forward Inbox messages to other users
-- Combined Main and Misc settings areas into "System Settings" area and add tabbed interface, introduce new settings area: "SEO Settings".
-- Comprehensive enhancements to the shoutbox admin, including user-controlled features like whether or not bbCode/smileys are being parsed, if the textbox is shown (shoutbox locked from posting), etc.
And of course, MUCH MORE! I can't give it all to you now, that would give away the WHOLE update right? So look out for 1.58.4 guys, we are that much closer to 1.6!

phpHaze 1.58.2 Released

Tue, 21 Aug 2007 20:51:27 EST

Mwahahahahah! I'm starting to love this ajax and javascript stuff that I seem to have been adding to phpHaze in each of the past few updates. Beta testers, be SURE to read all of the stuff below and check out whats new and what has recently been fixed!

Biggest Changes
-- Ajax Enhanced MP3 Admin
-- Ajax Enhanced Security Logs Admin
-- Ajax Enhanced User Control Panel

New Features
MP3 Player
-- Full control of your MP3 Player with an all new Settings area in your MP3 admin area. Fine-tune the settings of your MP3 Player to get the best performance and layout!
-- In place of a normal textbox, you now have a dropdown select box for song-images for both adding and editing songs.
-- Each setting for your MP3 player has a comprehensive explanation in a tooltip when hovering the question mark image.
Private Messages
-- You can now manually mark messages in your PM center as read/unread
Latest phpHaze Panel
-- Now shows an alert based on your version of phpHaze and the latest possible version of phpHaze. If out-of-date, the appropriate message shows, if up-to-date respectively.

Administrator Sessions
-- Added Flood Control to prevent administrators from renewing a session more than once during a single session.

Bug Fixes
-- Fixed bug in Sessions Admin; when killing an administrators session besides your own (I thought it worked.. that is the point of the admin area in the first place) it was not working.
-- Removed duplicate verify image generation function from core, it was in existance apparently accidentally. Should help with site speed tremendously.
-- Added missing user icons to core for user levels Client and Staff; function moved to functions.render, outside of core in preparation for moving to themes.
-- Fixed "PM Webmaster" link on Contact Me page, it was pointing to the old Private Message center.

Other Stuff
-- Various Code Structure improvements
-- Removed multiple unnecessary DB queries in core
-- Compacted some code to enhance site performance

phpHaze 1.58.1 Released

Sat, 18 Aug 2007 17:18:12 EST

As promised, there was a necessary routine service release following the release of phpHaze 1.58.

Bug Fixes in 1.58.1:

-- XHTML Errors in Admin Panel --> Blacklist Fixed
-- Added missing CSS class attributes to the search functions
-- PM Center, Writing a Message did not work. Entire PM center rewritten and all bugs should be fixed now, will re-examine in 1.58.2
-- IN IE ONLY, collapsable panels for Shoutbox and Music player bugs have been fixed. Firefox has the same, if not new issues with the fixes I applied for IE, so users of phpHaze beware of setting the Shoutbox/Music player to Collapsable as it will have some design flaws with Javascript actions.

New Features in 1.58.1:
-- WYSIWYG Editor Integrated with the News Admin area. This is currently in beta testing so please report any flaws or mistakes that you find with it. Currently you can not control the initial state of the editor from your admin panel, but in 1.58.2 you will be able to.
And thats about it for now, I kept this one small as I could because of the huge overwrite to your Private Messaging system so expect some more stuff as usual in 1.58.2, surely in the next few days to a week or so.

phpHaze 1.58 in Beta Testing

Wed, 15 Aug 2007 23:54:40 EST

Well as usual I have been deep into making phpHaze for the better in my free time, wait til you see what this update has in store! If you haven't already noticed the site layout (this one in particular) is no longer tableless, there is many reasons for this and I will get into this later. Anyway, on to the details of the update!

The reason this entry was titled "in Beta Testing" is because this upgrade isn't released for the public yet. I have to create a backwards-compatible theme system that will support themes for phpHaze 1.57 installations. Once this is complete, I may take this site back to a tableless layout and then later upgrade the other live phpHaze sites. But for the time being, I'm loving the table-based layout because of the powerful capabilities.

Here's the update change log and check list:

-- Improved Theme System. Theme system is now table-based, but in the future will include a div-based option.

-- Fixed many more PHP "Notice" errors in various areas. I think they are all squashed now, so please report any that you run into as the core of haze now forces all errors to display in this version.

-- Fixed more XHTML validity errors, mainly in the admin panel. The site should be back to being 100% full XHTML 1.0 Transitional as well as the CMS itself.

-- Fixed multiple shoutbox bugs in archive, admin and panel itself.

-- Admins can now kill other sessions that are live as well as the completion of the full Admin Session Management area in the admin panel. Added some more data to this area as well such as the current IP# of the session.

--The Login Box/Panel is now an actual Panel controlled by the admin area (can be disabled/enabled etc) and a separate login-page now exists if the user so-chooses to use it [enable the link "Control Panel" in Navigation Admin if its not showing]

-- With the new theme system comes a nifty subheader where more links can be displayed as well as other various tools/features.

-- You can now disable and enable navigation links from displaying in both the subheader/navigation panel.

-- Comprehensive layout updates to the following areas: News Categories, News Archives, Members Admin, News Cats Admin.

-- The feature on page.php that banned malicious hack attempt IP#'s has been removed and the user is now forced to the site's front page instead. This stops the flooding of your blacklist.

-- You can now have fully maintainable Center/Content panels controlled from your admin area that show on the sites front page. In next update of phpHaze you will be able to choose which pages they display on, or all pages, etc.

-- You can now create panels with PHP/HTML code instead of having to upload a new PHP/HTML file to your panels directory each time. Completely admin panel controlled.

-- Theme system has a built-in option for collapsable side panels that uses a very nice show/hide script. Somewhat buggy, will address these issues in next version of phpHaze.

-- Added more variables shown in Members Admin area to you can see more "at-a-glance" useful data based on each user listed.

-- Bug fixed in News cats admin when creating new categories [add category form moved to same page as news cats admin]

-- Bug fixed when previewing new custom pages and previewing existing custom pages.

-- The Private Message Center is now Ajax-Powered and flipping between PM Center Sections doesn't require a page re-load. There will be more advances to this system as time goes on.

phpHaze 1.57.6 Released

Sun, 12 Aug 2007 01:54:12 EST

Phew! The past few days, I've been doing nothing but phpHaze. I recently set up my personal computer as a local test server so that I could properly test phpHaze and other scripts that I develop/developed.

It turns out, phpHaze was of course full of "Notice" errors since this live server that serves this site supresses those errors. Matter of fact, 99.9% of live servers do supress these errors. Nevertheless, I had to fix 'em!

This is by far the largest update to phpHaze as far as total file size goes. Over 100kb of new files in this package upgrade your version of phpHaze to 1.57.6. See below for update specs.

-- Cleaned up alot of code. Got rid of needless code and generally made the scripts run smoother all around.
-- Bug fixed in Admin Sessions where if you leave the page open and your session dies, it would show something like "37 years left" on your admin session, I believe I have squashed this bug and everything seems a'ok.
-- Another bug with Admin Sessions was fixed where for some reason multiple sessions were being created for the same user and they weren't being killed properly. this bug has also been fixed.
-- All known "Notice" errors have been fixed.
-- Lots of XHTML Validity errors fixed. I believe the entire CMS and Layout is XHTML 1.0 Transitional Valid, even the admin areas and things that W3C doesn't have access to validate.
-- Fixed smileys layout bug. If you put numerous smileys in a line they would go over the layout and make the page look very strange, this bug has been fixed.
-- Fixed broken mini-avatars when no avatar exists, now loads the no avatar image instead
-- Fixed mini avatar layout issue as result of previous update to phpHaze, 1.57.5
-- Completely re-wrote page.php syntax and control-structure for security, much better, secure, and optimized.
-- Added "Parse time" to official phpHaze footer to benchmark each page execution time

That's about it! It feels like I did a LOT more than I have listed here, but I suppose that's mainly because the same things were fixed on so many pages.

phpHaze 1.57.5 Released

Tue, 07 Aug 2007 02:07:57 EST

Another quite large update for phpHaze has made its way into the record books! This time, I address many issues with your phpHaze CMS. I have received some feedback from the last update, and have taken all suggestions into consideration prior to completing this update.

Most notably, this update introduces Admin Session Control. Before being able to use the admin panel or anything admin-related, you will have to login again to create an admin session, and the sessions are controlled by time. At anytime, you can kill your own session or renew it to make it last longer. Once the time is up on your session, the session dies.

Only full administrators have the right to choose the length of their sessions, otherwise Moderators and Staff Members can only enter the admin panel with a session length of 10 minutes (default) or a length that you set in the admin panel.

Note that you can set the default session length for mods/staff members in the Misc Settings area of your admin panel, as well as disabling the use of Admin Sessions altogether. So you don't even have to use sessions if they annoy you, but mind you they are an added extra layer of security and its highly recommended that you make use of it.

As well, the other smaller changes are as follows:

-- The built-in Contact Form now includes Image Verification to help combat spam attacks through the phpHaze contact system.
-- XHTML validity errors in the Private Message Center and the Contact Us page have been fixed.
-- Admin Session Control (see above long explanation)

As I said, the update is big, but its only big because of the admin session control extension. There have also been some other minor core changes and other small bug fixes along the way that you probably won't notice anyway.

Existing Live CMS users of phpHaze: your sites have already been updated by myself.

phpHaze 1.57.4 Released

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 01:13:46 EST

Ladies and gentlemen, announcing the arrival of phpHaze 1.57.4! I took a few days off from updating haze just to give you guys a break . Anyway, on to the details of the update!

This time theres actually no significant database changes, the only thing your upgrade.php file does this time is change the version number of your installation of haze, which is still just as important as the rest of the upgrade package.

-- Made Contact Us & Site Map modules real pages (previously were custom pages that ran PHP include statements on the modules) As a result of doing this, they were taken off of the sitemap. See below for solution!
-- Pages such as Archives, Categories, Contact (real phpHaze pages, not custom ones) now appear on your Sitemap in order with your custom pages (nice huh!)
-- The official phpHaze footer has had some other changes in the way that is laid out so you will notice a slight change in that.
-- The RSS system has also seen improvements, as it now no longer requires separate RSS core and connection files to operate. This of course means that it uses your original phpHaze configuration to connect to the database and get your news for feeds. As well, in the next update of haze this paves the way for Member-Access RSS feeds which will control (depending on if your logged in or not) which news items you see. As of right now, the RSS system only parses news that is public access for security reasons.
-- There have also been various bug fixes to the javascript involved with the bbCode and Smiley buttons, all should be working 100% with no errors now.

And that is about it for this update .

On a side note, the phpHaze self-installer is now in its beginning stages and we do have a working version of the installer and are preparing to release the first phpHaze demo site which will display our stock theme which will come with the phpHaze package, ready for release by phpHaze 2.0.

phpHaze 1.57.3 Released

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 01:13:25 EST

Am I on a roll or what? . Yes, phpHaze has been updated again. Lucky for you guys, I'm updating your sites as I go so at the moment you don't have to worry about constantly updating your copies of phpHaze.

Curious as to what has been changed in this update? Well loyal reader, you know I won't let ya down!

As mentioned earlier today (approx. 7 hours ago) here on my blog I made note of phpHaze 1.57.3 being released and a new admin area didn't I? Well, this new area is still under construction and probably will see advancements throughout the next few updates of phpHaze. What is it you ask? It's the plug-ins admin! In 1.57.3 you aren't able to add or disable any new plug-ins but you are able to manage any plug-ins that are installed. It's like a miniature admin panel (kind of like your Maintenance admin area).

I wasn't really ready to release this admin area yet but it was required because of the latest plug-in developed, the Shoutbox. Graciously provided by Shedrock from the Fuzed Themes site, I have completed the changes required to every aspect of this mod for it to work on phpHaze just like it did on PHP-Fusion. So besides the plug-ins and Shoutbox, check out the other changes!

++ Patched a possible exploit in user avatar & mini-avatar URLs allowing users to place scripts in the URL.
++ Overlay patch to increase security on page.php (in phpHaze 1.6 we will do away with page.php altogether)
++ You can now preview custom pages rather than having to save them first. This applies to both adding and editing current pages.
++ Optimized and fixed some buddy code in navigation.php that limits navigation on admin areas
++ Custom pages now have a new option, you can opt to omit the page from the site map and it won't be shown on your site map (respectively)
++ When creating a new custom page, you can opt to automatically add a link to the page to your main navigation.
++ The Security Logs admin can now be ordered by Log-Type, clicking a type of log will show only logs of that type. May be some bugs, will revisit in 1.57.4 when I have about 200 logs to use for testing in a few days

The Future of phpHaze

Mon, 23 Jul 2007 18:03:04 EST

I figured it was about time to let the readers in on what is next for phpHaze in the upcoming weeks and months.

Over this week we will move into the next upgrade package for phpHaze, 1.57.3 which will introduce a new admin area as well as some other nice changes .

After this is complete, I will begin working on the auto-installer for fresh installations of phpHaze for new users and clients. This will help me and new users tremendously by speed lining the what once was a long process.

phpHaze already saw the first user-upgrade package in 1.57.1 and it was perfected in 1.57.2. You will of course see it again in 1.57.3 and updates to come. We have a long list of things to do for phpHaze and I believe it will all be included in the 1.6 package, so there are about 6 service release updates until then (so don't get ahead of yourselves).

At the moment there are currently 4 sites on the web using the beta version of phpHaze, 2 of which belong to the same person and recently what would of been the 5th site, was converted to PHP-Fusion recently. It's always good to keep the number of beta testers to a minimum to minimize risk but I'd like to keep about 5 people besides myself running their own phpHaze site and keeping it up-to-date.

In light of this decision, I will offer 2 new copies of phpHaze to friends who would like to test this software; if you don't have somewhere to host the site I'll host it for you. One of these spots are already taken by the newest member of this blog, Shedrock. During the middle of this week he will receive phpHaze 1.57.2 or 1.57.3 depending on when 1.57.3 is released.

So keep your eyes peeled for the next upgrade! By the time we make it around to v2, I believe everyone will be forced to re-install the whole software (but the database will be fine).

phphaze 1.57.2 Released

Sat, 21 Jul 2007 20:14:29 EST

A minor security exploit was taken advantage of this morning and my webhost forced me to release an official patch for phpHaze before redistributing phpHaze to my clients again (as well as myself and this site).

Since it was time for another update, I went ahead and included the planned features that I already had planned for phpHaze 1.57.2. I really didnt plan on releasing this 24 hours 1.57.1 was released, but ya gotta do what ya gotta do!

This update includes the following changes:

++ New Maintenance Utility: Clear Verify Cache (allows the admin to clear the verification image cache generated during user failed registrations)
++ The News Admin area had a bug where the Add News button didn't show if there was no news in the database, this has been fixed.
++ Fixed missing argument errors for includes/search.php for newer version of PHP that don't supress warning messages.
-- Full News Articles comments are now paginated, every 7 comments the other comments are moved to a new page to save layout space.
++ "Be the first to comment on this news article." was showing on News Articles when not logged in, this was fixed.
++ Added missing copyright link to footer for phpHaze site
++ Limited the Admin Navigation to only show your user control panel and a return to site index button instead of all available panels.
++ The exploit for this update was in page.php, I wont go into the minor details of it but it has been patched and now if you attempt to hit this exploit your IP is banned automatically by phpHaze.
++ Toggling for Maintenance Mode was moved from Main Settings admin to the Maintenance Admin area, respectively.
++ Bug in last update for security logs admin has been fixed.
++ The version of haze is now controlled as to where database upgrade packages will update the version automatically, but the user themself cannot change the version manually from admin panel.
++ The Maintenance page that showed when the site was in maintenance mode had a footer bug and that was fixed.

phphaze 1.57.1 Released

Sat, 21 Jul 2007 01:34:32 EST

I have finished the minor upgrade for phpHaze 1.57.1. This version contains 2 minor security patches which were not yet exploited, but it's better to be safe than sorry.

phpHaze 1.57.1 beta also sees the first "user upgrade package" where a trained phpHaze technician is not required to make the upgrade; the phpHaze user themselves can apply the patch. This paves the way for the self-installer prospected to come out with phpHaze v2 when it officially hits the public market.

Some other small bugs and things have also been fixed in this version, and we are now well on our way to the next bug-fix and feature changes.

Stay Tuned for More!