XOOPS 2.7.3 RC-1 is here — and it brings a new editor

The first release candidate for XOOPS 2.7.3 is out. Thirty-six changes since Beta 1, and three of them you will notice the day you install it.

A new editor, and one that finally looks the same everywhere

SCEditor joins the editor dropdown as a lightweight BBCode option. It ships bundled, so there is nothing extra to download.

It stays in source mode on purpose, and that is a feature rather than a limitation: a WYSIWYG round-trip is exactly how [siteurl], [d], named [size=] values and custom smilie codes quietly get rewritten or dropped. SCEditor inserts at the caret and leaves the rest of your post alone.

While we were in there, we fixed something long-standing: the same editor now shows the same toolbar everywhere. Until now the control panel and the front end disagreed, and front-end themes disagreed with each other. The cause was five separate hand-written copies of the same markup. There is now one, and every renderer uses it.

Code blocks work again on modern PHP

If you post code on PHP 8.3 or newer, you may have seen blocks that began with the mysterious text le="color: #000000">. PHP changed how it highlights code in 8.3; XOOPS was still cutting fourteen characters off the front, assuming the old format. Fixed — along with the whitespace inside code blocks.

Your error screen, under your control

The headline feature. When a site throws an uncaught error, the module that draws the screen is now one owner you declare, rather than whoever happened to register last. XOOPS publishes who owns it, where that came from, and whether anything is wrong.

Choose your screen: xWhoops 2.0.0-Beta2 or the brand-new xTracy 1.0.0-Beta1. Watch it from DebugBar 1.4.1, which now reports the real owner instead of guessing. Full details in the companion post.

And quietly, in the background

A round of security work on form output, module administration and the image manager. A database fix for searches that produced invalid SQL when a user's permission list was empty. And a Windows bug so old that the file cache had never worked there.

Try it

This is a release candidate: please install it on a test site, put it through its paces, and tell us what breaks. That is what an RC is for, and it is the most useful thing you can do for 2.7.3 right now.

Bug reports and feedback: XOOPS on GitHub.