For current changes, please see the main changes page.
New in Version 6.1.1 (Released 5/26/2008):
- Bug Fixes:
- Fix problems removing POP3 servers.
- Fix situation where user logged into a forum via a site-wide user account
may have their visits recorded in the activity log as from an "unverified" user.
- Other Changes:
- New option for site administrator to migrate previously defined per-group
user accounts set up with email as names to site-wide accounts.
- Added SSL option for fetching mail via POP3 (needed e.g. for gmail)
New in Version 6.1.0 (Released 4/29/2008):
- New Features:
- Added "mail to forum" feature. You can now specify a POP3 account that
will be monitored. Any messages sent to that email account will be posted
to a page in the forum. This can be activated on a per-forum basis using
the new 'Email' pane in the forum's administration area.
- Added ability to use an SMTP server that requires authentication.
An ESMTP username and password can now be specified on the site administrator's
'Notification' page.
- Custom themes can now add extra content, such as <meta> tags, to the
<head> section of pages.
- Additional Bug Fixes and Changes:
- Any <div> tags are now correctly stripped out from the WYSIWYG editor.
- Page names containing HTML tags are no longer permitted.
- Removes outer frames from attachment dialogs.
- Changed 'Cancel' button to 'User Accounts' link on site-wide accounts user
information page, for consistency with other pages.
- Improved error handling in themes, attachments, page creation, and sending email.
- Added help message on activity screen to clarify that activity covers all forums
in the group.
- Fix problem where hitting the return key in the lock password field while editing
a locked page with IE wouldn't save changes.
- When using individual accounts, the name you're logged in as is shown adjacent
to the logout link.
- In projects using the same authentication scheme as the main group, the user's
name is shown and specifies they are logged in via the group.
- Added ".png" to list of extensions recognized when images are uploaded without
a proper image/* mime type; adjusted error messages.
New in Version 6.0.4 (Released 3/11/2008):
- Bug Fixes:
- Fix problems with accessing projects which shared the same passwords as the group,
and the group was set to require passwords for editing, but not for posting
- Replaced timezones in RSS feeds and email with offsets from UTC; particularly on
Windows, the descriptive timezones were often non-standard
- Links of the form [123#] could produce page rendering errors when the referenced
forum did not exist
- Links of the form [123#] would have the forum name appended in the richtext editor,
which would result in incorrect links when saving; the forum name is no longer added
New in Version 6.0.3 (Released 2/13/2008):
- Bug Fixes:
- On saving from the richtext editor, remove any font tags
- Remove some invalid closing tags that can be added by IE6 in the richtext editor
- Trim any linebreak tags within lists, to avoid breaking them up on save
- Fix a harmless Javascript error that can appear in the error console when
closing certain windows such as attach file
- Other Changes:
- Added support for 'webcal://' URLs
- Added new substitutions for custom links: $P (pageid) and $N (name of page)
New in Version 6.0.2 (Released 2/01/2008):
- Some versions of IE 6.0 SP1 (see Microsoft Knowledge Base)
have a bug where they will not decompress gzipped content, which includes the Javascript files in ProjectForum.
Fixed this by no longer serving compressed Javascript to any version of IE 6.0. Because some firewalls can also
be configured to block compressed content, a new site-wide preference was added (see main site admin page) which
will prevent compressed Javascript being served to any browser.
New in Version 6.0.1 (Released 1/26/2008):
- Bug Fixes:
- Fix problem where bold and italic formatting entered in Safari wasn't being
correctly converted to wiki markup
- Handle embedded non-breaking space characters inserted by the richtext editor
in some browsers
- Render HTML blocks as the original HTML source in the editor, preventing some
errors when opening and closing tags were in separate blocks
- Don't interpret custom links in the richtext editor
- Changes on Mac OS X to prevent Leopard's firewall breaking the application when
set to restrict specific applications
- Administrative info links on directory page weren't being properly closed
- Indent/outdent are now available only for list items to facilitate nested lists
- Remove blockquote tags, replacing with nested lists where appropriate
- If the richtext editor fails to load, a link will be shown directing the user
to the markup editor
New in Version 6.0.0 (Released 1/21/2008):
- New WYSIWYG Wiki Editor:
- available for modern versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari
- complements but does not replace the existing markup editor, and allows switching back and forth
- includes only the essential formatting tools needed to provide a familiar writing environment,
but not distract from the content and collaboration
- for those familiar with it, most wiki markup can be quickly entered directly in the WYSIWYG editor
- New Site-Wide User Accounts Option:
- adds features to standard version that were previously available in Enterprise version only
- new option to create central, site-wide user accounts, identified by email, user name and password
- site administrator can decide whether users can register for their own user accounts
- each group administrator has the option of allowing the use of a site-wide user account to gain
access to the group, instead of or in addition to the existing per-group accounts
- new tools for site administrator to manage site-wide user accounts
- Additional Enhancements and Bug Fixes:
- new option to hide a group from the directory unless the user currently has access to it
- changed the default key for Enterprise user accounts to be email rather than userid
- added message on edit screen for locked pages to indicate whether comments could still be posted
- fixed a bug where administrators were incorrectly being prompted for a lock password to post comments
- render a 'commentsarea' div to parts of a page below a comments divider, allowing e.g. including pages but hiding comments in them
- fixed problem rendering custom links that contain a quoting error
- larger Javascript files can be downloaded compressed, speeding download time
- performance improvements in background processing when including external files and (for Enterprise) using an external authentication service
- fixed some alignment and layout issues on Internet Explorer
- improved support for transparent PNG images for Internet Explorer 5.5 and 6.x
- fix a degenerate case that could cause a potential infinite loop in search
New in Version 5.6.2 (Released 11/27/2007):
- Bug Fixes:
- Fixed a security loophole that could allow people having access to one
forum within a group to gain access to pages within another forum
in the same group, possibly bypassing password settings on the forum
containing the page.
- Fixed a bug which under rare circumstances could cause IE to show a blank
window and not permit any other action at the conclusion of a file upload.
New in Version 5.6.1 (Released 11/08/2007):
- Bug Fixes:
- Workaround a Mozilla Firefox bug in print preview using Broadcast theme
- Improve performance for retrieving page information, and handling large
numbers of page references.
New in Version 5.6.0 (Released 10/10/2007):
- New Features and Enhancements:
- New feature to duplicate groups or projects; this is accessed via the group
or project info screens (the same ones used to delete groups/projects)
- Atom feeds can now be included in pages; this can be done using the existing
"rss:" tag, or the equivalent new "atom:" tag (or "atomlong:" or "atomfull:")
- A "favicon.ico" file will be served up if placed in the root of the Group Data directory
- Outgoing HTTP calls (e.g. from include:, rss:) now include "Mozilla/5.0" in the user agent,
which helps with certain web sites such as Google news
- Improve support for 304 (not changed) responses for uploaded files and images
- Web views now log page views and downloads in the forum's activity tracking
- The various 'logged in as administrator' messages now specify the innermost
place (site, group, project) where the user is logged in as administrator
- Pages list now shows number of links to each page
- Images uploaded with 'attach file' can now be displayed with the 'image:' markup
- references: now includes pages in other forums in the group
New in Version 5.5.1 (Released 8/28/2007):
- Bug Fixes:
- Fixed a problem serving theme files with virtual host web views.
- In web views, don't display any content under a ===comments=== divider.
- Performance improvement in processing web requests.
- Fix authentication issues in forum references pages.
- Fix timeout issues saving pages when using external authentication (Enterprise).
New in Version 5.5.0 (Released 8/14/2007):
- New Features and Enhancements:
- New 'web views' feature allow a read-only version of a forum to be published as a
static site; this makes it easier for a group of people to jointly edit content that
is automatically made available externally.
- HTML export is now available in the Basic version of ProjectForum.
- Added a new option on search form to allow including the contents of matching pages
in the search results, which is useful to generate certain types of reports.
- Added file size to attachment tooltips.
- On Windows, ProjectForum can now also be uninstalled through the "Add/Remove Programs"
control panel.
- Ellide names of long pages in pages table.
- Various changes to page layouts and messages.
- Bug Fixes:
- The 'delete unused files' administration tool was missing mp3: and include: attachments.
- Adding 'mp3:' links to a page was creating extra blank pages.
- Pages will not be autocreated on editing an existing page if the page name contains newlines.
- Remove image borders from pages, attachments and user activity admin screens.
- Remove logginig on invalid forum errors.
New in Version 5.4.2 (Released 6/19/2007):
- Bug Fixes:
- Fix problem where software would not run on certain Linux
systems due to security restrictions associated with loading
libraries from /tmp (usually SELinux related).
- Restored ability to select empty pages for deletion.
- Adjusted code to allow for attachment downloads that take a
significantly long period of time to complete.
- Fix typo in editing help.
- Fix colors for sortable table in dark weblog theme.
- Fix sporadic sorting issue on size column of attachments page.
New in Version 5.4.1 (Released 5/31/2007):
- Bug Fixes:
- Fixed a problem where interrupted downloads of attachments would
sometimes leave an operating system file open; in extreme cases,
this could result in the process hitting operating system limits
on number of open files, preventing opening further downloads or
forum databases.
- Corrected an error in an HTTP header.
- Made changes to internal error logging.
New in Version 5.4.0 (Released 4/23/2007):
- New Features
- Pages in this Forum screen is now sortable, adds information about size and versions
for each page, and allows selective multiple deletions.
- New Attachments screen allows for browsing information about and deleting attachments
in a forum.
- New page to browse list of all versions of page, and selectively delete them.
- User activity screen is now sortable, and allows drilling-down to see detailed activity
logs for each user.
- New 'View' command on attachment menu to view uploaded files in the browser window,
where possible.
- Bug Fixes and Enhancements
- Upload progress bar done with AJAX, to avoid repeated web page reloads.
- Improve performance of fetching old versions of page and generating page-specific RSS
feeds on pages containing hundreds of posts in a row.
- Creating a new course will skip over any old, unused datafiles it finds.
- Updated various icons, tooltip labels.
New in Version 5.3.2 (Released 3/19/2007):
- Bug Fixes:
- Fixed a variety of harmless errors that were producing warning
messages in log files and the Javascript console.
New in Version 5.3.1 (Released 2/27/2007):
- Bug Fixes:
- Fix memory leak when forums are automatically deallocated from memory
after being idle for a while
- Fix memory leak in the versions screen showing differences between
versions
- Fix memory leak in Search that can occur when the http request has a
particular set of http headers, which doesn't occur with normal web
browsers, but can happen with spam robots
New in Version 5.3.0 (Released 2/05/2007):
- Custom and Image Links:
-
A completely reworked "custom links" feature allows the site administrator
to define entirely new formatting markup. This can be used to add new
formatting features, or smoothly integrate with "Web 2.0" services like
photo sharing, instant messengers, and even your own internal information
services. All these things no longer require users to add their own HTML
to forum pages. A new Custom Links HOWTO describes
in detail the new capabilities and how to use them.
-
Many links, such as http, ftp, and more can now be displayed as images in
the page. Whereever changing the name of the link was allowed, images can
now also be used, by specifying the "name" as e.g. "image:12345" (for an
image uploaded to the forum), or "image:http://.../foo.gif" (for an image
from another web site).
- Comment Posting Improvements:
-
Comments can be posted to locked pages without unlocking the page by first
entering the lock password and then posting; the page remains fully locked.
-
Comment posts are stored more efficiently in the databases; this helps mediate
problems with automatic spam robots, which could cause the databases to grow
extremely large very quickly.
- Other Features:
- for Enterprise, all logins now go through a single
centralized page, as opposed to forum-specific signin pages
- added ability to batch delete users for Enterprise
- added new view=content display option, which generates just the
content part of the pages, without borders, etc.
- allow including HTML files uploaded as attachments to the
forum (e.g. converted Word documents) by using '[include:###]',
where ### is the attachment id
- attached CSS styles 'toclist' and 'tochlist' to table of contents
generated by 'toc:'
- Bug Fixes:
- removed bogus cell-spacing and cell-padding properties from CSS
- import wasn't properly setting URL Prefix of the course/group
New in Version 5.2.2 (Released 11/29/2006):
- Bug Fixes:
- Fix problems with preview in projects
- Improve preview so images and document icons are rendered
New in Version 5.2.1 (Released 11/13/2006):
- Bug Fixes:
- Fix problem where preview of larger pages was not working on some versions
of IE 6.0
- Fixed margins of classic theme
New in Version 5.2.0 (Released 11/6/2006):
- Revamped Editing Page:
- New preview option to quickly review changes before saving
- New format toolbar for access to common formatting features
- Resizable text area
- Completely new, more comprehensive help system, and option to hide help
- Bug Fixes and Enhancements:
- All themes now load a system-wide CSS file (base.css) before loading
theme-specific styles.css; this allows better refactoring, thereby
simplifying custom themes. Existing custom themes may need some
changes to work with the new system.
- Themes now support use of 'png' images.
- Added missing 'alt' tags for all system images (for accessibility)
- Table borders now appear in slideshows where appropriate
- Fixed an incorrect calculation (overflow) when calculating size of
large attachments folders
- On versions page, some internal links were still active and incorrect
New in Version 5.1.2 (Released 9/13/2006):
- Bug Fixes:
- Fix problem where some email notifications might not be sent after a
restart if there were previous pending notifications still to be
sent out for the forum
- Fixed error on storage page with very large database or attachment
directory sizes
- Added error logging to forum export
- Closed loophole where it was possible for spam robots to post to
archived forums
- Field in rename pages starts out with current name
- Name of database file appears on storage admin page
New in Version 5.1.1 (Released 8/14/2006):
- Bug Fixes:
- Fix problem where sending of email notifications could become "stuck" in
some circumstances
- Page references were not being properly updated when more than one link
on a page targeted another page, and then links were added or deleted
- Fix sporadic problem with content-enabled page RSS feeds containing
attachments that sometimes would not render
- Fix problem where an error in the 'recent changes' section of the page
would prevent the page from rendering at all
- Trap and handle a wide ranger of harmless errors that were appearing in
logs, resulting from incorrect parameters for some pages and other
causes
New in Version 5.1.0 (Released 7/11/2006):
- New and Changed Features in this Release:
- Added [mp3:...] playback tag, for either uploaded files
(specified by fileid, like with the file: tag), or external
MP3 files, specified by URL; this uses an approach based on
the Del.icio.us playtagger
- By default, activity logs for groups are now off; this
also applies to pre-existing groups except where this
option was explicitly set
- Administrator now has the ability to delete all empty pages from
the 'Pages in this Forum' screen
- Versions screen has new options to show the page without changes
highlighted, or show only the changes; layout of controls area
was reworked to accommodate this and improve appearance
- New option [toc:horizontal] to display the table of contents
for the page with a horizontal orientation
- A 'forgot password' email is available for Enterprise
when users are logged in via their email address, and an email
server is available
- Added "-directory" flag to command line versions, for specifying
a different base directory than the current directory
- Bug Fixes and Enhancements:
- Greatly increased the performance of the versions screens, particularly
figuring out the difference between two versions
- Fixed very slow rendering of bold, italic, etc. when start and end
were widely separated in a page, such as can occur with mismatched tags
- The 'Open Current Page' button in the edit conflict resolution
screen generated an error in some web browsers
- Archived forums no longer write entries to the activity log,
regardless of whether logging was on before archival
- Fixed error loading versions of Projects page when the 'only
administrator can create projects' option is set
- Fixed a bug where an improperly structured comment post (such as
generated by some spam robots) could generate excessive CPU
activity, potentially causing a hang or a substantial decrease
in performance
- Cleaned up formatting of 'Pages in this Forum' so that dates don't
wrap onto multiple lines, leaving excess blank space between rows
- Option to navigate directly to a group if only one is present now
is available if there is only a single group that is not hidden
- On Solaris, removed dependency on a shared library that is not
present on some systems
- Cleaned up several harmless error messages that appeared in error.log
- Reworked the display of error pages
New in Version 5.0.0 (Released 5/3/2006):
- Major Changes:
- Mac OS X: This version is now a Universal Binary, running
natively on both PowerPC and Intel Macs; the minimum OS version
required has been changed to 10.3.9
- Windows: The minimum required operating system is now Windows 2000,
Windows XP, and newer versions
- S5 (version 1.1) slideshow support files have been directly integrated
into the application, so that creating slideshow presentations no
longer requires a separate download; the previous slideshow.zip
mechanism is available for adding or changing presentation themes
- The internal low-level runtime engine for all platforms has been
upgraded to the latest versions (Tcl 8.4.12, Metakit 2.4.9.5+),
which brings increased performance and reliability, helping address
a number of bugs
- Other Bug Fixes and Enhancements:
- allow linking to files on a mounted Windows shared drive by
drive letter, e.g. 'file:U:\foo\bar.doc'
- recognize 'feed:' URL's when including RSS in a page
- recognize 'telnet:' URL's in page markup
- new application icons for Mac OS X and Windows
- updated look and feel for Windows installer
- Mac OS X version now uses Internet-enabled disk images
- fixes for several crashing bugs that could appear in unusual cases on
some Windows systems
- fixed problem where searches returning many results were very slow
- fixed rename and delete for pages containing a '*' in their name
- properly escape ampersands in page RSS feeds showing full content,
which caused some aggregators (e.g. RSSReader) to reject the feeds
- noted that projects are not automatically exported when the containing
group is exported
- closed loophole that allowed scripts to post to pages even when
the page required a password or was locked
- fixed problem where theme support files uploaded from Windows did not
strip off paths properly, so they couldn't be referenced
- added additional error handling and logging for administration pages
- fixed bug in Enterprise version that could in some circumstances
prevent the display of users after the first ten pages
- fixed bug in Enterprise version where batch registering users did
not accurately track license user limits
- removed some spurious but harmless errors that appeared in error.log
New in Version 4.7.0 (Released 11/14/2005):
- This release includes a wide range of performance and scalability
enhancements throughout the application.
New in Version 4.6.0 (Released 9/19/2005):
- New and Changed Features in this Release:
- activity log page in group now allows
setting maximum amount of time activity logs will be kept, and logs
can be cleared from that screen
- new checkbox on attach file/image dialog to allow
optional top posting
- new markup [toc:] inserts table of contents in page,
based on page headings
- new markup [pagelist:] inserts list of all pages;
optional parameter 'bydate' to sort by modification date, otherwise
sort is alphabetic; new 'Index' page in newly created forums
- added [recentchangeslong:] markup, which tries to
display the first 250 characters of each page's content
- allow non-admin users to rename pages, when they have
edit rights and the page isn't locked
- Bug Fixes and Enhancements:
- very long page names are elided in the page footer
- don't automatically create pages when run-on links
are found in the page.. either crossing a newline or longer than 100
characters
- fix top posting with comments divider at end of page;
divider stayed at end, rather than post going after the divider
- forum export now processes 'include:' when used to
include other forum pages
- 'include:' will now look for cache-control and expires
'meta http-equiv' tags in the header of included HTML pages, when the
corresponding HTTP headers are not found
- tweaks to all the themes related to the size of the
comment text area, as well as dialog sizes; for users of custom themes,
there is a new '#commentstext' style that can be used
- fix problem that could cause some extremely large
uploads to terminate part way through on a slow network link
- improved performance of page rename
New in Version 4.5.0 (Released 8/2/2005):
- Notification Changes - RSS and Email:
- new 'Track Changes' page linked from the forum page
- new per-page RSS feed, complimenting the existing per-forum
RSS feeds
- email notification option, per-forum or per-page
- removed RSS link from default key pages used for new forums
- new 'Notification' panel in Site Admin for configuring RSS/email:
- site-wide admin option to include content of changes in
per-page feeds
- customize number of items in RSS feeds
- customize url of site (used in RSS/emails); this way RSS
feeds are always served with same URL, not dependent on how
the feed itself is served
- Other changes:
- Tables can now have borders; place "[tablestyle:borders]"
before the table, or turn it off with
"[tablestyle:default]". Note that this depends on a
new stylesheet style ".bordertable"
- Table rows are now vertically aligned at the top.
- Site administration screens now report information on when the
current license is valid until, for software updates.
- When the URL prefix is changed in the administration screens of a
forum, the browser is immediately redirected so that it is using
the new URL prefix
- for Enterprise licensing, added some explanatory messages to the
directory page in cases where no groups are listed
New in Version 4.4.1 (Released 6/2/2005):
- fixed bug affecting some versions of IE/Windows where the 'Replace...'
feature for file attachments wasn't working
New in Version 4.4.0 (Released 5/24/2005):
- Table Formatting. Tables can be created, by using a
"|" as a cell divider, and you also need it as the first and last
character of each row (each row on its own line). Markup within
cells works as expected. For centered cells, put two or more spaces
before and after the cell's contents; for right justified cells,
put two or more spaces before the cell's contents.
- Web-Based Slideshows. Very simple slideshows can be
created from forum pages. This support is based on the open source
'S5' package by Eric Meyer, and does require an additional download.
See the
Slideshow
HOWTO for more information.
- Other Changes:
- The site administrator can now set a time zone different
than that of the underlying server; this feature is available
on Mac OS X and other Unix systems that provide the Olson
time zone data files
- Minor changes were made to date and time formatting in
some areas.
- Archived forums now display the "key pages" area (containing
links to projects, the main forum, etc.) for easier
navigation.
New in Version 4.3.0 (Released 4/21/2005):
- Web-Based Theme Editor. Site Administrators can now create
and modify themes entirely through the web interface, making
branding and other look and feel changes even easier.
- Improved Help for New Users. Many of the help pages
loaded by default into new forums have been changed to make it
easier for new users to learn the software. They also link to
a new 'getting started' area on the web site.
- Category Pages. Added explicit support for building
category pages, a bottom-up way to organize forum pages.
- Easier Administration. All administration screens have
been restructured to provide for greater consistency and ease of use.
- RSS Enhancements:
- added support for Firefox 'Live Bookmarks' (and other RSS feed
detectors using the <link> tag).
- new [rssfull:] tag, which renders an RSS feed with full
description, and allows included HTML e.g. images.
- some RSS feeds displayed with [rsslong:] did not have
all HTML tags stripped from their description.
- fixed title of feed in projects where the project had no name
- Other Enhancements:
- allow changing page title of directory page via
Site Administration screens
- fix problem where "use same passwords as main forum"
permissions for a project would sometimes not look at accounts
set in the main forum if the main forum was wide open
- fix possible overflow calculating total disk storage for display
- fix six level deep nested bullet lists
- fix bug on Windows where sometimes older versions of theme
components would be returned after restarting via the
launcher user interface
New in Version 4.2.0 (Released 3/1/2005):
- Enhancements to File Attachments:
- upload dialogs now allow simultaneously uploading of several files/images
- added progress bar to upload dialogs
- new menu on file attachment icons allows you to more conveniently
replace/update a file
- added named file: links (those on the network require quotes
around the network path)
- Enhancements to Search:
- rewrite of searching code to work more closely to common search engines;
allows searching for words in different parts of the page, use "" to
group words to find words only when together
- pages where match occurs in title are listed first in results
- Additional Changes:
- new built-in theme 'Flair', courtesy of Jean-Claude Wippler
- groups to be imported now must be placed within
the 'import' directory, and files available there can be chosen from a
list, rather than prompting for an arbitrary path
- a ===comments=== divider right at the very end of the
page would not be detected
- RSS/include weren't handling permanent redirect (301) http status codes
- in Enterprise version, do not return search results for forums the
user does not have access to
- fix problems exporting some forums that used rss/include
- fixed problems with forums that are archived after a
forum password is setup
- fixed various places where an available URL prefix was
not being used (search, references, links, etc.)
- fixed problem rendering '&!' sequence
New in Version 4.1.0 (Released 1/12/2005):
- Enhancements to Top-Posted Comments:
- Setting of the 'top' checkbox on each page is remembered for the
next poster
- A new per-page setting allows selecting whether comments for the
page appear always at top, always at bottom, or either
- A per-forum setting for whether comments default to top or
bottom can be set by the forum administrator
- Top-posted comments can be set to appear below fixed text at the
top of the page, delimited by ===comments===
- Additional New Features:
- Provided built-in support for Windows Services (previously
relied on the third party FireDaemon utility)
- Made available a Solaris version (but see our
FAQ)
- Themes can now override settings for 'print' pages
- Groups from another ProjectForum site can be imported
- Other Bug Fixes and Changes:
- group and project lists are now sorted alphabetically
- fixed handling of some fatal startup errors on Windows
- page includes with spaces after the 'include:' were not
appearing in the appropriate page references list
- fix problem in enterprise license with inherited post/write
permissions in projects
New in Version 4.0.0 (Released 11/08/2004):
- Weblog-style top posting. This new option allows you
to post comments at the top of the page. Top posted comments can
be made using the new 'Top' checkbox in the comments section of
each page.
- Named links. A different name for links (http, https,
mailto, ftp, etc.) can be specified which will be displayed in
the page instead of the link itself. To do this, place the link
in square brackets, and after the link address itself, place a
space and then the name to display, e.g.
[http://www.google.com Google] will display as
Google.
- Export forums to static HTML. This allows you to
generate static pages on disk containing the full content of
a forum, suitable for archiving or being served by a regular
web server. This option is available via the new 'Forum Export'
option in each forum's administration pages.
(full version only)
- Additional new features and changes:
- projects can now be archived/unarchived, which parallels how
groups work
- as an alternative to including a forum's RSS feed to embed a
list of recent changes for the forum in a page, the new
markup [recentchanges:] or [recentchanges:forum]
can now be used
- new windows were sometimes reusing browser windows rather than
always opening a new window
- when requesting a RSS feed via SSL, the internal URL's in the
feed are now returned as https, not http
- the sitewide help URL could sometimes be reset
- for theme developers, the new include 'contentend' allows
inserting material directly after the main content of the page
- additional internal changes and customization options
New in Version 3.7.0 (Released 7/12/2004):
- when linking across forums without specifying a page name
(e.g. [3#]), now shows name of the forum rather than 'Home'
- linking across groups now better handles pages that have
special characters in their titles
- adjusted rendering of images to resolve issues in some browsers
- better handle XML CDATA and UTF-8 characters in included RSS feeds
- enhancements to Enterprise licensing when using in conjunction with
an external authentication server
- numerous other changes and improvements internal to the software
New in Version 3.6.0 (Released 5/25/2004):
- Improvements to Enterprise Licensing Features:
- some projects would not appear in the projects list even when
the user had access to them
- delete project links were sometimes not showing up in the projects
list even when the user had appropriate priveleges
- the user's name is automatically added to comment posts
- clarified terminology to more consistently use 'signin' rather
than 'login'
- restructured signin sequence to display errors on a separate
page, and to allow linking directly to the signin page
- hooks are available to allow the system to use an external
authentication server to get account information (contact us
for details)
- Miscellaneous New Features and Changes:
- added a new option in regular licensing so that forums can be
set to allow posting comments without a password, though still
requiring one for page editing
- prevent search engines from indexing the 'Edit' pages
- render headings using HTML h2 tags
- removed some explanatory text from the directory page
- Other Bug Fixes:
- fix problem rendering bracketed 'file:' links starting with
two backslashes
- when 'allow HTML' is on, '<' or '>' within verbatim blocks
are now escaped, to allow e.g. displaying HTML or XML example code
in a page; processed HTML should use ===HTML=== blocks
- adjusted HTTP headers to correct sporadic problem with stylesheets
not loading on some Linux versions
- cleanup routines would not detect files or images that were
present in a page if they contained a space after the 'file:'
or 'image:' part of the link, even though they display correctly
New in Version 3.5.0 (Released 4/19/2004):
- New Enterprise licensing option, offering per-user, unlimited group
licensing, single sign-on, and more
- Additional Enhancements and Fixes:
- Allow theme designers to specify the sizes of the comment posting
area, as well as help popup windows; adjusted some of the built-in
themes to take advantage of this
- New option to allow setting a side-wide help page to be loaded when
users hit the 'Help' button in any forum
- Added the ability to monitor and clear up storage for activity logs
via the 'Manage Storage' administration page
- Made current behavior of redirecting from the home page directly
to a group when only one is present an option that can be
set in the Site Administration options
- Fix a variety of stability problems that could affect
servers running using SSL
- Made a variety of changes to the HTML generated for pages
- Improved cacheability of theme components (images, stylesheets)
via HTTP header changes, 304 responses, etc.
New in Version 3.4.0 (Released 3/17/2004):
- allow replacing the pre-defined set of pages used to start
all new forums
- allow easily including pages from different groups into the current page
- added new markup (===html===) to easily include block of HTML code
into a page
- additional bug fixes and enhancements:
- RSS feeds will return a 304 code when not changed to save bandwidth
- handle http redirects in include: and rss: targets
- updates to starting pages for forums reflecting changes in recent
versions of the software
- fixed problem deleting the first version of a page
- clean up some harmless errors that were being logged
- performance improvements for some operations
New in Version 3.3.0 (Released 2/23/2004):
- New Features:
- extended formatting markup to support nested lists, using multiple
"*" or "#" at the start of a line
- links are now allowed to forums outside the group, and
can be specified via the forum's URL prefix, followed by a hash ("#")
and then the name of the page, e.g. "3#Help" or "Physics#Home"
- new Site Administration option allows projects to specify their own
"URL prefix", as groups have been able to do previously
- to allow control of web crawlers, serve up a 'robots.txt' file if
placed in the 'Group Data' directory
- Other Enhancements:
- multiple fixes in Versions feature: inhibit processing of include/rss
directives which caused delays; improved performance of 'diff'
algorithm; escape embedded HTML tags in 'view unformatted'; fix
location of navigation buttons at the top of the page; additional
stability improvements
- fix problem where printing on IE6 was ignoring stylesheets
- fixed errors loading RSS feeds in some aggregators such as AmphetaDesk,
caused when some page names contained ampersands
- moved 'Find Pages' above key pages list in Broadcast theme
- tweak date formats to use abbreviations for months, not numbers
- on Windows, detect add-on themes on stop/start from the GUI,
not only on full restart
- adjusted signin dialogs so just hitting 'Return' submits them
- fix errors that could sometimes occur on list of archived groups
page when logged in as site administrator
- extra blank pages were being created for bracketed words appearing
within ====== verbatim blocks
- strip any quotes from list of accounts
- improved error handling in site administration pages
- additional stability enhancements for 'include' functionality
New in Version 3.2.1 (Released 1/16/2004):
- fixed a sporadic bug that could cause pages containing one or more
included RSS feeds to sometimes hang when loading
New in Version 3.2.0 (Released 1/12/2004):
- New features:
- embed RSS feeds directly into forum pages
(via '[rss:http://...]' links)
- a list of pages or other links can now be placed on every forum
page, as selected by the forum administrator (replacing the fixed
'Projects' and 'RSS' links)
- extended 'include:' links to allow including the content of other
forum pages (e.g. [include:Home])
- Enhancements to Themes:
- new standard theme "Broadcast"
- new theme exchange for add-on themes available on the website,
including several new contributed themes: "Notebook", "Parchment",
"Titanium"
- size of attachment windows can now be set on a per-theme basis
using the new 'dialogsize' parameter in the theme's info.txt file
- removed clock from sample "Bookworm" theme which caused problems
on IE5/Mac
- added date of last change to "Classic" theme
- various fixes for themes in Windows
- Other Changes:
- fixed bug where text enclosed in double square brackets was
creating empty pages
- fixed error handling behavior for badly formatted 'include:' links
- fixed rendering of bold http links
- fixed some caching problems when including other web pages
- fix version information etc. in Windows binaries
- fix possible crash in Windows when doing a search with an
extremely long search string
New in Version 3.1.0 (Released 12/8/2003):
- New features and options:
- recognize use of file:// URL's for access to files on shared
network drives
- new option to reset site administration password (a menu item on
Windows and Mac, and a new "-resetpassword" command line option
on Unix
- ability to delete a specific older version of a page
- Enhancements and fixes:
- better detect and resolve conflicts that occur when multiple
people make overlapping changes to forum pages
- adjust build processes to substantially shrink size of binaries
- list of recent changes now displays the date/time of most recent
change
- fix display glitch where IE/Windows text area on edit page
would change size when first modified
- fix some problems running as a StartupItem on Panther
- improvements in version differences display
- on Safari, some parts of certain image buttons were not active
New in Version 3.0.1 (Released 11/21/2003):
- fixed bug that could very rarely cause IE/Win to report an error
following submit of edit forms, but only on certain pages (changes
to the page were being made correctly)
- fixed error that prevented all entry into forums setup for individual
licensed accounts after a license key had expired
New in Version 3.0.0 (Released 11/17/2003):
- Themes Support:
- Appearance of each forum as well as the overall site now
determined by themes
- Themes can be set at the project, group or site level
- Several standard themes are available
- Custom themes can be added, e.g. for corporate branding
- Additional changes to accommodate themes: "start new page" area
replaced by "new page" link, comment posting area made fixed height
- Integrating Other Web Information:
- New "include:" links allow incorporating other web pages directly
into a forum page
- Custom link prefixes can be defined which extend the markup
language, and allow including information from external web
services into pages
- Other Changes:
- Dropped the "mailto:" from rendered form of mailto: links
- Allow page rename to change the case of a page's name
- Old name of page no longer shows up in changes list after rename
- Escape HTML character codes in edit page so preserved in most browsers
- Fix page links in RSS feeds for sites hosted out of a subdirectory
New in Version 2.6.0 (Released 9/30/2003):
- New Features:
- versions browser now shows a 'diff' view, highlighting the
parts of each page changed with each version
- the administrator can now both delete and rename pages,
either right from the page itself, or from the list of all pages
- a new printable version of a page, without all the controls,
is now available
- the administrator can now purge all older versions of a page
from the versions browser
- Markup and Formatting Changes:
- allow bracketed https: links
- add popup: links, which work like help: but without the button
rendering style
- add support for rtsp: (streaming) links
- can now include square brackets in the page by doubling them up
- Bug Fixes and Other Changes:
- saving very large pages was very slow
- downloading files originally uploaded to another forums in a group
can now only be done if the user has permissions in the original
forum
- when logged in as Administrator but without a name, use 'Admin'
as the default name when posting comments
- added summary of total user activity to user activity stats page
- fixed messages in the headers and footers of pages for archived
groups, and when running the free version
New in Version 2.5.0 (Released 8/26/2003):
- option to use SSL (https) for connections to the ProjectForum
server, for increased security; see the
SSL How-to for details.
Note that SSL is not currently offered on our hosting service.
- titlebar now includes name of forum as well as page name
- in the short recent changes list appearing on each page, the
tooltip for pages modified in the past 24 hours now shows the
time modified rather than the date
- added version number to bottom of site admin page
- additional bug fixes:
- signin page on password-protected forums was being included
in the page activity statistics
- internal enhancements to FreeBSD builds
- bracketed http links no longer cause new pages to be created
for the link
- better error handling for permissions errors which prevent
writing data files on startup
New in Version 2.4.0 (Released 7/21/2003):
- list of all pages in the forum is now available, linked from the
forum setup page (though non-admins can view the list as well)
- administrators can now completely delete pages in forums (via the
new page list screen)
- added support information (email, forum, home page) to Windows and
Mac OS X about boxes
- changed Windows installer to add a link to the online user's guide
in the program group, and added an option on the uninstaller to
delete all data files
- allow changing 'Welcome to...' message on the home page
- reworked authentication options for projects, including adding an
option to explicitly use whatever authentication is set up for the
main group forum
- allow ftp links to be placed in brackets to produce a short form
- RSS feeds now note when pages are empty in their item descriptions
- modified wording of message on directory page when running the
free version
- additional bug fixes:
- fixed typo in editing instructions
- added additional HTTP headers to work around a problem where
Safari was sometimes cacheing editing pages after some other operations
- remove some spurious but harmless error messages that were being
logged on deleting groups
- fix references to help icons when run proxied from a subdirectory
of another web server
- recognize PNG images, even when not uploaded with proper MIME type
New in Version 2.3.0 (Released 6/25/2003):
- new RSS (Really Simple Syndication) support in every single forum,
allowing you to easily track changes made using popular news
aggregators such as NetNewsWire, NewzCrawler, or AmphetaDesk.
- improved the appearance and layout of pages, making it easier to
navigate through a group or project forum
- new features to make it easier to refer to pages pages in
different forums within the group, such as between different projects
- various enhancements to page formatting:
- support for numbered lists
- support for abbreviated display of long URL's or email addresses
- several enhancements to preformatted text
- other bug fixes and enhancements:
- fix display problems on user activity pages
- adjust setuid behavior to run correctly when non-root user specified
- fix stylesheet, image and page references on some pages
- adjusted default size of comment field
New in Version 2.2.0 (Released 5/19/2003):
- new tools for group administrators to allow them to cleanup
old versions of pages, and unused attachments
- allow page locking for group administrator in the free version
- fix problems on Windows when can't start up on the default port
- fix problems in the option that allows group administrators to
prevent users from creating projects
- fixes to make it easier to run as a StartupItem on OS X
New in Version 2.1.0 (Released 4/9/2003):
- extended branding to support insertion of new elements into pages
- enhanced project administration: ability to delete individual
projects, and an option to restrict creating them
- added new markup for headings (surrounded by three asterisks)
- miscellaneous performance improvements in page rendering
- bug fixes:
- fix problems when running on newer versions of Linux
- fix problems creating accounts without passwords
- allow attached files to be linked to from multiple pages
New in Version 2.0.0 (Released 3/10/2003):
- added support for international characters in all content
- changed Windows version to run as a small GUI, rather than running
as a console-mode application
- update application icons (Mac/Windows)
- bug fixes:
- workaround bug in Safari beta 60 where it would often incorrectly
complain about network connection resets
- use of certain search terms could generate bad results pages
- ignore leading/trailing spaces in links to other pages
- fix width of edit box for older Netscape versions
New in Version 1.3.0 (Released 2/16/2003):
- support preformatted text by enclosing the whole block with '==='
- new group option to allow HTML tags to be used in addition to
the standard markup
- new 'references' feature showing what other pages link to a page
- new option to hide a group from the directory page
- new option to store passwords with permanent cookies on login
- fixed layout problems with Safari beta: footer rule intruding on
bottom logo, button wrapping in right hand area of pages
- fix problems formatting mailto: and http: links enclosed in brackets
- when using individual user accounts, include the user's name in the
header for posting, rather than inserting it as editable in the
body of the posted comment
- when only a single group is defined, loading the site home page
now takes you directly to that group; the 'Site Home' links in
page footers can still be used to access the directory page
- empty pages are indicated in the search and recent changes results,
and omitted from the short list of recent changes appearing on
view pages
- the textarea on edit pages now takes up the full page width
- added an indicator to the bottom right of view pages showing if the
user is signed in as the group or site administrator
New in Version 1.2.0 (Released 1/13/2003):
- enhancements to support larger number of groups
- option to choose from a predefined template when creating new
pages, with the group administrator able to define new templates
- option to search across all projects in a group
- change restrictions on free version (i.e. when no license key
provided): remove number of pages restriction, but don't allow
use of versions, images and attachment features
- restyled administration dialogs to provide help text on demand
- cosmetic enhancements to edit pages
- fixed several incorrect text messages
- changed links to refer to www.projectforum.com site
