Newsletter #1

This is the first edition of the FNUG newsletter where we plan to inform the FNUG members about news and our activities on the development front and tips that will hopefully make you a better poweruser.

Fundanemt 2.0 release

After almost a year of development the first public version of Fundanemt was released on March 6. The release was announced during the Annual Linuxforum Conference held in Copenhagen, Denmark.

So why is it called version 2.0?
The first generation of Fundanemt was never really released to the public. Besides the specially made versions that Tankegang a-s released for their customers there has never been a version 1.0. We raised the version number to 2.0 so that this second generation of Fundanemt was not mistaked with the earlier versions

Only a week after the release of Fundanemt 2.0 it was downloaded more that 100 times, which to us is a success. Currently the 2.0 and 2.0.1 releases has been downloaded over 250 times.

Fundanemt 2.0 has now been followed by a 2.0.1 and a 2.0.2 bugfix release.

Linuxforum 2004

To mark the creation of the Fundanemt User Group, the developers was invited to have a booth at the annual Linuxforum conference held In Copenhagen. Besides this, Christian Hansen, the head developer and founder of Fundanemt was invited to speak about Fundanemt.

Looking at the number of listeners during Christians presentation we are sure that the interest of Fundanemt is enourmous. The presentation room was almost full which was alot more than we had expected.

The presentation is available as a stream on the linuxforum's official website.

It was a nice day with lots of user inputs and people showing a great interest in discovering how Fundanemt works. Most ideas collected from the visitors are allready on the roadmap for 2.1 (see later).

We would like to thank all who visited our booth and made it a special day for us. ( Allthough we drained the emergency Jolly far too soon. )

Modules

Fundanemt can be extended with 3rd. party modules, which often allows administrators to let different users handle different parts of the websites content (e.g. each department has its own calendar and newslist.) So far the list of usefull modules includes:

Polls
Create polls on your website to figure out what your visitors thinks of different topics of your choice. Statistics, different security settings and easy adding of new polls is available.

News
Administrate one or more newslists at your website, complete with resumé, full text, date of appearing on the website and optional rss feeds.

Calendar
Keep track of one or more calendars on your website. This is very usefull for clubs keeping track of events and tournaments.

Link catalog
Create and administrate your linksektion. Keep track on the number of clicks on each link - which is more popular? The Fundanemt team uses it on the fundanemt.com website to keep track of how many downloads of the system there has been since the release.

Forum / Guestbook
This module allows you to add a guestbook/forum section below each calendar event, news item showing. A full forum or guestbooks is of course possible as well. Administrators are able to remove posts from specific ip-adresses, authors etc.

FAQ catalog
Allow your website to contain a catalog of questions and answers as a form of documentation, so users can get fast answers to frequently (and perhaps not so frequently) asked questions - it is up to you.

Near future - 2.0, 2.1 and beyond

Fundanemt 2.0.2 bug fix release
After each major-release we plan to ship a bugfix release after a few weeks. We have currently just released the 2.0.2 bugfix release which contains quite a few bug fixes compared to the 2.0 and 2.0.1 releases. At the same time of the 2.0.2 release, we plan to post the Fundanemt project to freshmeat, opensourcecms.com and other relevant software sites.

Picture gallery
A picture gallery has been created. With this module you can create galleries and show the world your pictures. The gallery is currently in betastage and is due to ship with Fundanemt 2.1.

Spell checking
Work is in progress to implement a spell checker. The spell checker is due to ship with Fundanemt 2.2.

Module insertion
Fundanemt is a module based system. One may install a module to extend his or hers Fundanemt system. Today the modules work just fine backend, but one has to know a little PHP to be able to create a module frontend.

One of the most important missing links in Fundanemt is the module insertion. Module insertion will allow one to insert modules using a wizard provided by the module itself. It will still be possible to use PHP to insert modules for greater customisation.

Module insertion wizards is available in Fundanemt 2.1.

Image functions
Fundanemt 2.1 will provide a strong range of image tools. One will be able to rotate, resize and crop images directly. This will extend Fundanemts usability. The average user will no longer need to learn how to use an external image application like GIMP or Photoshop to prepare the images for the web.

Tips & tricks

Symbol filter

The Fundanemt parser can be extended with filters. In example one may create a filter that converts all emailadresses to something unusefull for spammers. Also one may add a filter that converts all smileys to small pieces of graphics.

The fundaSmil module actually allready provide this feature.

Bugs - they are everywhere

If you find any bugs working with Fundanemt, please let us know so that we can make Fundanemt even better. Submit bugs on http://bugs.fundanemt.com/ or write an email to team [at] fundanemt.com .

Documentation

Without documentation any system is useless. The documentation on Fundanemt has just begun and much is to be done. So far both some official and unofficial documentaion exists:

Everybody is encourised to contribute to the documentation. This can be done in several ways.

End user documentation ( fundadocs.pdf )
The end user documentation is written in LaTeX. If you would like to contribute to the document just go ahead. If you do not know anything about LaTeX, just write the documentation in HTML, OpenOffice or whatever you like the best. Then send it to team [at] fundanemt.com and we will convert it to LaTeX and include it in fundadocs.pdf.

Webmaster documentation
For webmasters a lot is still missing. Mostly on the parser and module insertion. In order to contribute you may write articles on specific topics like "enabling the search engine" or "inserting newsmodule". Just write the article and we will publish it on fundausers.org.

The article written by Mads Baggesen is a good example FundaLinks Guide