Scot's Blogger 3.1 has been released. There are dozens of new features, updates, and fixes to enjoy.
There are two important things you need to keep in mind when updating to version 3.1.
1. The htaccess file will need to be updated/refreshed for all of your blogs.
2. To take advantage of the new features, fixes, and updates, your blog templates will need to be updated, in some cases quite a bit.
See the installation instructions starting at Step 7 for template downloads and other important information.
The new templates for version 3.1 are heavily modified versions of the original v3 templates (up to version 3.007.)
Disclaimer:
As new features are added and old features are made stronger and as we try to simplify the templates and installation process, template updates are inevitable. It just happens that this time around there are more than usual.
Step 1: Update Templates First
Stock templates: If you haven't customized your templates you can copy the stock templates to the main blog page and the scotsblogger template page and then update your htaccess.
Custom Templates: If you have customized your templates, download the new templates and load them in an editor and do your customizing there, then copy/paste into the store and update your htaccess.
Template Updates Details
The mvt:page items for scotsblogger have been removed from the templates in favor of calling functions from the module files. The only one left is the main scotsblogger page item (no parameters) which loads some required runtime data.
The template updates affect archives, pagination, loading data for various kinds of posts/results/archives, and many other things.
Post, results, and category post data is all loaded differently than before but in a way that is more organized and simplified.
The post loop now handles all post arrays (search, archives, blog roll, etc) which greatly simplifies the template.
The post display area has gotten rid of the "message load recent" and related page items in favor of calling a function called "runtime_message_load_id(..)"
Step 2: Htaccess Updates
The htaccess file should be updated in the blog settings part of the module admin so it can handle:
1. Pagination for the blog roll.
2. Pagination for archives.
3. The archives "more" which displays a list of archive months and years.
Pagination has been fairly ugly since version 1 of the module, however it is now short-linked so that pagination is more like:
/myblog/page/3/
This handles search results, the category blog roll, and the regular blog roll. Archives have their own similar pagination setup.
Remember to update your blog htaccess settings you update your blog templates. If you want to do the updates manually, see the "Permalink Information & Instructions" section at the bottom of the blog settings.
