Jamie Balfour

Welcome to my personal website.

Find out more about me, my personal projects, reviews, courses and much more here.

Jamie Balfour'sPersonal blog

Jamie Balfour'sPersonal blog

Although it's easy to find out about BalfBlog through the changelog, I thought I'd update you here.

The latest revision of BalfBlog is a bit of a step up in terms of security and performance. The main new features related to user accounts. Every BalfBlog installation from version 2.3 (Goldfinger) will now feature a special user account called helpdesk. It is disabled by default, so an administrator has to enable it in settings. Once it is enabled, helpdesk is used to allow me to remotely login to your blog and help you with issues. I suggest leaving it off unless you need help.

As well as this, at the end of February I added the switch user functionality, which allows administrators to use the user account of any user without the need for a password. This also is designed for debugging and will allow administrators to debug the system themselves. I also changed the dashboard menu to a new accordian style which keeps items better organised. You will see other asthetic changes across the website, including the new login page. On the development side, you can now switch quite easily to CKEditor instead of TinyMCE for a more lightweight editor (more editors will come soon).

I have recently begun work on the new Message Centre. I will primarily be using this on my blog to record issues. This new system allows you to setup an easy to use message system whereby users can get in touch. You will be able to set expiry dates on messages so they will only remain in the system for a few days. 

Also coming in Goldfinger is the new logging system. This will allow you to see what people are doing in the dashboard. I will also be looking into building a comment system that I will integrate into BalfBlog. Version 2.3 will also possibly be changing from MySQLi to PDO, but we shall see. A new file manager is also planned and I'm looking to improve performance too.

I'm still working on improving the file upload system for images, which is no longer working. 

As with all version of BalfBlog 2.x, HTML5 and CSS2+ is required to be able to actually use it, so please just stick to Firefox, Edge, Chrome or Safari 6+.

Posted by jamiebalfour04 in BalfBlog
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