January 25th, 2008
0.97 - alpha sneak peak
The Exponent team is wrapping up development for its 0.97-alpha release of Exponent. We've packed so many new and exciting features into this release, we had to skip the 96.7 release, and round it up a notch. Read on to sneak a peek and what's to come.
New Theme
We'll be shipping default with a new theme called Coolwater, a theme created by Erwin Aligam and released on .
Administration Quick Links
Makes it quick and easy to get certain tasks done, including the Preview functionality, logout, change password, etc...
Cleanup for Admin Panel default view.
A much prettier interface for the traditional admin toolbar.
New Admin Container Chrome.
Permissions and actions for modules are being migrated to flyout menus, and soon here, we'll move all module level permissions in to those menus. Currently, a hard coded module will not have this chrome as it is provided by the container module's default view, where hard coded modules bypass container all together. The HTML and menu's will soon be taken care of in subsystems/template.php.
FCK Editor Enhancements
Larger editing area, styles now viewable within editing area, more concise control over HTML output, and much more configurable on the theme level.
CSS Engine
With new configuration options passed to exponent_theme_headerinfo(), you can allow exponent to use YUI's reset-fonts-grids.css, include CSS files from the common directory, and include all CSS files within themes/mytheme/css/ and themes/mytheme. Once the files are gathered, they are run through a process, combining the CSS into one file for inclusion, reducing page load time.
Image Gallery
Image Gallery now has configuration options for thumbnail size and popup size. What's nice here is that the gallery will check to see if you've changed the size of your popups or thumbnails, and rebuild them if needed.
Also, the default image gallery popup window is now built to use a YUI panel to display the image, adding a very nice display for popup images.
In the works is a slideshow view for image gallery, which might not make it's way in to the alpha release, but most definitely will be there for GA.
Printer Friendly
A printer friendly function can now be added to your theme, allowing a configurable environment for allowing visitors to fire off a printer friendly window of your page content.
Search Engine Friendly URLs
We finally got SEF URLs. Configurable in Exponent's Site Configuration, each page in an exponent site can now be accessed in a search engine friendly way. As a kicker to Exponent's SEF system, is that specific blog posts, news posts, or any other content can be added to a router map file, allowing you to fully customize your search engine friendly URLs. The icing on the cake for Exponent's SEF's: typing in an incorrect SEF URL will automatically fire off Exponent's search function, returning to the visitor a list of possible matches for the SEF name it could not match. Adios 404 errors!
Google Translation Module
The google translation feature is now an addable module in Exponent. This module was originally created and contributed by Imran Somji. It was cleaned up slightly and will now ship default with Exponent.
YUI Menubar
With Exponent's tight integration with the , we're now shipping with "YUI Top Nav" as a view for Navigator Module. The folks at YUI have done a great job in creating an excellent and easy to style solution for flyout , and we've integrated them into Exponent.
And this is just the short of it. Stay tuned for our up and coming release, along with a detailed feature list, demo's and how-to's to help everyone make the best use of Exponent!
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