This is to announce a new forum dedicated to a group of members who have gone out of their way to help bring Pro_News to the community. Either by extensive testing, writing code, translating, or donating funds to help me develop Pro_News. In many cases these members have done most or all of the above.

This new forum is my way of saying thanks to these individuals. In the forum I'll be providing some snippets on how I use Pro_News, and few tricks to get the very best out of a Pro_News based website.    _PNMORE ...

Pro_News 3.0.0.0, which was going to be called 2.3.0.7, has been released. You can find it in downloads here. Downloads are restricted to registered members initially, until we can be confident there are no big issues. Expect it to be widely available in just a few days.    _PNMORE ...

Article originally posted by gallowglas on Wednesday, December 17, 2008 (09:40:25) as a forum post

Hi ...

I made this mod some time ago, but I forgot about it. (thanks Robert for reminding me)
I modified Newsletter_Pro V3.4.5 to work with DF9.2.x and Pro_News 2.3.x (should work with older versions, but only tested with 2.3.0.5)    _PNMORE ...

The next release of Pro_News - version 2.3 - is out for what may well be its final test before release.

As well as all the planned features, a number of new tweaks and improvements have be added to improve the overall usability of Pro_News. Things Admins will like, e.g. if there are no articles to display in a Section/Category it will now tell you, as Admin, which Section and which Category. And you can go directly to any Section or Category from the Admin > Pro_News > Category screen without having to redisplay from the Home or Pro_News page. Plus many others.

Bigger enhancements are correctly sized mini "icon" displays in Headlines, support for default images per Section to avoid the blank "No image" displays, new table-free Headline templates for Headlines - which should improve the display particularly for those CSS-challenged browsers like IE.

There will be a couple of minor upgrade steps needed for those of you using Headlines to generate the new icon images, but it had to be changed/improved.

Calling all Beta testers, the Pro_News 2.3 Beta initial release is finally in the Downloads section.

This release is currently limited to the Beta Testers group only, for download. But by all means take a look at the description to see what features are going to become available.

I think you will agree that some of these features will greatly extend the applicability and usability of Pro_News.

Build a whole website with just Pro_News and the standard DF features? I think that should now be very much possible.    _PNMORE ...

I believe that we are now code complete on the next release of Pro_News: Pro_News 2.3.

Significant changes to Pro_News will make things much easier for admins. For example, the ability to specify a display order separately for each Section, means that the long term goal of being able to use Pro_News for all posts and articles on a site can finally be attained. Latest News can be displayed in latest-first, while reference articles can be displayed in alpha order.

More details as soon a basic testing is complete and this site is updated to 2.3.

Beta testers start making preparations for testing please!

Here it is, come get it! The latest version of Pro_News has been released.

The main features of this release really complete the News-compatibility part. After many, many requests I've added Email a Friend and Printer Friendly formatting, equivalent to that of Dragonfly News, plus the often requested Scheduled Article, plus - wait for it - Scheduled Deactivate!

Plus I've included a link to the full article template suitable for hooks into Digg, etc. See the Community Forum here for info on using this.    _PNMORE ...

We are now in a short beta cycle for next version of Pro_News.

Hopefully this version will be available to all soon.    _PNMORE ...

***** [ Sample article to demonstrate the latest image capabilities of Pro_News ] *****

15th Anniversary Limited Edition, 1997 Twin Turbo Supra. Original stock model - nothing has been modified. Bridgestone Pole Position 3's. Genuine 71,000 careful miles.    _PNMORE ...

This article attempts to demonstrate the new display new images, including the border, frame and drop-shadow, plus the Album display and User Fields.

The image above is associated with the Intro section.

Those to the right are from the selected Coppermine Album - the display format is handled by the indexalb.html template, allowing user configuration.

The Title (missing in this case) and the Field Names are user configurable in the language/english/pro_news.php file(s).    _PNMORE ...