I won’t be adding anything else to 2.8 other than fixing any bugs that arise during testing.

If you don’t want to wait, you can download FCMS 2.8 Release Candidate 1.

As always, here is the list of items that change in 2.8.

There is a security vulnerability in some versions of Family Connections on some configurations of PHP, that could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary commands.

How to Fix

To protect yoursite from an attack simply remove the dev/ directory from your site.

This directory is not needed for Family Connections to work and is only useful to developers who want to make major changes.  Future versions of Family Connections will be available in two forms, one for development and one for production.  The production version will no longer contain the dev/ directory.

Technical Details

The bug exists in the dev/less.php file in all versions since 2.5.  This file is used to help with converting LESS files into CSS files.  You can find out more about this vulnerability by visiting ticket #406.

Download the latest version of Family Connections.

What’s New in 2.7?

This release was mainly to fix a few random bugs.

Address / Contact Info

• Added Country
• Phone Number and Address is now formatted based on country.

Date of Birth/Death

• DOB and DOD are no longer required fields.

Upgrading to Family Connections 2.6

Upgrading from 2.5.3 or earlier

1. Upgrade to 2.5.4
2. Follow instruction: Upgrading from 2.5.4

Upgrading from 2.5.4

1. Log in as admin

2. Run the automatic upgrade

3. The upgrade will stop on step 4 with the following error message:

Could not find upgrade directory.

To continue the upgrade process change the url from auto=4 to auto=5.  This will continue on with step 5 of the process

4. When the upgrade is finished, click the logo to return to the website.

The major releases where quite large, sometimes 40 to 50 different tickets.  Major release version numbers were two digits like 1.0, 2.4, etc.

The bug fix releases where smaller, usually just 2-5 tickets, and the version numbers where three digits, like 1.0.1, 2.4.1, etc.

The Old Way

One of the biggest reasons for this type of versioning/release management is that any theme or plugin that works on 2.4, should work for all 2.4.x versions. This makes it easier on the users, to tell which theme/plugin works for what.  And also is less updating for site owners.

The problems with however are, it takes forever between releases, so users have to wait a long time for new updates.  And it also makes development harder, trying to keep track of so many tickets per release.  This leads to more bugs.

The New Way

Going forward however, I will be doing small releases.  This will allow for much faster development of new features, and will eliminate the need for three digit version numbers.  The new releases will contain no more than 10 tickets and will probably be more like 3-5 tickets.

The biggest downside to this is the frequent upgrades users will have to perform.  The solution to that is that 2.5 will contain a automatic upgrade system, which will hopefully eliminate most of the current issues with upgrading.

FCMS 2.5

The next version will contain just the Status Updates feature and the Automatic Upgrade feature.  The Video section will have to wait for the 2.6 release.

It’s going to take some time before everything is fully transferred over, and some of it probably won’t be (like forum posts).  But from now on, all support related stuff will go through Tender.

Foursquare

One of the new features that require PHP 5, will be a new section I’m calling “Where is Everyone”.  This section will allow users to link their foursquare accounts to the site and show a listing of where everyone has checked in.

Blogger/Tumblr/Wordpress/Posterous

Another new feature that requires PHP 5, is the ability to import blog data from an outside source into FCMS.

Facebook

I’m also adding the ability to add status updates, similar to twitter/facebook, so It makes sense to allow users to link their facebook accounts so they can share those updates.  This also requires PHP 5.  In addition to status updates, it will allow us to import data from facebook when filling out your profile information and also when registering a new account.

Themes

Halloween – This is a Halloween theme based off of the standard default theme.

Emerald – A user-submitted theme.  An explosion of green.

Mods

Who is chatting – A user-submitted mod, that will show a list of member that are currently in the chat room.

Latest Info Overview Email Updates – This mod can send out weekly emails to the member of your site, with the latest updates for that week.

No Registration – A user-submitted mod, that will allow Administrators to remove registration.

Translations

Slovak

German

Thanks

A special thanks goes out to all of those who have helped with translations, mods and themes.  I really appreciate it.

You can check out these new videos by checking out our new Facebook page, or by viewing them on YouTube or Screenr.

Be sure and Like our new Facebook page.  We will be adding more videos and info to it over the coming months.