Some of the key improvements that have been released include:

• CKeditor updated to version 3.4
• Minor UI improvements related to versioning
• Improved support for Amazon S3 buckets
• Simplifying auto-scrolling down to errored forms
• Improving output of folder details in folder details container rule
• Making "item selector" JavaScript widget position itself more intelligently
• Improvement in sending support files (e.g. Recite logo) when in container management mode

All users are encouraged to upgrade all packages when possible. You can managed the upgrade via the "Packages" section in the Recite CMS administration section.

For more information about using Recite CMS, please either browse this web site or contact us today!

The location package is available to all users of Recite CMS.

Some of the improvements in this release (and in the various package updates) include:

• Upgrade to Zend Framework 1.10.6
• Upgrade to CKEditor 3.3.1
• Ability to access extra data when outputting custom fields
• Ability to create custom "location" field

For further details of the changes in this release, refer to the Recite CMS Download Portal.

We encourage all users to upgrade to the latest version of Recite CMS and al related packages.

[0:20] To start, let's add a new tab to manage feeds. Select "Feeds" then create that tab. Once this widget has loaded click "New Web Feed", and we're going to add it based on "Pages". There's other options for creating feeds, so if you want to make a blog then create an RSS feed you can do that. To keep it relatively simple for now we're going to create a site map based on the pages.

[0:50] Let's just call this "Google Sitemap". You can add this in Google Webmaster Tools. I won't show you how in this screencast, but it's fairly straightforward. They'll validate your XML feed and make sure it's working fine.

[1:07] We're going to start from the home page. If you select a sub-page then only pages within that will be included. So select "Home" and "Include Starting Page", and "No Limit". We're not going to exclude any pages for now, but we will shortly. Let's just create this feed. And the feed appears here. There's no options to click on here, it just shows you that the feed exists.

[1:37] Now that the feed is there we need to add it to the web site. Open "Pages". We need to add a new page which uses the "Web Feed" driver. That hasn't been added yet as a page type so let's open "Page Types". Now we can add the new page type.

[2:07] Click on "New Page Type". There's a few to choose from here but we'll be outputting a web feed (at the bottom). We'll call it Google Sitemap. We have to choose how we're going to output the feed. There's a few to choose from. We're using the "Google Sitemap" format. If you pick "RSS" then it will output an RSS Feed. Click "Create Page Type".

[2:31] This isn't creating the page, just the type of page. This means you can create multiple pages using this type. We don't need "Page Types" widget any more so let's close that. Now we can create a sub-page. As you can see our new type appears here. We're creating it below "Home", which means it will appear below this top level here.

[2:51] So select "Google Sitemap". We'll call it Google Sitemap. The convention with sitemaps is to call them sitemap.xml. This isn't required, but we'll stick to convention. The other option here is to pick a feed, so let's select the feed we created at the start.

[3:10] Click "Create Page", and there's a Google icon here to indicate it's a site map. Let's click on that. There's no "Content" tab for this page because it doesn't make sense for there to be. We can have a look at this page, so let's click on it now. You can see the URL, it has sitemap.xml as we entered.

[3:35] So here's our site map. Chrome doesn't actually render XML in any useful format, but just to demonstrate: "View Page Source" and you can see there it's generated the urlset based on the Sitemaps schema. We've only got three pages so far but as you add more pages these will automatically be added.

[3:58] You might note this sitemap.xml file. This doesn't need to be in the sitemap, because Google already knows about it. We can actually exclude this by returning to the Control Panel.

[4:15] We do that in the feed options. As we saw when we created the feed, we could exlude certain types or certain pages. We can either exclude the Google Sitemap type or we can open "Exclude Pages" and exclude it in that way. Now save the feed.

[4:43] Now reload the feed. You can see that last URL is gone. If I view source, it just has the two links in here now. And that's how you create a Google Sitemap in Recite CMS.

Transcript

[0:04] In this screencast I'm going to add a page to a Recite web site and then add a contact form to it, and show you how easy this whole process is.

[0:14] I'm going to start with the site we used in the Recite Getting Started video (you can find that on the Recite home page). Let's just take a look at this site. And it's this layout here. In the demo there was a contact page which I've taken that out just to complete this video. So our first step is to add this page back in.

[0:37] To do that we return to the Control Panel and click "Create Sub Page". We're just going to use a generic contact page name, so "Contact Us". Select the page.tpl template (That's the only template available for this web site). Obviously you can have more if you create more; and we're just going to create this as a live page. So click "Create", so that appears now in the navigation here

[1:17] So if we return this page here and refresh, now we get the contact page. It's just a blank page at the moment, so there's a title and no content. I'll just add some content in. Click "Edit Block", which loads up the WYSIWYG. We're going to a form in a moment, so let's just write a message to introduce them to the form.

[1:55] So that's pretty basic; you might want to add in your address details, or phone number, or email address, but for now let's just keep it at this. So we click "Save and Close". It updates here, so let's reload that; and you can see it down there

[2:12] The next step is to create the form, so for that we click on "Forms" (I added this tab earlier). There's no forms on this web site yet so let's click "New Form", and there's two form types available in this installation. If you've set up your web site to use user management there might be some more forms available, but for now let's just pick "Email".

[2:38] It gives us a default title based on the type of form we're creating. And you can choose to protect it with CAPTCHA. I'll just select "Yes" here just to show you what's involved (nothing really, you just pick "Yes").

[2:54] We can add any number of fields to our form, and when we display the form we can loop over those fields so they'll automatically be displayed. We're going to keep this simple and add a field for the person's name, their email address and a field for them to enter their inquiry.

[3:11] So first their name. It's just a sentence. You could pick paragraph if you want multiline (we'll look at that in a moment), but just sentence for their name. And we're going to call it "Your Name". You can enter a help message which you can then display in your template. Something along of the lines of "Please enter your name". I've already got it pre-filled, and we'll say this is required. So that appears there now.

[3:42] And we can add a paragraph, and that can be their message, so "Message", "Please enter your inquiry". We'll make that one required, and we'll add one for their email address. So, "Email". "Please enter your email address", and again we'll make it required.

[4:13] As you can see here we've added "Message" before "Email". We're going to change that so Email comes before Message. Just grab the drag handle and drag it up. Now we create the form.

[4:29] And the form appears here. Click on it to load, which just gives the summary of it. You can see any submissions (there's none yet since we just created it), and the "Recipients" tab allows you to define one or more people to send an email to when the form is submitted.

[4:49] So that form's created, all we need to do now is add it to the Contact Us page. So I'll just close this one and load the website in "Container Management" mode. This just allows us to add dynamic content. So "Contact Us" is the page we're adding it to. Scroll down, we've got this container rule set up, and we pick "Web Form", "Create Rule", and now we can pick the email form. In brackets is the type of form just to differentiate it from other forms.

[5:33] We have to pick a template to output the form in. We haven't actually created this yet so let's return to the Control Panel and click on "Templates". You can see here the other templates used in the site. We can organise these into folders, but to simplify things I've left this flat for now.

[5:51] So now we add a template to output the web form in the container rule. So under "Web Form" we pick "Email" and click "Create Template" and scroll down. We're just going to use the sample template that's bundled with Recite. So pick that and click load. It fills in the filename and just a base set of HTML for these fields.

[6:22] If we look here this {foreach} just indicates it's looping over all the fields that we added previously (name, email and message). This form isn't actually outputting the help option, so in order to do that we can add some code and to do that we add {$field.help|escape}, and we just escape that one. This might not look right depending on the CSS setup. You can also test for that having a length of greater than zero ({if $field.help|strlen > 0}).

[7:00] Down here we check if the CAPTCHA is enabled, and if so we output that. The Smarty tag {captcha} (that's a built-in Recite template function) here outputs an image, and by passing audio=true it generates a "wav" file which the user can listen to if they are vision-impaired, and a field to enter that.

[7:27] So that's if the form hasn't been submitted, and there's also this check at the start: {if form.complete} output the details of what they submitted. So we'll just "Save and Close". We can customise that, but to keep things simple I'll just use the default one with no styling, but you can easily update that. It's a good starting point.

[7:45] So let's return to our site where we're adding the web form container rule. So under display template, click "Select" and now this template we just created is here, so check that, so as the help shows we're just selecting a template used to output the container rule.

[8:03] Click "Add Rule to Container"; this is just a message that we need to reload now, so we could do that, but since we're done at this point I'll just close administration mode. So we click "Close" there, and now we scroll down, and you can see the form here, and the help message I just added to the template. And these are each of the fields that we added earlier.

[8:28] We can fill this out just to show you how easy that was to do. So I'll enter some details. Now this will validate, meaning if an invalid email address is entered an error message will be shown. And I'll just add a sample message, "Demonstrating the Recite Form", and enter the CAPTCHA and click "Submit". And that's all there is to it. You can see we outputted what the person entered here. Unstyled, but we always improve that.

[9:12] So return to the Recite Control Panel and click on Forms. Now if we click on the "Submissions" tab, we can see the submission, and we can see all the fields that were entered. And that's how you add a web form to Recite.

To celebrate the creation of our YouTube channel, we've created a new container rule for Recite CMS for publishing YouTube videos on your own web site! All users receive this new feature automatically when they upgrade the feeds package.

We've created a videos page on this website using this new container rule. This page lists all of the videos on our YouTube channel.

We encourage all users to subscribe to the YouTube channel to see the latest features and learn new ideas for using Recite CMS!

In case you haven't seen it before, here's one of our videos that we've published:

In addition to the new version of Recite CMS, there are updates available for a number of packages. These can also be upgraded via the administration site.

Some of the key improvements in this release include:

• Improved MIME detection to be more reliable and quicker
• Multiple optimizations to nested tree API
• Increased performance in generating template data from custom field lists
• Ability to bulk delete forms and search indexes
• Display a loading indicator when dynamic widget tabs are loaded

You can download Recite CMS now from the Download Portal! If you have any questions about this release, please Contact Us.

This service gives you full access to all standard features of Recite CMS without requiring a license.

Benefits of using Recite CMS Hosted include:

• Access to all standard features of Recite CMS
• Export your site in full on-demand
• Cancel your account any time
• 24/7 e-mail support
• All software updates to Recite CMS will be automatically applied

Sign-up takes only a moment and your site will be up and running within minutes!

Some of the updates in this version (and in updated packages) include:

• Upgraded to Zend Framework 1.10.5
• Upgraded to CKEditor 3.3
• Ability to bulk assign modules to clients
• Ability to change the status of a client (makes it possible to deny Control Panel login without taking down their site)
• Various improvements to import/export framework
• An improved default site that is optionally auto-created when a new client is added

We encourage all users to upgrade to this new version (and any new packages) as soon as possible. You can upgrade using the Package Management section in Recite CMS administration.

If you have any inquiries about this release, please contact us.

Note: We released Recite 2.1.14 last week, but we've now released this subsequent update to incorporate additional functionality that was required by some clients.

These features include:

• Front-end content editing
• WYSIWYG templates
• Custom styles in styles dropdown
• Custom look-and-feel of editor

Spending a little bit of time setting these up early on will make things much easier for other users (and you!) in future!

Front-End Content Editing

Every page in Recite CMS can have any number of content blocks associated with it. These are defined in page templates using the following code:

{contentblock name='Main Content'}

You can define any number of content blocks in each page. You simply use {contentblock} and provide a different name for each block.

The great thing about content blocks is that in addition to being able to update content while in the Control Panel, you can also make changes to your site in real-time while viewing it!

All you need to do is open the page you want to edit in container management mode then click Edit on the block you want to change. This will open up the WYSIWYG editor!

WYSIWYG Templates

The WYSIWYG has a feature where you can insert pre-defined blocks of HTML into the editor. This is useful if you have a particular piece of markup you want to use often. You can open this list by clicking on the Templates toolbar button in the WYSIWYG.

This list is populated automatically using certain templates you define in Recite CMS. To create a new template for this list, create a new template with type WYSIWYG Template (in the "Miscellaneous" category).

When templates appear in this list, they display the name and description you enter when creating the template.

Custom Look-And-Feel of Editor

When the WYSIWYG editor displays normally, it shows a white background and black text. It is possible to change this default look and feel using a WYSIWYG stylesheet.

The WYSIWYG stylesheet is a normal CSS stylesheet that you can create in the Recite CMS file management tools. Any styles defined in this stylesheet are automatically loaded into the WYSIWYG.

In order for the WYSIWYG to load this stylesheet you must first set Recite CMS to use this template. You can do so by opening Site Settings and loading the Files bundle.

Under the WYSIWYG Settings section, select the stylesheet you created and click Save Settings.

Now when you use the WYSIWYG, this stylesheet will automatically be loaded, as you can see in the following screenshot.

Custom Styles in Styles Dropdown

One of the great features of the WYSIWYG editor is the Styles dropdown. This allows you easily format content in the editor using a pre-defined style.

This dropdown box is empty by default, but Recite CMS allows you to easily populate this. Once again it uses the a WYSIWYG stylesheet. In fact, it is the same stylesheet you create in the previous section (for defining the look and feel of the WYSIWYG).

To define a new dropdown style, you must define it in the stylesheet then put a special comment above it. This comment is in the format /* @wysiwyg [Name to appear in WYSIWYG] */

For example, to create a style that has a yellow background and black bold text, add the following to your stylesheet:

/* @wysiwyg Fancy Block */
div.fancy { background : yellow; color : black; font-weight : bold; }

Now when you load the WYSIWYG editor, this new style will appear in the dropdown.

Summary

As we have seen in this article, the Recite CMS WYSIWYG editor is very powerful and easy to customize. If you have any questions about the topics covered in the article, please Contact Us.

The changes made are as follows:

• You no longer need to create an account before downloading Recite CMS (this is now streamlined in the install process)
• A wizard for installing the ionCube loader is now available if a compatible loader is not installed
• The administrator is emailed their log-in details for the administration site once Recite CMS has been installed.

The lead developer of Recite CMS, Quentin Zervaas, has drawn on his experience developing Recite CMS to write an article about using the Zend Framework's Zend_Cache to implement a caching solution in PHP 5.

The article first introduces you to the theory behind caching, then shows you how to set up and a use a cache in PHP. The article goes on to show you how to easily cache entire web pages, before introducing the concept of tagging cache records so they can be easily managed.

You can read the entire article now on PhpRiot.com at http://phpriot.com/articles/speed-up-your-php-with-zend-cache.

This screencast demonstates a number of Recite CMS features, including:

• Uploading files
• Managing templates
• Adding container rules
• Front-end content editing

We hope you enjoy this new screencast. If you have any requests for future screencasts, or if you have any questions about this one, please Contact Us!

This release addresses the following issues:

• Miscellaneous improvements to site export/import
• Addressed a minor version detection issue in package updater
• Improvements to text editor for templates and files
• Added a link to directly edit a text file from the file listing

We encourage all users to upgrade to this version using the upgrade tools available in the Recite CMS administration section of your installation.

Take forms in Recite CMS as an example. When a form is submitted from your Recite CMS-built web site, it is submitted to a URL that begins with /__/forms. In actual fact, this request is being sent to a backend request driver called forms. This driver takes care of processing the form and performing any required actions (such as creating a new user or sending an e-mail).

Forms is an example of one such driver that comes with Recite CMS, but developers can also build their own. For instance, if you've developed a custom Recite CMS module for publishing weather forecasts, you could create a backend request driver to retrieve this forecast using Ajax.

Your "weather" backend request driver might accept the name of a city as an input (e.g. /__/weather/forecast?city=adelaide), and a return JSON-encoded data that can be output using JavaScript.

For more information on building backend request drivers (or any other driver type), head over to the Recite CMS Documentation Portal.

The key improvements in these updates include the following:

• Upgrade to Zend Framework 1.10.4
• Added a script to help restore files to database file stubs
• File manager now stores a hash of files to help if restoring file stubs
• Ability to serve static web site files that are not managed via Recite CMS

We encourage users to upgrade their Recite CMS installation and the two package updates. Instructions can be found in the package management area of the Recite CMS administration site.

You can download Recite CMS now for free at the Recite CMS Download Portal.

If you have any questions about this release or have any comments or suggestions, please Contact Us.

The Incident

As part of our ongoing effort to make Recite CMS as fast as possible we are continually tweaking the content cache. One of the issues that arose in Recite CMS 2.1.8 was that in some cases when a template folder was deleted, any templates that were in that folder remained cached for several minutes afterwards.

In Recite CMS 2.1.9 we resolved this issue, but the fix had a side-effect where it removed some of the stored "file manager" data for the associated client (this had no impact on data stored in the database).

Our Resolution

We have resolved this issue and released new versions of the affected packages (recite-2.1.10 and core-templates-2.1.9).

Additionally, we have added an additional safeguard to the stored client data can no longer be removed in the manner described.

We are now also looking at ways to prevent this kind of issue from occurring in the future, including expanding our unit testing suite, as well as upgrading the Recite CMS package updater to include more detail about available updates.

Conclusion

For any of our clients who are impacted by this issue we apologize and request that you contact us if you have any follow-up questions.

While we try our best to avoid these kinds of issues from occurring, we strongly encourage that all users do the following to reduce the impact if they do happen:

• Perform regular backups of your development, staging and production servers (including file system and databases)
• Regularly check for package updates in the Recite CMS Administration Site

Thank you for using Recite CMS.

Some of the key improvements in this release include:

• Upgraded to Zend Framework 1.10.3
• Upgraded to CKeditor 3.2.1
• Render pages with gzip encoding

To download this version of Recite CMS or to view more details about each package, visit the Recite CMS Download Portal.

An even simpler option is to sign up for a free demonstration - You don't need to download or install anything!

All you need to do is enter your name and e-mail address, and your demonstration site will be automatically set up for you. The Control Panel username, password and web address will be sent to you in just moments so you can start using Recite CMS!

As with any new product, we recognise there is a learning curve for new users, but we aim to minimize this by running you through a series of steps and providing links to our comprehensive documentation.

If you have any questions about Recite CMS, or if you're not sure it meets your requirements, please Contact Us to discuss your requirements. We've always got new features ideas in the pipeline and are open to new suggestions.

Part of this new functionality is a new tool in Google Webmaster Tools that indicates the page load speed of your site. They recommend using tools such as Page Speed or YSlow (both plug-ins for Firefox's Firebug) to find areas where your site speed can be improved. While some of these come down to the person implementing the web site, Recite CMS does take care of several of these recommendations, including:

• Minifying CSS and JavaScript. CSS and JavaScript files contain many unnecessary characters that are useful when creating these files but serve no purpose in rendering the page. Recite CMS allows you to automatically reduce these files when they sent to your site visitors.
• Serving files from a Content Delivery Network (CDN). Recite CMS has an add-on package called Assets Mirrors that will automatically synchronise all your web site files to a remote location. This can be achieved using Amazon S3, FTP, SFTP or a network file server. Additionally, developers can implement their own mirroring driver to suit your own needs if required.
• Caching generated pages on the server. In order for Recite CMS to provide the advanced functionality it does, a lot of processing goes into generating your web site pages. Recite CMS minimises this overhead by saving and re-using generated content wherever possible using its internal data cache. This is an area of Recite CMS we devote a lot of time and are continually striving to squeeze more speed from generated pages.
• Leveraging browser caching. When Recite CMS serves a static page with content that isn't about to change, it instructs the visitor's browser to save the data to its "temporary files". This makes it much quicker for the user to browse your site, since much of the data will already exist on their computer.

Of course, there are still areas we can improve in making sites run quickly. One of the key features we will be implementing soon is to automatically GZIP encode all returned HTML pages. Not only can compressing returned pages speed up your site, it can also reduce your (and your site visitor's) bandwidth usage.

If you have any questions about Google's new policy and how it relates to Recite CMS, or if you have any further improvements you'd like to see made to Recite CMS related to web site speed, please Contact Us.

Every time you make a change to this content, the new version is saved in the revision history. You can then view a list of saved versions.

If you want to restore an older version, you can do so simply by clicking the Restore button.

This functionality currently saves revisions of pages, files and templates, and the simple API allows developers to easily tap in to the new versioning module.

We'll be publishing a developers guide for custom versioning drivers in the near future; if you need any details ahead of time, contact us for more information.

You can read more about the versioning package at the Recite CMS Download Portal.

This file contains a number of directives which most search engines will honour, including which files or directories they can and can't access.

When using Recite CMS, you can easily create the robots.txt using the settings panel.

First, you must create the content of the file. You can use a tool such as Google Webmaster Tools to create the content of the robots.txt file. Once created, you can add to Recite CMS in the following manner:

1. Log in to the Recite CMS Control Panel
2. Click on Site Settings in the header
3. Load the Global Settings settings bundle
4. Enter the robots.txt content in the labelled text area
5. Click Save Settings

Now when you visit the http://www.example.com/robots.txt file in your web browser you will see this data.

Some of the key enhancements in this version are as follows:

• Ability to easily manage robots.txt file via Control Panel
• Ability to revert to old versions of pages, files and templates (using the new versioning add-on package)
• Improved Control Panel tab management tools
• Ability to view draft content even if page doesn't have a draft version
• Ability to hide containers when viewing draft content

To download Recite CMS, or for more information about each package and the corresponding release notes, visit the Recite CMS Download Portal.

We encourage all users to upgrade to this version of Recite CMS using the built-in upgrade tools - all upgrades to Recite CMS and core packages are free!

Recite CMS offers this functionality out-of-the-box, allowing users to manage files on their Recite CMS web sites using their native operating system. Additionally, users can manage their templates using their favourite text editor.

Although this article doesn't specifically help users of Recite CMS, it will hopefully give you a bit more of an insight into some design considerations and implementation details for Recite CMS.

The article discusses the following:

• Creating a simple WebDAV server
• Mapping a web drive to Windows and OS X
• How to ignore temporary operating system files
• Adding file-locking so operating systems can safely write files
• Protecting the WebDAV server using HTTP digest authentication

You can read the article at http://phpriot.com/articles/web-dav-with-php.

It takes only a few minutes to create a new theme, since all you need to do is the following:

• Create a new PHP class that extends the Application_Cp_Theme_Default class (this class specifies the default colours for Recite CMS)
• Specify the logo style
• Set global colours, header colours and widget colours
• Update your branding in Recite CMS administration to use the new theme.

Head on over to the Recite CMS Documentation Portal to read the guide.

The key steps involved are:

• Create a new template using the "Output Twitter RSS Feed" sample template
• Open your web site in container management mode
• Add the web feed rule to a container using the RSS link found on your Twitter page
• Refresh the page to see your latest tweets!

Watch the following screencast to see this in practice. You can show the video fullscreen to see text labels more clearly.

We encourage all users to upgrade to this version, including installing the updates to the following packages:

• core-containers
• core-assets
• core-cp-components
• core-templates
• core-pages

The issues we resolved were primarily related to rebuilding of certain search index types, as well as a small issue when clearing the cache through the Control Panel.

For full details about latest releases, head on over to the Recite CMS Download Portal.

Some of the key improvements of this release include:

• Show a list of related widgets when adding new widgets in the Control Panel
• Ability to upgrade/install all packages with a single command
• Ability to put your site into maintenance mode via the Control Panel
• Ability to easily restart Apache automatically when client domains are updated

In addition to the new Recite CMS release, we've released updated versions of all packages. Some of the highlights include:

• Upgrade to CKeditor 3.2
• Ability to set Expires date on files mirrored on Amazon S3
• Ability to send minified CSS/JavaScript to file mirrors
• Ability to use an uploaded file as a custom field
• Easily see if there are unsaved changes when editing a file or template
• Ability to resize text editor and template editor
• New "data streaming" container rule to consume XML/JSON data from third-party sites

For more details about the changes in this release, check Package Information page on the Recite CMS Download Portal.

Note: If you are looking for the Recite CMS 2.1.5 release, this was released internally but not made public due to a technical issue that has since been resolved.

For instance, Recite CMS currently has its own set of backend request handlers which perform the following functions:

• Logging users out
• Processing user-submitted forms
• Managing updates to user shopping carts

They are especially useful as an endpoint for web sites that need to make use of Ajax, since the backend request handlers can easily return JSON-encoded data if required.

For more details, head over to the Recite CMS Documentation Portal.

We're working hard on publishing all of our developer documentation. We acknowledge it's not currently complete on the documentation portal, so if there's any further documentation required, let us know and we'll provide you with the required documentation and direction!

This video demonstrates the following functionality:

• Uploading a reasonably large file. A progress meter displays the progress.
• Extracting a zip file. The files extracted are kept in their original structure.
• Bulk deleting files. There's a number of bulk management tools, including bulk delete.
• Uploading multiple files. You can select many files from your computer at once and quickly upload them all.

When playing the following video, set it to full screen to see text labels more clearly.

One of the great features of Recite CMS is the ability to easily create image thumbnails. This is especially useful if you want to display an image gallery on your web site.

When creating a template, simply use the {thumbnail} template function. This function accepts the following arguments:

• path - This is the path to the image on your web site
• w - The maximum width of the thumbnail (in pixels)
• h - The maximum height of the thumbnail (in pixels)
• pad - If you specify true then the image will be shrunk to fit within the specified size and whitespace will pad to make it the exact size. The longer dimension is shrunk to fit.
• crop - If you specify true then the image will be shrunk by the shorter dimension so it fits in the specified dimensions. The image will be the exact size specified but some of it will be cropped.

If the thumbnail isn't padded or cropped, it will be sized to fit within the specified width and/or height, but the resultant image may not be exactly the dimensions.

Use the {thumbnail} function within your HTML links or images. The following code demonstrates this:

<img src="{thumbnail path='/assets/myPhoto.jpg' w=150 h=100 pad=true}" />

You can also link to a larger version of the same image with the same technique. The following code would output a small thumbnail then link to a medium sized version of the image:

<a href="{thumbnail path='/assets/myPhoto.jpg' w=450 h=300}">
<img src="{thumbnail path='/assets/myPhoto.jpg' w=150 h=100 pad=true}" />
</a>

Creating an Image Gallery

If you wanted to add an image gallery on your web site, you would add the File Listing container rule to list files from a chosen directory.

When creating the template to output these images, you would use a template similar to the following:

{foreach from=$content item=row}
<a href="{$row.fullpath|escape}" title="{$row.description|escape}">
<img src="{thumbnail path=$row.fullpath w=150 h=100 pad=true}" />
</a>
{/foreach}

One of the aspects of Recite CMS that makes it easy to manage your web site is that you can decide on your own layout for the Control Panel.

This means that you can cater for the specific task you are currently performing, or for the screen size you are using. The following video demonstrates how this functionality works.

Be sure to keep an eye on this blog, as we'll be posting more videos soon!

Note: You can make this video full screen to view it more easily.

Recite CMS offers Amazon S3 connectivity with its assets mirroring add-on.

This article discusses the following:

• Signing up for Amazon AWS and creating your access keys
• Creating, clearing and deleting buckets
• Uploading objects to buckets
• Downloading objects from buckets
• Retrieving a list of objects
• Using Amazon S3 as a Content Delivery Network (CDN) on your web site.

You can read the article at http://phpriot.com/articles/zend-service-amazon-s3.

For more details, view the release information at http://download.recite.com.au/recite/packages/view?package=recite.

Additionally, we released updates to all packages, which addresses a number of improvements to add-on packages. These changes primarily relate to the calendar, categories, assets, containers and listings packages.

You can view release notes for all packages, once again at the Recite CMS Download Portal

We encourage all users to upgrade to this latest version. All updates are free and can be managed via the Recite CMS Administration Site for your installation.

Today we added the Container Rule Driver Development Guide, which is a comprehensive guide for building custom container rules. If you're not sure what a container rule is, check out the Recite CMS Product Tour - this tour demonstrates some container rule functionality.

Additionally, we also published some updates to the main Recite CMS developer guide. This guide contains generic information that applies to all of the different types of custom development that can be performed for Recite CMS.

In the coming days and weeks we'll also be publishing our guides on developing custom form types, form fields, search indexes, and many more!

To view this documentation, head on over to the Recite CMS Documentation Portal.

No package updates are required for this version. You can upgrade using the Recite CMS Administration Site.

We encourage all users to upgrade to this version. 

You can get a glimpse of how we built this site using Recite CMS by clicking the "Behind This Site" link in the top-right corner of this page.

In addition to this web site, we've also launched our new Documentation Portal (up-to-date administrator, user and developer guides) and Download Portal (download and install Recite CMS now!).

We hope you like the new web site and are able to find everything you need from it. If you have any suggestions or ideas, please let us know!

This version includes the following improvements:

• Upgrade to Zend Framework 1.10.2
• Ability to have multiple sites for a single client.

We encourage all users to upgrade to Recite 2.1.2 when convenient. As always you can install any updates via the Recite CMS Administration Site.

If you don't already have Recite CMS, visit the Get Recite page for more details.

Some of the improvements include:

• Upgrade to Zend Framework 1.10.1
• Add license status indicators to administration site
• Various per-request data cache optimisations
• Improve auto-generation of web server configurations
• Automatic optimisation of search indexes
• Include user roles when exporting users to CSV

We encourage all users to upgrade to this version.

This will be the final release in the 2.0.x series. We expect to release the first public version in the 2.1.x series in the coming weeks (Recite CMS 2.1.0 is currently in use by select clients).

• Upgrade to Zend Framework 1.9.7
• Upgrade to CKeditor 3.1
• Upgrade to SabreDav 1.0.4
• Ability to save a page content block and keep the WYSIWYG open (front end)
• Ability to duplicate a template
• Ability to export/import brand configurations

We encourage all users to upgrade to this version (and update all packages accordingly).