Blog items tagged with "preview"

Giving you a summer forecast...the main things we'll be working on this summer should include the following of which several will manifest itself as a patch #3:

Exponent is still hanging on with at least one update and a new major version planned for 2023! Some features you can expect within v2.7.1 in addition to rolling up the previous patch to 2.7.0 include:

Exponent will see at least one update in 2022! Some features you can expect within v2.6.1 include direct integration of Twitter Bootstrap v5 and Twitter Bootstrap Icon support. PHP v8.1 support will be improved and support for obsolete PHP versions (5.6, 7.0, 71, & 7.2) will likely be removed along with the extra libraries only included to support those older versions (Smarty & Switftmailer).

Exponent will be updated in 2021, however support may come to an end in early 2022. The use of Exponent as a CMS seems to be waning as many site providers and previous users now opt for a proprietary or commercial applications. However some features you can expect to be integrated in v2.6.1 will include Twitter Bootstrap v5 and Twitter Bootstrap Icon support included in the main package instead of as an optional addon.

Yes, Exponent CMS is still alive and being updated. Though development has taken a much slower pace, bugs are still being squashed and new features are being added. You can expect v2.5.1 to be released by the end of winter 2020 (March). This is actually a minor patch update to v2.5.0patch2, but due to the copyright being updated to 2020 it affects almost every file and would be a very large patch, therefore it'll be a full version release.

As we wind down 2017 and move into 2018, Exponent version 2.4.2 is being polished for release. What does the future of Exponent CMS hold in store? If you've read recent posts (here and here), you'll get a feel for what you can expect in the next version. So how can you prepare for the next version of Exponent?

The primary theme framework for Exponent CMS is Twitter Bootstrap, currently at version 3 (actually 3.3.7). The next Bootstrap release, version 4 should be available in the near future and is currently in the beta 2 stage. It would be good to integrate support for the Bootstrap 4 framework, but there are several obstacles:

Exponent provides an excellent environment for writing and sharing articles or 'blogs'.  A site where the 'back-end' is on the front-end and a variety of what-you-see-is-what-you-get WYSIWYG editors take away some of the creative hassles with writing.  Another nice convenience for writing articles which is found on other blog applications (like WP), is editing the articles offline by using an application to manage and edit multiple blog articles.  Though there was preliminary support for this feature in the v0.99beta1 release (before v2.x), it has not been available to the v2.x code line...until now.  

Back in version 2.0.8 we added the LESS ​stylesheet compiler to Exponent.  LESS is a dynamic stylesheet language which extends CSS with dynamic behavior such as variables, ​mixins, operations and functions.  This functionality makes it much easier to create flexible stylesheets since redundant styles and style variations can be handled by the compiler/server instead of the designer.  Though this addition to Exponent was primarily to support Twitter-Bootstrap, its use is increasing especially beginning with v2.2.3.

While v2.2.3 (when released) will focus on addressing issues in v2.2.2 and removing all the deprecated features and 0.9x compatibility, there will be a few minor new features and changes to the permissions system (final implementation will be based on your feedback to this article!).