26th Nov 2007

Lore 1.7.0 Development

The next major release of Lore, version 1.7.0, is now under heavy development.

There should be some minor bugfixes, although no security issues yet. But let’s get on to the important stuff - major changes and new features!

New Fulltext Search Engine

The new fulltext search system in Lore 1.7.0 will solve many of the issues with the old one - the “50% rule” headaches, lack of weighting in article titles/keywords/content, and minimum number of articles. This new system will take advantage of features in MySQL 4.0 and greater - so Lore will no longer run on the (now legacy) 3.23 version of MySQL. You will be able to fully customize the weighting of each of the three search fields - article titles, article keywords, and the article body itself. More weight means more relevancy. By default, titles and keywords will have the most weight, followed by article body.

New Frontend Interface

Lore is long overdue for an overhaul of the end-user interface. With the current trend in simple, streamlined web interfaces with less clutter - we figured this would be a perfect match for Lore. The ultimate goal of your knowledge base is to help your customers find their answers as quickly as possible. We want Lore to do just that, by pointing them in the right direction, and then getting out of their way.

New WYSIWYG Editor with Image Upload Support!

We’re scrapping Xinha, which is unfortunately quite bloated and difficult to customize. Simply adding this to the Lore package triples its size - and that’s after we removed dozens of useless plugins. We will be replacing Xinha with FCKEditor - a lightweight and highly customizable WYSIWYG editor. And best of all, it will include the image browser pre-configured, so you can upload and insert images right from the editor.

Require Login to view Knowledge Base

You will now be able to create “regular” users via the control panel, and require that they log in to view the knowledge base. This is optional, of course, so you can still leave your knowledge base publicly accessible if you prefer.

All changes and features are tentative and may change without notice. We currently do not have a set release date for Lore 1.7.0, but we will keep you posted.

Questions, comments, concerns? Post a comment! Your feedback is valuable to us.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 26th, 2007 at 12:22 am and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “Lore 1.7.0 Development”

  1. January 9th, 2008 at 2:53 pm River Says:

    I’m looking forward to use the new version and features. So please let us know when the new version will be available - 1. quarter 2008 ?

  2. February 18th, 2008 at 6:03 am dimis Says:

    How easy is to understand the use of a software?

  3. February 18th, 2008 at 10:18 am Pure Says:

    Yes, Lore 1.7.0 is set to be released this quarter.

    The software is very easy to understand and use. There is no programming knowledge required and you can be up and running in only 15 minutes.

  4. February 19th, 2008 at 11:22 am River Says:

    Could you post a screenshot of the new end-user interface as a preview. I like also the “old” default-style, but very interested in how you developed it further. I guess it will be also be possible to customize it to the user needs (smarty template engine?)

    By the way I like that blog and the possibilty to communicate with developer and users.

  5. February 19th, 2008 at 12:12 pm Pure Says:

    Yes, the new theme will be fully customizable Smarty templates just like the others. We will put up a screenshot when one is available.

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