We in Elxis Team celebrate the 10 years life of the Elxis project with the sixteenth release of Elxis CMS, Elxis 4.4 Orion. We would like to thank all those people that trust Elxis CMS for their sites all these years and to invite new people to try Elxis and join our big open family. Elxis 4.4 Orion is the latest member of the 4.x series. Download it, try it, use it! We are here to help you on any question or problem you might have.
Some notes about Elxis 4.4 Orion. For the full changelog visit the release notes page.
We re-developed Elxis Defender from scratch. The Defender uses new detection methods for web attacks and new filters (signatures) that comes mostly from thorough analysis of our own sites log files. We also added the option to automatically block IPs that are listed in bad IPs and bad IP ranges lists. These lists are updated automatically. The result is a security tool that blocks 3 times more attacks than the previous version. Due to the huge improvement on blocking web attacks, bad hosts, bad robots, etc, we added an option the Defender to notify site admin only on actual attacks and not on other cases (like a bad robot visit on site). This limits the number of email alerts the Defender might send. Also we introduced security logs.
Elxis 4.4 is fully compatible to PHP 7 and keeps backwards compatibility to PHP 5.x. PHP development team made a fix in version 7 related to session management that lead Elxis (4.0-4.3) custom session handlers like database and files not working properly. We improved a lot session management in Elxis 4.4 and made it even more secure. We made custom session handlers database and files to work correctly. So if you use Elxis 4.4 sessions will work perfect on any PHP version you may have and with any session handler. If you use Elxis 4.3 or older and PHP 5.x all session handlers will work fine. If you use Elxis 4.3 or older and PHP 7.x then you should set in Elxis confiuguration as session handler the option None (database and files dont work properly). Off course the preferable solution is to update Elxis to the latest version.
Elxis 4.4 has a personal messaging system for the users! The messaging system designed as a method for the users to send private messages to each other, to all users, or even make public announcements. By this system users can also receive notifications by the Elxis core (for example for a problem detected on site) or even by Elxis Team. We developed a module named Admin messages for the administration section to manage your messages. For the frontend section we will release on EDC a related module soon. We also developed a helper class (elxisMessagesHelper) for the developers.
Elxis installer in 4.4 Orion became mobile friendly. You can now install Elxis from your mobile phone! The media manager was updated and also added support for drag-n-drop on files upload. Many system libraries were updated, the WYSIWYG editor was updated, and many other things. Download Elxis 4.4 and read the full changelog in the release notes page for Elxis 4.4 Orion. An update patch will soon become available for 4.3 users.