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The last few days I've been looking around at various CMS and also keeping and eye on xaraya 2x (now called Jamaica). Nothing substantial seems to have changed in 2x since i was working with it, although I know Marc has been adding additional features in his own 2x branches.

There are a few of the 2x changes that I'd be happy to see in the Xarigami cumulus branch and some that i wouldn't want at all. To date we've been keeping most of our php5 and 2x-ish changes in the Cirrus branch which is based on xarigami cumulus (and 1x) but with reworked directory structure, and various other additions. In any case whatever ideas from 2x, they need to be reworked for xarigami cumulus and cirrus branches.

Here is a list of some of the Dynamic Data  changes we have implemented, some ideas from 2x rewritten and some new, added to xarigami branches in the last few days:

Dynamic Data Property Status - extended

This now allows a property to have status set to active, view only, display only, hidden, disabled or ignored. In 2x they also have Input status but this is not implemented in Xarigami. This is because we feel it blurs the line between display and input creating confusing and also adds access controls on top of existing permission based access controls which again tends to make things too complex.

For now the various property status can be changed to any of the following from the Dynamic data GUI:

• Active - the property is available in an object in the view listing, individual item display; can be edited and updated with the usual provisos
• View only - the property is presented in the view listing, not item display; can be edited and updated with the usual provisos
• Display only - the property is in the item display screen only; can be edited and updated with the usual provisos
• Hidden - the property is hidden from view in all screens, and treated as a hidden input field. Can be overridden in any template using the 'hidden' attribute with values of 'active', 'display', or 'hidden'.
• Disabled - the property is treated as not available, and will not be used in any way. Similar to removing the property but the data is still available, and will be still if the property status is changed again to eg active.
• Ignored - the property is available in all screens but is ignored for updates.

Classes updated

Xarigami cumulus branch is now officially php5 (since version 1.1.4).  In this light, we have begun to update the dynamic data classes for php5. There is still work to be done but we've made a good start there.

New classes

One of the nice things that Marcel added was the Object class on which all other classes are founded. This has been in our Cirrus branch for some time but i decided to implement this in our Cumulus branch as well in readiness for more php 5 updates.

Due to this we were able to add some handy methods to the Dynamic Object Master class and a few other bits and pieces . These will be documented elsewhere on site for easy access as they are handy for development work.

Tiny tidies

Numerous other bits and pieces in dynamic data under the hood, with tidying in code, reworked functions and classes, and  some UI improvements in property naming and template presentation issues.

There is a lot going on in xarigami at the moment so your continued testing and reporting is much appreciated. The new dynamic data work will be added to the dev builds in the next day or so but is available now from the xarigami core monotone repository.