Today I’m proud to announce a new release of the software that runs pgdp.net: R201701. The last release was a year ago and I’m trying to hold us to a yearly release cadence (compared to the 9 years in the last one).
This version contains a slew of small bug fixes and enhancements. The most notable two changes that I want to highlight are support for PHP versions > 5.3 and the new Format Preview feature.
This is the first DP release to not depend on PHP’s Magic Quotes allowing the code to run on PHP versions > 5.3 up to, but not including, PHP 7.x. This means that the DP code can run on modern operating systems such as Ubuntu 14.041 and RHEL/CentOS 7. This is a behind-the-scenes change that end users should never notice.
The most exciting user-visible change in this release is the new Format Preview functionality that assists proofreaders in formatting rounds. The new tool renders formatting via a simple toggle allowing the user to see what the formatted page would look like and alerting if it detects markup problems.
What’s next for the DP code base? We have a smattering of smaller changes coming in over the next few months. The biggest change on the horizon is moving from the deprecated mysql extension to mysqli, which will allow the code to run on PHP 7.x, and moving to phpBB 3.2.
Many thanks to all of the DP volunteers who made this release possible, including developers, squirrels, and the multitude of people who assisted in testing!
1 Ubuntu 16.04 uses PHP 7.0, but can be configured to use PHP 5.6.
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