Yesterday, a friend of mine, who is also a programmer, sent me the following text. I don’t know the original source but it is very good so I thought I would re-post it. If I am able to find the original source I will post a credit and link.

Open source is:

• A means to encourage software innovation among diverse groups of programmers
• A policy of open inspection and analysis of source code, both to
  educate and provide a means for constructive criticism
• A means by which programmers can “scratch their itch” for mental
  stimulation while at the same time solving computing problems that are
  frequently applicable even to non-technical users
• Free, both intellectually and in terms of cost

Open source is not:

• A way to get commercial-quality support at no charge
• A free-for-all forum to ask for pie-in-the-sky software features and
  expect them to be implemented as requested and with no delay
• An invitation to harass and otherwise frustrate a small and dedicated
  development staff because they didn’t do what you wanted

I am also continuing to work on the next version of SkyBlueCanvas. I am taking my time on the next release to make sure it is the best it can be.

Download it now

See below for a full list of changes:

• Integrated Snippets extension into the core system
• Added /includes/hooks.php

  This file has some very useful functions that simplify common programming tasks. I strongly suggest you familiarize yourself with the hooks.

• Added /includes/JSON.php
• Fixed a bug in Core::GetVar() where the $default value was required but should have been optional
• Added Snippet button to WYMeditor to insert snippets into page text
• Removed the Collections Publishing features from Page Manager and Collections
• Added [[page.metadata]] and [[skin.path]] variables to SiteVars
• Removed pre-1.1 skin hooks
• Modified plugin.parser.php to remove P tags that WYMeditor adds around in-line tokens.
• Made the SESSION timeout editable by the admin user. (See Admin > Settings)
• Added an option to the Page manager, SiteMapper plugin and SiteVars to allow admin to omit pages from the site map.
• Modified Configuration editor to update the SiteMap when saved.
• Updated SiteMapper class to match new Google SiteMap XML

This template includes all the Fragments and Managers required to function and includes Articles, News, Twitter Feed and Galley. The template costs just $14 and your purchase will help support the SkyBlueCanvas project.

In the coming weeks I will be working to convert several more of Qiming’s themes to work natively with SkyBlueCanvas.

I have, however, been hard at work on the new version. Originally the next release was going to be an incremental release (v1.2) but I decided that it would be better to delay a little longer and get this next release right the first time. The code is essentially at alpha stage, meaning that all of the functionality that is intended to be in the software is there. It is not yet fully tested (that comes next) but it is there. Version 2.0 constitutes a complete re-write of the code without a complete departure from the concepts that have made SkyBlueCanvas such a success. Above all else, I have not only maintained the ease-of-use, but I have actually greatly improved it.

I am very pleased with the new version. It is not quite a lightweight as the original but that doesn’t really concern me at all. Disk space was never my concern to begin with so I am happy to take up a little more room if and when it makes sense to do so. The new version still uses XML for data storage by default, but will also now support the use of any storage mechanism you like. It will take a while to build a collection of the necessary wrapper classes (technically DAOs) but the capability is there. I am already working on an Oracle DB-compatible wrapper and intend to get a MySQL wrapper out just as soon as possible.

The Road Ahead

There are two main tasks to be completed at the moment. The first is the most daunting: I need to transfer my knowledge of the system into a collection of documentation. I truly believe that when I get all of this out onto (virtual) paper, developers will be very pleased with the design.

The second task may or may not be so daunting. The finishing touch on the software will be the Admin UI (user interface).  I have decided to purchase a stock admin theme from ThemeForest.net. You have seen me pimping their themes on all of the SkyBlueCanvas sites. I do it to make a few extra bucks but also because I really do like their templates. I have personally bought about as many as I’ve sold (thus canceling out any commissions). There are two themes I have selected as the final candidates:

Administasia

Developer License: $500.00

Flexy Admin

Developer License: $600.00

You can click the image of each theme to view more screen shots and a live demo of each. As you can see, these templates are not cheap. I need to purchase a developer’s license in order to be able to redistribute the theme with the software. The prices are very good prices but a little too much for me to pay for out-of-pocket. You can help purchase one of these templates by using any of the Chip-In donation widgets throughout all of the SkyBlueCanvas family of sites.

That is where things stand at the moment. I am working as hard as I can to get version 2.0 out to the public and especially to my loyal users. As we move further into 2010, I will be releasing more and more content on this site covering SkyBlueCanvas and general web-related topics. Than you for your support and thank you for reading.

Update – January 14, 2010

I have resumed work on the new version of SkyBlueCanvas. Due to the extent of the changes, the next version will be numbered 2.0. I have not set a release date yet but the major coding is complete. I am currently working with a UI designer to create a new interface for the software. I plan to begin testing in the next couple of weeks. Thank you for your patience.

I have just completed the coding for SkyBlueCanvas version 1.2. The new version is an important milestone for the lightweight CMS because it is the first version to fully implement i18n (internationalization) support, the MVC (model view controller) design pattern and a lightweight ACL (access control list) to support multiple users and access permissions.

Version 1.2 also introduces the MVC (Model View Controller) design pattern into SkyBlueCanvas. While the MVC pattern is not fully implemented, this version does lay the groundwork for us to continue to refactor the code to fully implement the pattern.

Also new in version 1.2 is support for multiple users and user groups to control access to both front end and back end content. The new access control is a lightweight ACL (access control list) that allows the site admin to restrict which users can see what content and which admins can edit which types of content.

In addition to i18n support and beginning to implement the MVC pattern, version 1.2 also includes significant improvements to the code including a completely new Skin engine for building web pages and general cleanup to nearly every class. Even with the significant changes to a lot of the core underlying code, the new version will be almost 100% compatible with sites that are currently using version 1.1.

You can browse the source code of the new version at http://www.skybluecanvas.com/1.2-development

A word of caution: the new version is at stage alpha and has not been fully tested. Additionally, any add-ons available on our downloads page are not yet compatible with the new code.

What’s to come

SkyBlueCanvas will undergo very significant changes over the next several months. The changes will be implemented gradually and carefully to minimize the impact of upgrading from earlier versions of SkyBlueCanvas. The changes will focus on improving performance, usability and to simplify the API to make extending SkyBlueCanvas much easier.

Also, help SkyBlueCanvas grow by posting comments and reviews on these sites where appropriate.

BlogsWeek.com is a blog by Andrea (Andrew in English) which focuses on Content Management Systems and blogging platforms, with a primary focus on open source systems which users can install in typical shared hosting environments. This site also includes news and Alexa ranking stastics for the most popular CMS sites.

CMSCritic.com has added us to their Lightweight CMS list. I have emailed back and forth with the site owner a few times and he is a very friendly guy.

CMSJam.com wrote a really nice review as well. This article mentions a few important issues about open source software and the responsibility of users to help the system grow.

CMSWire.com has written a very nice review of SkyBlueCanvas. I emailed back and forth with the author of the post and the whole team at their site seems to be very nice. They work hard and provide a lot of great information about the CMS market.

LinuxBeacon.com is a wiki that provides tutorials and documentation (and donations) for popular open source projects. LinuxBeacon is a SkyBlueCanvas donor so please support their site.

linuxlinks.com is a site dedicated to links to useful Linux software, tools and utilities.

MacUpdate.com is a site dedicated to software downloads and reviews for the Mac OS.

OpenSourceCMS.com is the premiere site for demos of open source CMS. We have been listed on the site for several months and they have been great to work with. Their team is always very responsive to our questions and requests.

SoftPedia.com is a warehouse of just about any software you could ever need.

If I have inadvertently left your site off of the list, please feel free to email me via the Contact page and I will gladly add a link to your site. Note that this means sites that list a link to or review of SkyBlueCanvas.

If you come across a site that has a review of SkyBlueCanvas, please drop us a line and let us know so we can add it to the list.

System Requirements

• SkyBlueCanvas v1.1
• PHP 5 (Not tested with PHP 4)
• Apache Web Server

Installation Instructions

1. Connect to your SkyBlueCanvas web site using the FTP Client of your choice.
2. Locate the Fragmentor Plugin file in source/plugin_fragmentor/plugin.fragmentor.php in this download.
3. Upload the Fragmentor Plugin file to /skyblue_root/data/plugins/.

Usage

The Fragmentor Plugin allows you to pass a standard query string, similar to a URL query string, to your custom SkyBlueCanvas fragments. A query string is simply a string of key=>value pairs in the format:

key1=value1&key2=value2

Reserved Keywords

The Fragmentor Plugin has 2 reserved keywords:

1. name – name tells Fragmentor which Fragment to laod.
2. view – view tells Fragmentor which Fragment View to load.

Syntax

You can use one of or a mix of two call syntaxes to call the Fragmentor Plugin:

HTML Comment Syntax:

<!--fragment(name=fragment_name&view=view_name&key1=value1)-->

Use this syntax to add Fragmentor calls to your HTML skin templates.

In-line Text Syntax:

{fragment(name=fragment_name&view=view_name&key1=value1)}

Use this syntax to add Fragmentor calls in-line in your page article text.

If you are familiar with SkyBlueCanvas Fragments, you know that the default Fragment Plugin attempts to load any data objects associated with the fragment automatically. The plugin determines the data to load based on the name of the fragment. For instance, if you have the Links Manager installed on your SkyBlueCanvas site, and you create a fragment named links, the Fragment Plugin will automatically load the links data objects. The data objects are passed to your fragment in a variable named $data;

Fragmentor maintains this automatic data loading and your data is still passed in the $data variable. Fragmentor, however, adds a new variabled named $params which is a keyed (associative) array corresponding to the key=>value pairs of your query string.

Your query string can contain as many key=>value pairs as you like and your key names can be anything you like. The only limitations are:

1. The name and view keywords are reserved by the plugin
2. Your query string must be a well-formed query string meaning it must follow the rules or a standard URL query string (no spaces, no special characters, etc.)

A few nights ago, Steve Fister, one of the SkyblueCanvas Development Team Members posed the question again and offered a few ideas on how to pull it off. After thinking about Steve’s suggetions, I realized that this is actually quite easy to do. In fact, with Steve’s idea, you can add an editable text block anywhere on a web page. What’s more, with a little SkyBlueCanvas Skin Magic, you can build page-specific text blocks, so if you want a different block of text to appear on different pages, you can do it with this trick.

Out-of-the-box, this is still not possible with SkyBlueCanvas, but I have been working on a new Plugin that – unbeknownst to me when I built it – is the missing piece. The plugin is called Fragmentor and is a super-charged version of the Fragment Plugin that comes pre-installed with SkyBlueCanvas.

About Fragmentor

The existing Fragment Plugin has one design limitation: it uses pre-defined parameters whose meaning is determined by both position and name. I built the super-charged Fragmentor Plugin to correct this design mistake and to make the plugin much more flexible.

Whereas one would load a Fragment with the old Fragment Plugin with a call like this:

<!--#plugin:fragment(fragment_name,view_name,
    match_param[id1,id2,...],
    page=[id1,id2,...]})-->

The new plugin uses a query string of key=>value pairs much like a URL query string that looks like this:

{fragment(name=fragment_name&view=view_name
    &param1=value1&param2=value2)}

There are 3 benefits of this approach:

1. The position of parameters is irrelevant
2. The query string can contain an arbitrary number of key=>value pairs
3. Only your fragment needs to understand the optional parameters*

* There are two exceptions to this rule: the name and view keywords are reserved. Some might call this a shortcoming but I tend to disagree. Every language, whether for markup or code execution, uses reserved keywords so we are not introducing a new concept by reserving these two keywords.

The Editable Text Anywhere Trick.

What You Will Need

• The Editable Region Hack Package Download
• Basic PHP and HTML know-how
• A SkyBlueCanvas web site
• FTP access to your site
• A text editor

First, download the Editable Region Hack Package. Follow the installation instructions included with the download.

Next, open one of your SkyBlueCanvas Skins in a text editor. We are going to use the sidebar for this demonstration, so in the sidebar of your template, add the following code:

{fragment(name=region&view=view
    &content_id=
    <?php $this->get_page_name(); ?>-sidebar)}

For the time being, don’t worry about what this code means. After we have created our content item to display in the region, I will explain how this code works.

Now for the Trick

We are actually going to use a SkyBlueCanvas Page for our editable content that goes in this region. However, we will only be using the Page Menu Text and the Page Article Text in the region. The reason we created an empty Skin File was so our page does not get rendered as a full HTML document.

The Page Menu Text is what SkyBlueCanvas’s Router Class uses as it’s unique identifier, so we will need to use this as well. The Fragment code I told you not to worry about earlier comes into play now. If you look at the code, you will see a PHP call embedded in the Fragment call. When this page is loaded, the template PHP will be parsed before the Plugins are fired, so when the Fragmentor Plugin sees this page, the PHP code will be replaced by the Menu Text or unique identifier of the current page. So if we are currently viewing the “Home Page”, the final key=>value pair in our query string will actually read:

content_id=home-page-sidebar

This is critical in order for the trick to work.

The Finale

With all of our pieces in place, log into the admin section of your site and navigate to Admin > Pages and click the Add Page button. Once in the Page Form View, click the Meta Tab and name your content item Home Page Sidebar.

In the selector labeled Layout, select Region. This tells SkyBlueCanvas to use our empty Region Skin to build this page. Since the Region Skin is empty, the only output of the page will be the article cotnent.

In the selector labeled Menu, select No Menu (this is important).

Set Published to No.

You can choose to syndicate this content item.

Finally, click the Article Text tab and enter text and images the same as you would on a SkyBlueCanvas page. Once you have finished entering your text, click the Save button, then view your home page. You should see your newly created content in the side bar.

Important

We are exploiting SkyBlueCanvas’s Unique Identifier format to match content items with the including page so it is critical that your editable region content Menu Text match the Menu Text of the including page exactly, except for the additional ’sidebar’ bit.