CHANGELOG, last updated 2004-04-26

This document contains the changelog for
"monaural jerk", an open-source weblog/journal/
diary/news/commentary system built on PHP4/Zend/MySQL.

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Changes in v. 0.5a5 (not released yet)

 Fixes
 - hit-count updater no longer rewrites item's mod-time
   in items table

Changes in v. 0.5a4 (2004-04-21)

 Features
 - MonauralJerk can now generate TrackBack pings, to
   notify Movable Type (and compatible) blogs of 
   related entries within a Monaural Jerk blog.
 - New standalone aggregator-PING form
 - added preliminary support for new aggregator, rootblog.com
 - external HTTP_REFERERs are now recorded for every
   item or channel page. A future release will allow
   these to be rendered on article pages (e.g. "sites
   linking here:")
 - external search-engine query terms are recorded
   as well. A future release will allow these to be rendered
   on article pages (e.g. "terms used to find this page")
 - hits to channels and items are counted in the database
 - Interception of search-engine REFERER data now 
   expanded to accomodate a9.com's URLs, enabling
   automatic term highlighting and supplemental
   search for a9.com clickthroughs.

 Fixes
 - in admin system, 'current item' link in menu now
   works after 1st (rather than 2nd) submit.
 - channel names handled more intelligently:
   HTML characters (like '&') converted to entities
 - channel URL name updating is smarter: illegal
   characters are stripped; duplicate names 
   generate a warning.
 - blank META tags are no longer output; if no
   META tag contents are available, the entire
   tag is skipped.
 - Interrupting the chain of aggregator pings
   won't cause item numbers to skip.

 Other Changes
 - Default template includes "alternate" <link>,
   pointing to RDF script. Enables RSS autodiscovery.
 - channels table is optimized after every change,
   ensuring best performance.
 - new configuration setting, 'published_domain',
   allows slightly more flexibility in pinging
   architecture as the system no longer relies on
   $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']. 
 - obsolete table 'referers' dropped

Changes in v. 0.5a3

 Features
 - added preference to easily flag draft-status content
   on public website
 - distribution now includes an RSS 2.0 syndication script
 - in item content, bare '&' now encoded to '&amp;' 
   automatically
 - admin function: list items not in any channel
 - ping-upon-publish now uses 4-stage chained GET request,
   to avoid timeouts due to slow responses from aggregators.
 - callback system added to facilitate the insertion of 
   channel-specific content into templates. (Intended
   use: Google AdSense ads.)

 Fixes
 - "ping upon publish" checkbox no longer disabled
 - rdf10 script works now
 - highlighting of external seach terms has been restored.
 - "posting rate" template now provided
 - the section of config.inc that deals with $_SERVER values
   is wrapped in a test, to avoid PHP warnings when the
   file is used by command-line scripts

 Other changes
 - includes SmartyPants-PHP 1.41php-r2
 - UPGRADING doc updated
 - restored javascript to put cursor into 1st field
   of login form
 - added phpinfo() script to admin menu, plus links
   to public site and RDF script
 - renamed script files from .html to .php, on the
   assumption that most sites don't parse .html files
 - renamed some config-file elements (iscript, jscript,
   mscript, pscript...). This will make upgrading somewhat
   more painful but has the advantage of making the code
   much less obscure.
 - changed VERSION and APPNAME define()s to avoid
   namespace collisions
 - in find_item script, show '*' in place of blank title
   (to make editing of untitled items easier)
 - restored lastmod function (now query_for_lastmod());
   needed by RDF script
 - documentation for 'posting rates' provided

Changes in v. 0.5a2
 - rewritten admin interface -- much-improved navigation,
   new stylesheet, better presentation
 - several changes to the core schemas, to store data
   more sensibly
 - simpler data-retrieval queries (fewer joins)
 - media review items now appear on the homepage, and/or
   in any non-genre channels. This reverses a design 
   decision made back in the v0.1 days.
 - Any content item can be changed from 'journal item'
   to 'media review' or back easily; the media template
   is used for rendering whenever appropriate.
 - the non-optimal "quote educator" from 0.5a1 has been
   replaced with a PHP port of the industrial-strength 
   SmartyPants code from daringfireball.net.

Changes in v. 0.5a1
 - major rewrite! new features:
   - ping weblogs.com, blogrolling.com upon item publication
   - RSS 1.0 (RDF 1.0) feed
   - no more tedious channels.inc regenation; channels table
     is now queried live for every page request. Although slower,
     for most sites the performance hit is trivial, and this
     makes installation much easier -- no more permissions
     errors to confound new users.
   - template-based formatting: no more markup in the source code
   - assumes / requires CSS
   - search term highlighting for both internal and external searches
   - nested channels
   - context-specific page titles
   - generates XML-clean whitespace markup. This is not perfect.
   - automatic smartquotes.
   - new channels editor (admin tool)
   - uses long <?php ?> tags throughout
   - does not require register_globals (!)
 
Changes in v. 0.4.3
 - bugfix: media items now inserted to channelitems table
   Special thanks to Daniel Lashua <http://www.inkshop.org/> 
   for the patches. Both editor.html and nueditor.inc were modified.
 - improvements to editor.html/nueditor.inc: instructions
   now appear in a popup window, saving screen space
 - made handling of $defaultgenre and $defaultchannel
   prefs more robust (in editor.html); script now fails
   gracefully if those prefs are not defined.
 - bugfix: 'default' channel shouldn't appear in channels
   pulldown within admin form (fix to nueditor.inc)
 - bugfix: genres with 1 item triggered a bug in return_content()
   in journal.inc
   
Changes in v. 0.4.2
 - bugfix: rss091 now uses $dyn_channels
 - mailit script includes dynamic channels hash
 - formatting media items as journal now works (journal.inc modified)

Changes in v. 0.4.1
 - mailing list subscription address in FAQ has
   been corrected.
   
Changes in v. 0.4
 - new tables: channels, channelitems, to store channel
   definitions (previously defined in $channels and
   $genres hashes) and one-to-many item-to-channel, 
   item-to-genre associations (previously limited to 
   one-to-one associations, stored in items.channel
   and media.genre fields). v0.4 ships with a utility
   script that creates and populates these tables; see
   the upgrade section of the README document.
 - to save runtime queries, channels data is written to
   a globally-available array ($dyn_channels). Many
   functions in journal.inc rewritten to use $dyn_channels
   instead of $channels, $genres, $attributes.
 - schema changes to items table to simplify primary key
   (removed channel field from primary key)
 - schema changes to media table to simplify primary key
   (removed type, genre fields from primary key)
 - bugfix: addition of WHERE term to single-item database 
   queries to improve performance. I'd inadvertently left
   out the WHERE site='${sitename}' term, preventing MySQL
   from using the primary key to retrieve based on items.id
   and media.id. 
 - many changes to editor.html and nuedit.inc to 
   support new tables
 - navigation improvements to editor.html
 - editor.html allows channels table to be edited
   (add/edit channels, genres, attributes)
 - bugfix: run item link names through stripslashes()
 - login form now sets focus on top form field, via javascript
 - show_channel_itemcounts and show_media_itemcounts
   are now per-channel (and per-genre) preferences.
 - dump_channels() rewritten to use $dyn_channels;
   should now be faster if you had itemcounts enabled,
   but might be slower if you didn't.
 - get_items() modified; processing of
   $queryspec changed somewhat to accomodate new
   channelitems table. Additional changes to allow
   editors (but no one else) to see unavailable and
   future-dated items.
 - notes on spider control included in README
 - added new include to journal.html file:
   include $prefs['channelsfile'];
 - new mailing list for Monaural Jerk users: see FAQ
   
Changes in v. 0.3
 - DTD address of RSS091 changed from netscape.com
   to scripting.com; for info, search for 'DTD' here:
   http://scriptingnews.userland.com/backissues/2001/04/27
 - added instructions to editing form (also visible on
   demo site, http://monauraljerk.org/demo/ )
 - modified schema for editors table, to assign an ID
   to each site editor.
 - modified items, media, and sessions tables, to store 
   editorIDs.
 - modified login/session management system to store
   editorIDs. Session-checking function now joins with
   editors table; login.html was modified to accomodate
   the new sessions schema.
 - Bugfix: admin script no longer allows content to be
   added to non-content channels (e.g. menu items that
   simply point to other sites).
 - fixed minor bug in calendar() function that would
   highlight future days when future (not-yet-published)
   content was present.
 - Relocated distro to monauraljerk.org; changed URLs
   in documentation to use new site.
 - Bugfix: hardcoded paths in editor.html and login.html 
   replaced with variable values from config file
   (Thanks to John Puster, http://guar.org)
 - Media items now show publication date in search results
 - Random-email-address generator now bundled with dist.
 - Bugfix: printit script no longer complains about missing
   synopsis field for media items
 - Item retrieval and formatting architecture radically
   rewritten to be more modular
 - journal.html script updated to use this new, more-
   modular function set
 - New genre-attribute item (['show_as_journal'])
   controls how media lists are displayed -- either as
   journal items (one title per item) or as a list of
   artists/authors with titles under each name, linking
   to individual pages for the reviews.
 - New preference item, $prefs['show_media_scores'],
   controls whether a score value is output for media
   items. This only has effect if show_media_as_journal
   is set to 0.
 - journal.inc now uses global J_DEBUG flag, to assist
   in problem-solving. (Set the flag to 1 to have most
   queries and other helpful values output to the browser.)
   
Changes in v. 0.2
 - added function to journal.inc: lastmod_date()
 - added new type of field to blobs table: type=6,
   to store synposis of item, for use in RSS files as
   well as META tags
 - mods to nueditor.inc to support new synopsis field:
   update_item_table(), get_item_data(), show_item_form()
 - initialized new synopsis field ('') in nueditor.html
 - mods to journal.inc functions to support new synopsis
   field: get_items()
 - added rss091.php script (standalone)
 - modified searchresults() function to search new
   field (type=6) in blobs table
 - printit script rewrites relative URLs as full
 - dump_content() function now returns an array; the
   first argument is the synopsis of the first item on
   the current page
 - journal script now uses a dynamic META description
   value -- if the page contains only 1 item it uses the
   synopsis of that item, rather than default copy
 - minor bugfix in channel_list() function; now no longer
   shows ADD link for non-journal channels (that is, "channels"
   that have an override URL set)
 - in jconfig.inc, $attributes hash expanded in two ways:
   an 'rss091' element was added, to hold the name of 
   an RSS091-compatible XML file (optional); also a new
   item was added to the hash to store attributes of the
   home page (which has no channel subscript, so I 
   created a "magic" value of '__')
 - dump_content() function no longer uses SPACER tags
 - added month-to-month navigation to calendar() function,
   controllable by preference settings; also added
   nav_prev and nav_next elements to $calendarprefs hash
 - bugfix: lastmod functions and calendar functions now
   query against items.site (so as not to return data from
   items in other people's journals, for any installation
   where the database is shared across sites)
 - bugfix: DEBUG flag not obeyed in admin script
 
 NOTE: as written, the new nueditor.inc functions will
 not read old item data. The fix is to insert blank
 records into blobs for each item field, e.g.
   insert into blobs values (N,6,'');
 where N is each of the IDs in the items table. The easiest
 way to do this is to run the included script, 
   add_synopsis_fields.php
 which you'll find in the utilities directory of this 
 distribution. Be sure to edit the two include lines
 at the top of the script to reflect the locations to 
 your config and function files.
 
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The most recent version of this document can probably
be found at http://monauraljerk.org/CHANGELOG