Over the past few weeks the CMSMS Dev team has spent hundreds of man hours on the core to address long standing issues, and to fix anything that popped its ugly head up in 1.9.2. We intend to make CMSMS 1.9.3 a good, stable, friendly, fast version that our users could use for a good long time. This should allow us to persue other longer term, though related projects. To that end, there isn't much for new features; though there are a few new buttons and options here and there. The intent of this release was to apply bug fixes only, we were adamant that absolutely no features would 'sneak in', that would cause new issues, and we wanted to be able to distribute a .diff release with this version so we made sure that the database schema was not changed.

In this version, along with all of the regular bug fixes that we fix as we find, we endeavored to comb through the various bug trackers and at least address them in one way, shape, or form. Though not all bugs are 'fixed', there are a surprising number from as far back as 2007 that have been addressed in this version of CMS Made Simple. In addition our ever vigilant Quality Control team has kept a watchful eye on the forum and tested, reproduced, reported, and tested fixes on a number of issues found there.

Perhaps the biggest noticeable change in 1.9.3 is related to browser caching pages. This was actually a bug reported back in 2007 that we had reviewed numerous times previously but didn't quite know how to fix properly (and not break a bunch of other stuff). Well we figured it out. As of CMSMS 1.9.3 cache-able pages can now be cached by your browser, thus giving your visitors a perceived performance increase when re-visiting a page. There is a setting in the global settings page to specify how long those pages should be cached for. and of course, a 'Reload' will reload the latest version of the page. Pages without the 'cache-able' check-mark are not allowed to be cached by the browser.

In the name of caching and performance we've also improved the sample htaccess file (shipped as doc/htaccess.txt) to illustrate some common apache rules that can be used to optimize the performance of your site. We recommend that everybody at least review this file, and implement what they think is appropriate to their site.

The MenuManager has also been re-re-visited and we fixed a number of issues in it, including that pesky $node->parent problem that popped up in 1.9.2. This has been tested extensively, and should now be stable for a good long time.

We recommend you upgrade your websites to 1.9.3 at your earliest convenience so that you can take advantage of the new performance features, and the stability of the latest version of your favorite CMS.

Enjoy!

* As of this release only CMSMS 1.9.2 and CMSMS 1.9.3 are supported by the development team and in the 'official' boards on the forum.
* (C) 2011 CMS Made Simple - No reproduction, duplication, modification or translation without explicit consent.