Recent Blog Posts

When Exponent v2.0.2 was released at the end of October 2011 it incorporated a fairly major change under the hood that could 'break' some custom themes or mods.  The template engine (what is used to display everything) was upgraded from Smarty v2.5.x to v3.1.x.  This was a major upgrade, but the syntax basically remained the same...the issue is that 'bad' template code which worked under previous versions will likely break with this version.  However, Smarty v3 adds many enhancements including the ability to use inline computations/math.  Details on how to identify problems and fixes is at the end of this post.

YUI 3.2 and earlier had no browser based detection loading, and worked well with YUI PHP Loader, allowing for Exponent to load YUI dependencies on the server side. Since the introduction of YUI 3.3.0, which loads (and skips loading) JavaScript based on your browser, it's now only YUI 2.x that can take advantage of server-side dependency calculation and loading, since PHP has no sure-fire way to detect the user's browser. The result: Exponent YUI 2 loading up on the server, and YUI 3 loading via YUI3's built-in Loader.

Here are some basics of using git and github to initially get or update the code to your site.  I've found this is an easy way to initial install, and the perform updates on my web sites.  There is a little bit of overhead (~105 MBytes), however the reduction in effort is worth it in most cases.

As a general rule of thumb, any images that will be placed into text modules should be resized using an external image editing program such as Microsoft Picture Manager or Picasa before it is uploaded to the Exponent CMS File Manager.