Instant-zero is happy to announce you the release of a new version of the Xoops News module.

First, we would like to declare that this new version, 1.56 is the last one which will support Php 4. The Php team decided to not anymore support Php 4 at the end of the year 2007 (and this is an excellent decision). The next releases of our other modules are in the same case.

This new version brings an important change in the PDFs generation. The library used up today was changed to use tcpdf. This library is much more powerful for the generation of PDFs and it can include the pictures of your articles.

Pictures can be included in your articles but they must be in the PNG or in the JPEG format (and not interlaced). To be able to use this new library, you will have to update your module but you will have to also update your templates. If you don't see any difference after you updated the module in the PDFs, that's because your templates are not up to date.

There is a drawback to this library, if your text contains a GIF picture or an interlaced PNG or JPEG, then you will not see the PDF. Another consequence of the use of this library, that's its size! The module's archive is now 7 Mb.

If you have too much problems with this library, the old library was not removed from the module so you just have to modify the news_article.html template and to replace modules/news/pdf/pdf.php by modules/news/makepdf.php

Some hacks suggested on this site were added to the module. As a consequence, there is a new translation (see the lang.diff) file.

If you are already using the News module, copy the news files to your website and be sure to update your templates.

The module is available for download from his homepage.

Here is the module's changelog

1. In article.php and when you was using a site with multilingual, there was a problem with the previous and next titles
2. It was possible to see the form used to post a comment even when anonymous users had not the right
3. Bug correction in the file /xoops/modules/news/include/notification.inc.php (thank you colossus)
4. A modification in /xoops/modules/news/templates/news_item.html (thank you colossus)
5. Added a new language define in main.php => _NW_NOTYETSTORY (thank you karim)
6. The library used to generate PDFs was changed. It supports UTF8 and local pictures (pictures must not be GIF and must not be interlaced (it's running with PNG and JPEG)) The html entities, usually visible in PDFs should not cause any more problems (except in the PDF's title)

************************************************************************** ** This version of the News module is the last which will run with Php4 ** **************************************************************************