Hello fans of CMS Made Simple!

Today we are announcing the release of CMS Made Simple 2.2.20 - Saguenay, an incremental bug fix and stability release.

This version addresses the much awaited support to the most recent versions of PHP, making it stable with PHP 8.3.0+. We have also tested thoroughly its compatibility with mySQL 8.0+ and found no notable issues while running under these recent versions.

We have thus upgraded our template engine, Smarty, to version 4.5.2, the latest on the version 4 branch. While there is already a version 5 branch there are some important changes that will impact its use with CMSMS, most notably “dropping support for the use of unregistered callables (such as PHP functions) in templates” (see this discussion) which would break pretty much every CMSMS site on upgrade and would need a considerable effort from our users base to convert these templates back to usable ones. That doesn’t mean that there are no solutions, but instead that we are considering our options moving forward so that we can keep compatibility as much as possible, and breakage to a minimum, if any, when moving to Smarty 5.

In the meantime Smarty code will spam server PHP logs if not properly filtered. We recommend that you filter ~E_DEPRECATED on productions sites, to prevent these messages from crowding the logs as this won’t impact the site functionality in any way.

A side effect from using Smarty with PHP versions above 8.1 is that the regular PHAR installer will no longer work on Windows environments. We are addressing that issue but, in the meanwhile, the Expanded PHAR installer still works properly on all platforms and can be used to circumvent that issue.

As an added bonus, the PHAR installer and redirection loop issue, an ongoing obstacle that occurred on LiteSpeed web servers, seems to have been fixed with PHP versions 8.2.16 and above, so using the regular PHAR installer on these servers should no longer present any problem.

The UserGuide2 module, currently available as an add on, has become UserGuide and joined the core modules. It is released with a CMS Made Simple Foundation video course pre-installed, streaming a handful of lessons essential to an editor. These will show an editor how to use the file manager, the content manager and the news module as well as showing them how and where to get further help. For those not wishing to include this module, it can be deselected when doing an advanced mode install/upgrade.

Additionally, this version fixes many minor bugs that have been lingering over the past few years, as well as some usability and performance improvements. Please see the changelog for a full list of fixes and improvements.

As per the Dev Team's official support policy, the only versions of CMSMS currently supported are now v2.2.19 and v2.2.20. Please upgrade at your earliest convenience.

Thank you for your time, and have fun using CMSMS!