This is not ImpressCMS related but I think newbies can find this educating.

I will be the first one to tell you that smarty is definitely neat, however - what is really the point?

How much weight does smarty add to the core? how many lines are dedicated to passing on vars to smarty? How much lighter would our core be without smarty?

The point of adding smarty to the core was to make things easier, and to ease people into using php. However - the time I have spent learning the ropes of smarty - I could have just as easily learned more about php. Just like anyone else, I started off as a complete noob, though now I have a hell of a grasp on the logic behind our template engine, and I have to beg the question, what is the point?

Lets look at some examples shall we?

<{$xoops_banner}>

<?php echo xoops_getbanner(); ?>

There are definitely some cool things that smarty brings to the table, however - why not lighten the size of the core and spends a little time documenting php functions, instead of introducing a new language that really is not going to help the system in the long run. What is the point in having smarty guru's - you cant write modules with just smarty.

Lets look at some cool ways smarty is not currently used, but could be.

yes, neat stuff - but we aren't taking complete advantage of this extra library - so in reference to our system... Smarty needs to put out or get out.

Just a little food for thought. 2.0 is coming fast.

So you want to see debug console whenever you want, but you don't want to go preferences -> general preferences -> etc etc just for that. Or maybe you want to be sure no other visitor sees the console while you're working.

Add this at the beginning of your theme.html file:

Then whenever you want to see it, add the debug variable to the URL.

Example:

should become this:

Notice what you're doing is directly accessing a $_GET variable from within the theme itself.

More info on the Smarty reserved variable:

http://www.smarty.net/manual/en/lan ... smarty.php

Notice also that this debug console is not as complete as the one activated in preferences. This last one not only includes the variables, but a complete list of all the template files loaded to generate the page as well.

I am sure a lot of you are wondering what the holdup with the 1.2 release cycle is. I know I would be, after all you have gotten this incredible preview of 1.2 in the alpha - and most of you would probabaly think that a usable version would be here by now.

It has been 6 weeks since the release of the alpha version of ICMS, and I sense there is a bit of tension surrounding the subject of the next release.

Is the project stagnant? No.

Are they doing anything? Always.

What the hell is taking so long? Quality my friends.

The alpha of 1.2 introduced some long awaited and pretty marvelous features to the ICMS core, however - it also introduced some bugs that needed to be rectified. Since the alpha there have been even more features included with the package as well as some major reworking of many of the existing features.

Please also take into consideration that the development team is settling into a new system - both in the way that they write code, and in the way that they submit it.

The real purpose of this post is to ensure the community that next release is on its way - and is just as exciting as the first.

Currently the plan is to finalize and squash the reported bugs - then release our next alpha.

This will be the final alpha of 1.2 and once it is released you should see a more rapid releases cycle for this version.

I hope you are as excited about 1.2 as we are, and can hold out for this awesome milestone in the lifecycle of ICMS!

FlashVars="foo=Hello%20Worldgraph=first+line%0Dsecond+line"By "here" we mean "your ImpressCMS site", and by "you can't use" it means "you can't use sitewide". You can't put relative links inside your Flash movie on an ImpressCMS site if you want this movie to work sitewide.

Why?

The bad news

When you run a movie directly in the standalone Flash player, all links are relative to the file itself (good), but when you run this same Flash embedded in a web page, all links are relative to the web page's path.

This is true for links, for included Actionscript files, for external XML files or images... whatever.

So you can bet this Actionscript code:

var myxml:XML = new XML();
myxml.load("foo/bar.xml");

Won't work in one page or another. If it works in Content Manager pages, it will fail in imBlogging pages, and so on.

A solution could be using absolute paths, but what if you plan to move your site to another URL? It's not a good solution.

The good news

A little known feature of the Flash movies is that you can pass variables from the HTML to the movie in a very simple way. Yes, we can.

http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/164/tn_16417.html

So put this code in your template:

<param name="FlashVars" value="foo=var" >

<embed FlashVars="foo=bar" src......></embed>

And you'll have a variable named "foo" inside your Flash movie with the value "bar".

Now, think Smart. Where it says "foo" write "path", and where it says "bar", write your path and use it in your Actionscript code.

Get it?