Stable Version Draws Even Closer As Release Candidate 2 Is Distributed

In what's becoming a habit, Exponent CMS Release Candidate 2 (RC2) titled "Cognitive Cocoon" was distributed on schedule.  This is the final 'testing' type release planned prior to the release of a stable version 2.0 at the end of August.

RC2 includes a number of substantial changes!  While RC2 focused on bug fixing prior to a stable release, it implemented a major revision of actual folder layout to better conform to 2.0 design goals; the 'page loading' process was streamlined; all 3rd party libraries were updated; many old-school (1.0) items were deprecated and/or updated to 2.0 format; a Gravatar.com option added to user profile avatars; plus many, many other tweaks and fixes.  You can look here for details of how this might affect your site upgrade as we work to leave the last remnants of the 1.0 system behind.  Since any customizations which haven't been updated to 2.0 standards might begin to break, we are also planning a blog article to explain what is changed.

Because of the massive changes to the folder layout/structure, it's best to start with a nearly clean folder, where only the '/files' folder and /conf/config.php remain.  While the upgrade will work by extracting on top of a running 2.0 system folder, it will orphan a lot of unused files (dead wood).

As a note to developer's who've created custom modules, you may find that they no longer work. This is because the system is now looking in another location for both datatypes (which is now "models") and definitions. If you've created a custom module with the datatype placed in /framework/datatypes/, you'll need to move that file to /framework/modules/YourCustomModule/models/. If your modules definition file was in /framework/core/database/definitions/, you can now move this file to /framework/modules/YourCustomModule/definitions/.

We think you'll be pleased with how far the project has come since the last release a few weeks ago, and will be pleasantly surprised with a few more changes when the stable version is released.