You may have heard about how the Internet is running out of IP addresses, and about the move to a new address space called IPv6. All computer systems on the Internet have an IP address, and the old addressing scheme, IPv4, only allows for around 4.3 billion possible addresses. Those are gradually getting used up, and with demand for IP addresses continuing to grow, the Internet is slowly moving to a new scheme called IPv6, which provides a virtually unlimited number of addresses.

The transition to IPv6 is proceeding slowly across all industry sectors, but the increasing scarcity of IPv4 is not an immediate concern to Exware clients. All Exware servers already have IP addresses, and each server can host many dozens of websites. Exware also has IP addresses in reserve, while our hosting supplier, Peer 1 Network, is one of the largest in Canada, and have an ample reserve of IP addresses for their clients.

As for the transition to IPv6, Peer 1 are ahead of the curve in terms of IPv6 network routing in Canada, as this article illustrates wwwbgpmon.net/blog/?p=382.

Once Peer 1 and other network suppliers fully support IPv6, then Exware will be able to start hosting IPv6 websites as well.

Version 3.7.2 of ExSite was placed into the downloads area today. New features in this release:

• updated admin stylesheets
• more configurable webtop categories
• variable-size control panels
• audit logs (track all database changes)
• Event Calendar improvements (recurring events, activities, event venues)
• Web Forms improvements (summary reports with charts, copying forms)
• Address Book improvements (generate and save custom contact lists, edit contacts)
• TinyMCE is now the default web editor
• new plug-ins:
  • Backup - download a complete backup of your site
  • Subscribe - invite people to sign up for a subscription list
  • URLshortener - create abbreviated URLs with special security features

Version 3.7.1 includes the alternate HTML editor, TinyMCE, which has been extended significantly for use with ExSite. New ExSite-only features in TinyMCE include:

• Inline element selector
• Font and CSS style selectors configurable from your ExSite config files
• ExSite hyperlink tools
• ExSite image/document tools
• ExSite plug-in tools
• embed tool
• three modes: standard, advanced (all functions enabled), and basic (suitable for non-admin users)

Version 3.7.1 of ExSite was placed into the downloads area today. Included in this release:

New plug-ins

• Order Fulfillmment: track your e-commerce orders, items awaiting shipping, and back-orders
• New Membership Management framework can track multiple distinct groups/associations in one system
• Membership Directory: manage complicated directories of members in numerous categories
• Address Book and Contact List management, including vcards

Content Management

• HTML editor now optionally supports TinyMCE
• Archivable pages and libraries:  these pages and libraries can still be published and viewed, but once you no longer need to manage them, they can be hidden from your admin screens to reduce clutter.
• Internationalized the webtop and My Website for translation of admin screens into other languages.
• My Website now allows you to define default settings for new pages, to reduce the amount of reconfiguration you must do after creating a new page.
  

Security & IT

• URL shortening for easier emailing or printing of long, complicated URLs
• improved one-click login and captcha security
• more debugging features
• can offload bulk e-mail to alternate servers for better spam control
  

More detailed release notes on these features are forthcoming.

Administrator style sheets have been updated in the 3.7.0 release to provided rounded corners on titlebars, tabs, and similar user interface elements.  Only browsers that support these CSS features - namely Firefox and Safari (or related gecko or webkit browsers) will enjoy these changes.  Users of out-dated browsers (including Internet Explorer) will continue to see regular square corners.

You may need to hard-refresh to force the new stylesheets to load following an upgrade.

Version 3.6.2 is now available in downloads.  Among the new features in this release:

Internationalization

• multilingual service pages (stay in your preferred language when redirecting to a service page)
  
• multilingual libraries (track documents or other files in multiple languages)
  
• new functions in Website Manager & My Website for managing multiple languages
• Zine subsystem is fully internationalized
  

New Plugins

• QA (configurable multi-purpose web forms)
• ObjectBrowser (object-oriented database browser)
• Logs (view log files)
  

Miscellaneous

• utilities to generate templated PDF documents on the fly
• automatic password strength validation
  
• content aliases (one content object can be an alias for another)
• trash can be emptied by the Task Scheduler
  

Kernel documentation is now readable online. This documentation is directed at system developers, not end-users. It is auto-generated by POD, and developers can generate current versions of these documents from their own code repositories.

A lot of new features appeared in version 3.6, and there hasn't been time to document them all.  Here is a quick survey of what is new.

Appearance

• Webtop
• new design, and new plug-in icons
• plug-ins self-organize into categories
• you can define your own categories
• has a favicon for quick recognition in bookmarks and browser tabs
• Home Buttons
• green home button on control panels returns to the entry screen for that control panel
• ExSite button on webtop takes you to the main website home page

Content Management

• Menu Management
• you can now easily reconfigure your menus by dragging and dropping pages into their proper positions in the site map, using the SimpleMenu control panel.
• menus can optionally include links to subsections, as well as pages.
• Dynamic Page Titles
• plug-ins can re-title pages if they choose to, which makes for better tabs/taskbar labels, history lists, and SEO
• useful for plug-ins that handle many content objects with their own names, such as news articles or catalog products
• Search
• advanced search options:  put a '+' in front of a search term to require it in the results, and a '-' in front of a term to exclude it from the results.
• search indexes are more efficient
• can search within a plug-in module's data, instead of across a whole site
• Keyword Tags
• webmaster can tag any site, page, photo, document, or article with keywords
• the system will automatically generate a keyword index allowing you to find all content related to a keyword
• File Server
• maintain a large archive of downloadable files, with varying degrees of access for your website members
• RSS
• secure member-only RSS feeds
• Images
• images can automatically be given titles/tooltips to match the image name or description
• Automated Publishing
• pages can be configured to publish automatically at set times, or at hourly, daily, or weekly intervals
• Browser Support
• Safari added to list of browsers that can run the HTML editor

Web Forms

• Client-side Form Validation
• Forms will now detect that they have missing data before you submit them, so you don't have to go back if data was missing
• Date selectors
• date fields on forms can optionally have drop-down day and year selectors
• Content Filtering
• You can enable a censorship option that will try to catch and filter bad words that users enter into your site.  (Useful for forums or other content that is being received from untrusted sources.)
• Captchas
• available on more forms and plugins
• more features to block robots

Internationalization

• Mutilingual system messages
• it is possible to translate all system messages (text that is not your content but is printed automatically by ExSite and/or plugins) into any language, and support any number of languages at once
• Emails
• improved support for emails in other languages

Productivity

• ToDo
• plug-ins can add items to the system to-do list, if they can detect that work needs to be done
• use the ToDo plug-in to view your to-do list and see what work is waiting for you
• makes it easy to see all your tasks at once, rather than visiting each plug-in separately
• not all plug-ins will necessarily make use of this feature
• Task Scheduler
• some plug-ins can schedule tasks to be performed at set times or intervals
• for example:  scheduled publishing, scheduled emails, daily digests, etc.
• Installation
• new quick installation program
  

Miscellaneous Plug-ins

• E-Zines
• daily and weekly digests of updates to your e-Zines can now be e-mailed to your members
• accepts document attachments
• Catalogs
• New add-ons to Catalog + Shopping Cart system allow you to set up multiple options for your products and optionally specify additional costs for each option. Options can be previewed through an inline image gallery.
• Membership
• Membership management tools have been upgrade to improve configurability, and tracking of membership status.
• Logs plugin
• a plug-in tool to inspect your ExSite log files
• Location Finder
• new plug-in to search for different geographic locations, eg. stores, agents, etc.
• Login
• can correctly generate login and logout links on static pages
  

Performance & Security

• Caching
• new persistent caching tools provide higher performance
• more efficient caching of website content, to reduce memory use
• improved caching of specialized database queries
• Load Sensing
• when your website is under high stress due to a spike in traffic or an attack by robots, the system can automatically disable some features to reduce the load, and re-enable them automatically when the traffic subsides.
• Logins
• persistent logins ("remember me")
• alternative login methods
  

Technical Standards

• Markup generation
• including support for XHTML and XML code generation
• URL management
• new tools for handling URLs and links, for improved standards compliance
• cleaner URLs for simpler links and better SEO
• optional secure URLs use encrypted, tamper-proof parameters
  

The downloads area now has a theme pack download, containing eight classic graphic design themes from exsitewebware.com.  You can install these themes right into your websites, or use them as learning examples to inspect for ideas on creating your own themes.