Right now Myles and I are pondering about quite a few things to put into SnowCMS.

Mod system
Of course SnowCMS will have a modification system, and the dev team and I were thinking about how to do it. Some systems have a sort of API system, where basically every so often, the system will call on some kind of hooks are integrated for developers to latch on to. But there is not much power. Sure it would be simple for use to make, and then updating SnowCMS powered sites would be a snap, we don’t want to take the easy way out

Other systems allow you to modify all the files themselves. It can be a little more complicated, but it also poses a threat to users if they were to install malicious modifications. Probably pretty unlikely, but hey! It can happen…

Another way is super easy. Not having one at all. Of course, we wouldn’t do that. We have come to a unanimous decision to have file based editing for the modification system. Oh, and did I mention modifications are referred to as ‘flakes’?

Mod security
As I mentioned about allowing people to modify the sources of the system can be dangerous. So how are we as developers going to combat that?

Pretty simple, well, at least simple in concept. What will happen is people will be able to submit modifications to our site (Eventually we will have a modifications database, of course!) and once the team has reviewed it (Either developers, or maybe a modification team) and approved the modification to be done well and doesn’t do anything bad, the file will have its hash taken (SHA-1, most likely) and stored in a publically accessible way (In a database and can have the data retrieved). Now once the modification is uploaded to your site, and once your about to install it, your system will hash the file and send it off to SnowCMS.com. We (well, the server…) will then take that hash and check to see if it exists and is approved in our database. If it is, you will see a message saying the modification is safe and has been approved by the SnowCMS team.

A pretty good idea. Because if that modification which you uploaded to your site was changed in any way, it won’t be in our database. Simple, but darn effective =P.

Updating
Since SnowCMS will feature a modification (flake) system, updating will be pretty straight forward. Once SnowCMS goes gold, whenever an update is out (Like 1.0.1) we will have those updates put into a flake package. That way even when you have modifications installed, you should be able to update pretty easily with little to no errors. But of course, in the beta and RC stage, you will not be able to update via this system due to the major amount of code changes that will occur. Sorry!

BBCode
Like I talked about in previous posts, I certainly hope by either public beta release or when 1.0 goes gold, we will have the new BBCode parser complete. Still working on it.

Well, a lot of information about SnowCMS v1.0. Until next time, see ya! XD.