Today we held a developer's review of the work being done in the trunk for the release of ImpressCMS 1.3, and while we talked a lot about the approach Marc and I took for this project, the real benefit shows in the benchmarks we have comparing 1.2.2 and the latest revision of 1.3. The greatest amount of effort has gone into the new architecture for the classes used by ImpressCMS - consolidating duplicate files and functions into single classes and separating each class into its own file. This has been a rather comprehensive work, because no one has done this in any other project before ImpressCMS - none of them have taken the time and made the effort to create a unified code base for their project.

We didn't do this just because it would make us different than the other projects or to break compatibility with previous versions, we did it to gain better performance, more stability and more scalability. We are in a time where most people have access to the Internet through a broadband connection, but also at a time when more people are browsing the Internet using mobile devices - those devices are not using broadband connections, so sites built on ImpressCMS, or any other platform, must be optimized for viewing on devices with less than highspeed connections. We also want to be considered for enterprise-level sites, where high traffic is normal and performance is an issue. So, we need to be critical about what code is included in our core and how well it performs. Let's have a look at how the numbers are stacking up, shall we?

Hi everyone,

Following Steve's latest blog post, I wanted to keep you updated of our progress. As you know, Steve and I have been hard at work refactoring ImpressCMS. We have some pretty old code in there ! And you would not believe how many different ways there are to name classes, functions and files! The good news is: with 1.3, we will have 1 way of naming classes and files (no, nothing for functions because we won't have any left ! - everything will be in classes!).

So, allow me to tell you a little bit about what we have done so far. It is still a work in progress, and we are refining our process as we go along, but a lot have already been done.

The past week has been an interesting one - Marc-André and I have set about refactoring the core architecture of ImpressCMS, which is no small task, given that we have code that dates back to PHP Nuke!

ImpressCMS 1.3 will be a big step in establishing our own framework and clearing out some of the very old and somewhat inconsistant coding practices. We have been touting this release to be smaller, faster and better and that is definitely going to be true. Some of my early tests are showing a significant decrease in the number of queries used, the amount of memory used and a better page load time. As we get closer to releasing the beta version, I'll put out some statistics about the actual improvements.

Off the shelf applications don't always do what you want them to do, so usually, a little customization is in order. For some applications, it is like wading through the bayou as you look through their code to find the right spot to make your change. Other projects have their stuff in order and you're surprised at how easy it is to modify and extend what they've packaged up for you. ImpressCMS is definitely falling into the second category!

After using hashtags and mentions on Twitter and Facebook, I thought 'This would be a cool little addition to ImpressCMS!' So, I started out to create plugins to allow me to use these common tags.

I have already been in Chicago for 2 days now for CMS Expo 2010. This is definitely an outstanding conference! Very well organized, a lot of great speakers, a lot of great people, great food, great everything!

For me, it had been a wonderful opportunity to finally meat with someone I’ve been working with for the past 5 years, Steve Kenow, one of the initiators of the ImpressCMS project. We have been working together since in the XOOPS days and started the ImpressCMS adventure together with other great people. We’ve been talking to each other nearly every week for the past few year, but yet again, I had still to meet with him! This was accomplished this week!

I also met with Steve M., another dedicated XOOPS and ImpressCMS user/developer. It’s so nice to meet with people sharing the same interest, in this case, open source CMS. Although CMS users and developers represent a large number of people across the world, you don’t connect with them in real life every day.