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).

A new release of BackendPro has been released due to a major bug being fixed. Please head over to the project page and get the changes asap.

Due to an increase in spam on my bug tracker for the BackendPro project, I have had to turn off creating tickets without a user account.

So if you have a bug you want to tell me about, please with do so by creating an account with assembla and posting it, or make a post on the BackendPro CI thread.

After a long cold winter BackendPro 0.5 is here. This release is mainly about bug fixes and a few new little features. So if you havn’t tried BackendPro yet, give it a whirl. If you are currently using it, upgrade if possible to get the new features and bug fixes. A list of the things changed and added is below:

Additions

• Added a section into the user guide to talk about the file system and matchbox, See Enhancement #10
• JS Code Output – The Page class now has the feature to store JS code and then output it into a view (very much like the PHP to JS variable converter), See Enhancement #84
• i18n Support – The status class language strings are now contained within a language file, See Enhancement #75
• CI Profiler Intergration – The CI profiler is now intergrated into the admin control panel. When turned on in the system settings rather than some of the output being hidden it is now clearly visible, See Enhancement #41
• Login Selection – It is now possible to select how a user can login, either with their email, username or either.

Modifications

• The page->icon() method now accepts a title paramter for the displayed image.
• Moved some of the dashboard files into their own module to tidy the file system up a bit. Also have created a new class to store to Statistics Widget creation code it.
• Improved the is_user() method so if $config['sess_use_database'] is FALSE then extra user checks are performed. For this to work the value returned by validateLogin() has changed, See Enhancement #80
• Removed PHP short tags from files, See Task #42
• Added some extra language strings for the dropdown options inside application/controllers/admin/settings.php, See Enhancement #73
• Updated the Page Module so it uses the functions in the CodeIgniter HTML helper, See Enhancement #36
• Changed the MY_Controller so the charset header and metatag value is taken from the CI config file, See Enhancement #74
• Altered the default dashboard statistics panel so it now also shows the current CodeIgniter version.
• Changed the way the install process is done. Now you can specify your CI folder structure, See Enhancement #53

Bug Fixes

• The dashboard widget system now restores moved widgets, See Bug #64
• The BackendPro tree menu in the admin panel now saves its open/closes status rather than it being lost between different pages, See Bugs #15 and #145
• Redirection upon login is now fixed, See Bug #100
• Spelling errors throughout the code, See Bugs #71, #76, #77
• Corrected the user guide section on the Page class. Originally it listed output_trail() as a method this is now output_breadcrumb, See Bug #69
• Modified the path to the user guide from inside the BackendPro control panel (footer), See Bug #68