I know a lot of you have been watching the code space on Assebmly and on the CodeIgniter forums recently waiting and asking for news about BackendPro 1.0. Sadly this is not a ‘its done’ post but a post to update you all.

Over the last few months I have struggled to find much free time to do work on BackendPro, mainly due to finding a new job, moving home. So things are just starting to settle down so I am hoping some time to free up. Sorry for the very long wait, I am still trying to get the project done its just taking a tad longer than hoped.

It has been quite a while since I last updated you on the status of BackendPro. Some of you may have been following the SVN and will know things are moving forward. A few people are now using the new code and reporting bugs which I am very grateful for.

Currently I am trying to put together the user guide for the code. The old guide was focused mostly around the classes available and what methods were available. The new guide will have all of this but will also contain detailed instuctions and examples of how to actualy use BackendPro to create a site. For example:

• How to  create your own frontend/backend pages.
• Extending the registration screen to include custom profile fields
• Added a new custom field type to the preference page
• etc etc

For the mean time I have also checked in the first copy of the new Installer. I have designed the new installer to provide a more ‘complete’ process. It hopefully will guide you through the process and help you a lot more than the old one.

I want to say a thank you to Phil Sturgeon whos PryoCMS install mine has been based off.

Currently BackendPro 0.6.1 dosn’t support PHP5 officaly but there is some things you can do to patch it so it will work. When trying to run BackendPro on PHP5 you will most likely be hit by the following errors.

Assigning by Reference in Loader.php line 414

Message: Assigning the return value of new by reference is deprecated
Filename: libraries/Loader.php
Line Number: 414

This can be fixed by opening application/libraries/Loader.php and going to line 414. Replace the line

$CI->dbutil =& new $class();

with the following

$CI->dbutil = new $class();

Function ereg_replace has been deprecated in libraries/Preference_form.php
Find line 100 and the code:

$this->field[$field]['label'] = ucwords(ereg_replace(‘_’,’ ‘,$field));

Replace the line with the following

$this->field[$field]['label'] = ucwords(preg_replace(‘/_/’,’ ‘,$field));

Call-time pass-by-reference has been deprecated in access_control/resources.php line 42
Find line 43 and the code:

$offset = $this->access_control_model->buildPrettyOffset(&$obj,$tree);

Replace the line with the following:

$offset = $this->access_control_model->buildPrettyOffset($obj,$tree);

Well as the Christmas period approaches I thought I would release some new screen grabs of the new BackendPro 1.0 UI. Its still in development but over the next few weeks I hope to be able to show more preview screengrabs of what’s to come.

Update: Just added another screenshot of the new preference screen. Its far cleaner than the old version and also quicker to navigate around.

Well I was just designing the new look and feel of a project I have started and it required the use of some gradients images. Now the problem was simple I had a background colour and I needed to fade this to white in my footer (Please see image below). So I created the gradients in PS and saved it as a png.

Upon loading it in FF all was good, but loading it in IE showes the gradient image was not only darker than that in FF but it didn’t blend with the underlying base color.

I strached my head for quite a while and in the end learnt the following.

IE .png palette has a bug in which it cann’t display the gAMA chunk of the image. This causes them to be rendered incorrectly.

Now there are two possible fixes for this.

1. Don’t use a png, use a gif
2. Use this tool to remove the gAMA chunk from the image, http://psydk.org/PngOptimizer.php

First of all I want to apologise for my site being down for so long. 3 weeks ago I went on holiday but sadly had a bad accident so have been unable to do anything until now. But all is well now so things are back on track.

I know some of you contacted me personally about problems and alike and I will try to reply asap.

A new version of BackendPro has now been released. Its main aim was to solve an issue where BackendPro couldn’t be installed on certain web servers. It also includes a few other bug fixes and enhancements.

Libraries

• Moved the Admin_Controller and Public_Controller to their own seperate files. This keeps it so there is 1 class per file. See Enhancement #99.

Models

• Stopped the preference model from making multiple queries to the DB whenever a preference was fetched. Now they are all fetched and cached. See Enhancement #135.

Bugs

• Fixed a bug saying Bep_assets could not find an asset file when attempting to create an asset cache. See Bug #134.
• Fixed bugs in the install process where files where not being checked if they where really writeable. See Bug #133.
• Fixed a bug where it would report Cannot load library: bep_site. See Bug #132.

The new version can be downloaded here.

It has been pointed out to me that there is an issue with BackendPro 0.6 on some web servers. The issue is with some new files in the site module. The problems comes because of the CamelCase used in the filenames of the site libraries.

If you get the follow error when visiting a BackendPro page:

Unable to load the requested class: bep_site

I am working on a new release which I will try to get out shortly, but for the mean time please do the following:

1. Change all filenames in modules/site/libraries to
   Bep_assetfile.php
   Bep_assets.php
   Bep_browser.php
   Bep_site.php
2. In the file modules/site/libraries/Bep_assets.php change the following lines:

   Change include_once(‘Bep_AssetFile.php’);
   To include_once(‘Bep_assetfile.php’);

   Change $this->CI->load->library(‘Bep_Browser’);
   To $this->CI->load->library(‘bep_browser’);

I want to thank Christian Schneider for pointing this out and for the fix.

It has taken me a while but now there is a version of BackendPro online for you to try. You have full admin control over the install and can add and do what ever you want.

The Demo is reset at 3am everyday (GMT), this clears all changes made.

To access the demo please click here, you will need the following details to login:

• Email         = admin@bepdemo.co.uk
• Password = password

As always please do let me know if you find any issues with either the Demo or BackendPro.

BackendPro 0.6 has been released at last. Not too many little updates in it but the major thing is the new Asset library. Replacing the old Page library, it now has improved and more intelligent caching, along with the ability to have asset dependencies.

A full list of the changes can be found in the user guide here. Please download it and give it a try, any issues can you either send me an email or post about it on the CodeIgniter forums (posting a comment here will also get my attention).