Geeklog 1.4.1 Beta

Saturday, September 30 2006 @ 20:30 CEST

Contributed by: Emil Gustafsson

Recently GeekLog 1.4.1 Beta 1 was released. It includes MS SQL support and multi-language support for articles. These are the biggest news in this release but the new features are not limited to these new features.

MS SQL Support

I have not tested the MS SQL support since I have no doubt it works fine. I think this new database support will become a problem in the future since some plugin developers proably will not even try to support both databases. In my professional experience having support for more than one database demands to much from the developers in the long run that it is rearly worth it to have this support since 99% of the users will not need support for more than one database. Since GeekLog is a free CMS I think it is enough to stick to MySQL since MS SQL involves quite expensive license fees.

Multi-language support

The first comments on this release regarding multi-language support was very appreciative and I was very curious to find out more about this since this site could very well use multi-language support. When I tried the multi-language support I was disappointed. The fact that the multi-language support is an old GeekLog hack that has been included in the core code shines through and the appearance feels very "hacky".

The first drawback of the multi-language support is that it does not only allowes you to write an article in more than one language - it forces you to write your articles in each and everyone of the supported languages. I would rather have seen a solution where each article was written in one language which was always used unless a translation was available. The MultiFAQ plugin for example works in this way.

Since the multi-language support is mearly a hack each translation is an article itself. This means that the statistics for the article is split up and counted seperatly for each language. This might be exactly what you want or it might not be what you want. Another problem related to this is that the number of new articles listed in the What's new block lists the number of new articles regardless of language. So if you support three languages and writes one new article in each of these languages, the What's new block will show 3 new articles and when you click the link to see the three articles you only see one article - the one matching your language setting. Even worse, if the article has not been translated to your language of choice you will see no new articles even though the site claims there are a number of new articles.

Batch delete users

A new function for user administrators is the new batch delete functionality. It makes it easy to delete users that never log in, only log in once or that have not logged in for a while. This is a much wanted feature and I had it on my TODO list for the GL-Utility plugin I'm maintaining. So now I don't have to do that myself.

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