The Exponent Development Team is proud to announce the release of Exponent 0.97.0 GA. The code has undergone rigorous testing, bug fixing, and cleanup. We feel this is our best release yet, with many new features and enhancements that continue to make Exponent simple.
Feature Highlight of 0.97.0
Deeper integration with The YAHOO! User Interface (YUI) Library.
Many components now take advantage of YUI's JS and CSS framework, including Navigation Management, News, Calendar, Image Gallery, Navigation Module Views, and the administrative chrome. A very tight integration with YUI Loader also provides a great framework for YUI Developers to quickly get scripts up and going, letting Exponent and YUI handle the work of figuring out dependencies.
Drag and Drop Tree style navigation management.
Organize your pages with ease by barreling down through your navigation in tree style format, quickly adding, editing, and deleting pages. An administrator may decide at any moment to re-arrange the site structure, and can do so easily within seconds by dragging and dropping single pages or whole hierarchy wherever they see fit.
Pod Casting
The Resource Module got a significant upgrade, now allowing it to be configured to Podcast. Upload you MP3's, videos, and other media files that will allow others to subscribe, and automatically download your casts to their favorite podcatcher, like iTunes.
RSS Syndication
The News Module is now capable of pulling in and displaying RSS feeds from any RSS source. You can mix your news posts in with your RSS syndications, seamlessly displaying posts from both Exponent's News Modules and non-Exponent sources alike.
Navigation Module and YUI
YUI's Menus and Menubar have been ported as standard views in the Navigation Module, coming in 4 different flavors: YUI Top Nav, YUI Top Nav JS, YUI Side Nav, and YUI Side Nav JS. The Top Nav and Side Nav views will display the same as their JS alternatives, only differing in the style in which the menus are built; for example, YUI Side Nav is built by progressively enhancing markup on the page, while YUI Side Nav JS is built from Javascript. YUI Side Nav offers more flexibility to designers who're better with HTML and CSS, but lack in Javascript, while the YUI Side Nav JS view offers much greater speeds on sites with large hierarchies (http://ci.peoria.il.us).
Minification Engine and CSS inclusion
Creating, managing, and minifying your CSS has never been easier. As a designer develops their Exponent theme, they can simply create and drop their stylesheet documents into their theme's CSS directory, and Exponent will automatically include your document in your site. The way in which Exponent will include your stylesheets depends on wether or not the DEVELOPMENT flag is set. In the administration control panel, by turning error reporting on, this will include all CSS files in the head of your document. When error reporting is then toggled, all CSS files are gathered up, minified as one document, allowing for much faster load times.
The {script} plugin
The script plugin solves another of the problems defined by YAHOO! (http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html). By wrapping your inline javascripts in {script} {/script} within any modules view files, your scripts are removed from their location in the document, and moved to the bottom of your document before execution, thus allowing the visual page to download without the javascript processing overhead. YUI Loader is built in the {script} plugin, allowing to load both YUI and non-yui scripts as a dependency for execution.
Looking Forward
As excited as we are about the 0.97.0 release, we have even more exciting plans for the future of Exponent. Exponent is very easy to use and administrate currently, and very soon it will be combined with ease of development. We've been working hard behind the scenes to deliver a product that will set Exponent apart from other CMS's and bring it to the forefront as the leader in the Content Management Arena. Stay tuned for more on how you can get involved in the process.
