CMSB v3.81 Beta (PHP 8.5 Support & More)

6 posts by 3 authors in: Forums > CMS Builder
Last Post: about an hour ago   (RSS)

By Dave - Thursday at 9:00pm

Hi everyone,

We've just released v3.81 beta! We're already running this version (and PHP 8.5!) on our site.

In addition to PHP 8.5 support, this includes several convenience and developer-experience updates:

  • Admin > Backup & Restore
    • Website Backup now shows an expandable list of excluded files/folders by category (and instructions on excluding folders)
    • Database Restore dropdown now shows relative dates (e.g., "just now", "5 min ago", "yesterday")
    • Website backups now allow up to 10 minutes for large sites (for multi-gigabyte backups)
    • Backup and restore operations are now logged to the audit log
    • Improved cross-platform reliability for database backups and restores (e.g., between newer and older versions of MariaDB and MySQL, etc)
  •  Admin > General > Server Info > Recent Changes:
    • Multiple Server IP changes now show in an expandable list of unique IPs with last seen dates (fixes issue where load-balanced servers had a recurring list of IP changes)
  • General code modernization and cleanup

Note: We still have a queue of pending user feature requests.  We're releasing what we have now so you can start using it.  Feel free to remind us what you'd like to see next. 

The full changelog for this release is as follows:

*** December 4, 2025 - Version 3.81 (PHP 8.5 Support)

SERVER REQUIREMENTS (Since Jun 2025): PHP 8.1+ and MySQL 5.7+ (or MariaDB 10.2+)

PHP 8.5 SUPPORT
- Comprehensive compatibility updates across core files and plugins to support PHP 8.5
- Added polyfills so new PHP 8.5 functions can be used on any PHP version

MINOR CHANGES
- Admin > Backup & Restore:
       - Website Backup now shows expandable list of excluded files/folders by category (and instructions on excluding folders)
       - Database Restore dropdown now shows relative dates (e.g., "just now", "5 min ago", "yesterday")
       - Website backups now allow up to 10 minutes for large sites (for multi-gigabyte backups)
       - Backup and restore operations are now logged to the audit log
- Improved cross-platform reliability for database backups and restores
- Admin > General > Server Info > Recent Changes: Multiple Server IP changes now show in an expandable list of unique IPs with last seen dates
- Libraries: Updated HTMLPurifier from 4.12 to 4.19.0 (Released 2025-10-17) - Moved to Composer /vendor/ directory
- Programmers: htmlPurify() updated with improved defaults, and better content preservation for invalid html
- Old File Cleanup: Automatically remove old CMS library files from previous versions during upgrade to reduce disk usage and prevent conflicts

BUG FIXES
- Plugins: Fixed issue where plugins were disabled after upgrading until you accessed the CMS admin interface again
- Cron: Fixed issue where duplicate "Aborting, task still running" log entries could be created for tasks running longer than 60 seconds
- Misc code and other minor improvements

You can download the latest beta here: https://www.interactivetools.com/download/

Please post (or email) any feedback, questions, concerns, or bugs you find.   Your help with beta testing allows us to release new features even faster.

Thanks. We look forward to your feedback! :)

Dave Edis - Senior Developer
interactivetools.com

By Dave - Thursday at 9:01pm

If you happen to be running PHP 8.5 on your server already, please post any warnings or errors you encounter.  Thanks!

Dave Edis - Senior Developer
interactivetools.com

By moh3 - 7 hours ago

hello, thank you for your efforts, can we please get a detailed documentation on how to build a plugin for backend and front end code, example list of functions and hooks we can use to extend the backend with migration taken in consideration

By Dave - 2 hours ago

Hi moh3, 

hello, thank you for your efforts, can we please get a detailed documentation on how to build a plugin for backend and front end code, example list of functions and hooks we can use to extend the backend with migration taken in consideration

Sure,  you can find an example plugin file here: /cmsb/plugins/_example_plugin.php

There's a list of plugin hooks here: CMS Setup > Plugins > Developer's Plugin Hook List (scroll to the bottom of the plugins page)

And if you enable: Admin > Admin Debug Mode, and view source on any page, it will tell you at the bottom the list of plugin hooks available on that page.

Hope that helps!  Let me know if you have any other questions.

Dave Edis - Senior Developer
interactivetools.com

By KennyH - about an hour ago - edited: about an hour ago

I have a lot of good things to say and will get to that after some more testing, but I did want to point this out early in case it is a problem. I unzipped the new BETA 2 files over the the BETA 1 files and got this error:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected token "<<", expecting "]" in /home/xxxxxx/cmsb/data/cache.data.php on line 11 Parse error: syntax error, unexpected token "<<", expecting "]" in /home/xxxxxx/cmsb/data/cache.data.php on line 11

I deleted cache.data.php and it opened up the program without any issues.

I did the same for another website and it didn't give me any errors at all, so it may not be an issue at all.