We are proud to announce that the initial version of 3.10 is ready for alpha testing on our demo site:
http://demo.socialengine.net
Some of the new features are:
- Data caching (file-based or memory-based with memcached) has been added to reduce MySQL server loads
- User login is stored in PHP sessions instead of hashed cookies for increased security
- New site statistics code in home.php can get statistics from plugins (will require next releases of plugins)
- Plugins can be re-ordered in the admin panel to affect lists such as the My Apps menu
- A captcha can be displayed on the help_contact.php page to prevent spam
- A captcha can be displayed on the login form, either always or after a certain number of failed logins (Admin Panel->Banning & Spam)
- lang_print and lang_sprintf now support preload, assign, and print parameters (see changelog for details).
- lang_sprintf now accepts the args parameter (see the vsprintf() function on php.net). This is required for the group and event media comment action feed link fixes (will require next releases of those plugins).
- Admin interface language can be changed
- The display name is now kept in the users table to ease retrieval and allow the addition of generation methods in the future
- Language packs can be imported from or exported to files for easier editing and transfer.
There are also some bug fixes:
- Fixed “Operation aborted” errors in IE caused by Tips initialization
- Action feed shows no text due to ASCII control characters or utf8 characters in the action text
- Action feed has incorrect link for group and event media (will require the next version of these plugins)
- Action media will now be cleaned out with the action items
- Database lockup problems sometimes seen on higher volume servers that is caused by updating user_lastactive
- The first and last name fields’ max lengths will default to 30 characters for new installations. An option for 30 was added to the admin panel as well.
- Javascript errors in admin panel caused by differing format of $global_plugins array have been fixed.
Notes:
- In order to support sessions, the following three lines must be removed from all of the files user_*_upload.php. If these are not removed,
users will not be able to upload files and will be logged out when viewing the upload pages. This code is not necessary as the session id
is already sent in each request header, so removing this code just as secure as before.session_start(); $_SESSION = array(); session_regenerate_id();
Developer Notes:
- Sessions will now automatically be started in header.php. You can leave any session_start() in your code
as long as it is called after the initial session_start() in the SocialEngine header. Do not empty the
$_SESSION superglobal ever as it is currently being done in the upload pages as it will log the user out.
(see note directly above) - To maintain backwards compatibility, we recommend you continue using the current method of accessing the display name as $user->user_displayname.
This will now be populated using the user_displayname column if that column exists, or will fallback to the standard generation (fname+lastname->username->userid).
Starting in v3.10, you will also be able to access the displayname using $user->user_info[‘user_displayname’], or as the se_users.user_displayname column - An SE_ROOT constant has been added to header.php and admin_header.php. This always gives an absolute file path to the SocialEngine root folder.
Possible future improvements for 3.11
- Notify types, action types, and system emails will use static language variable ids instead of dynamic for easier import/export of variables
- Profile field system supporting of adding fields to multiple categories (to prevent subnetwork, search, and changing of category problems and decrease redundancy)
- Users can change how their display name is generated (i.e. [First Name] [Last Name] vs [Last Name] [First Name] vs [Last Name], [First Name]) as allowed by admin
- Admin Levels
