Seagull 0.4.0 Released

Finally a stable 0.4 release! Highlights in this iteration:

• the last of the FC bugs squashed
• config ini files now unreadable even if your var directory is web-viewable (Georg Gell)
• Seagull now works for CGI installations of PHP
• configurable auto-login (Rares Benea)
• module generator improvements
• German and French translations completely up to date

This basically marks the end of all the front controller work which has been extensive, and now makes way for some of the other higher priority stuff: separating out a core Seagull, making modules installable the PEAR package mgr's 1.4 release, improving i18n support and hopefully moving translations to the DB to allow for truly multilingual support.

I've begun work on a release script in etc which should make more frequent releases a possibility. I'd also like to start addressing upgrade scripts to make the product more user-friendly, my company's product Max Media Mgr (phpAdsNew) has some good code we could look at here for ideas.

I've also just added badBoyWebTests.bb to the etc directory, this is a deceptively small script (windows only) that mimicks UAT testing by 'clicking' on every link in the app and testing that no errors are present. 'No errors' means no php notices/warning and no PEAR errors, both of which Seagull intercepts and wraps. The assertions are done by running a regex on the html sgl outputs.

This is a great help in ensuring that the hundreds of links in the app still work after each vigourous round of mods/patches/improvements we put in. It is no replacement for unit tests which we are still largely lacking, but should help trap some of the nastier errors.

I strongly recommends anyone interesting in reducing their test cycle to try this mostly free software out:

http://www.badboy.com.au/

I run it in vmware - while you're at it, please feel free to add to the sgl tests, there only partially complete at the moment.

Thanks as always to the mountains of patches, suggestions and feedback that's come in, keep up the great work!

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