Typo official weblog

Typo 5.0.3 “Don Mc Cullin” released on February 2008 the 24th is mostly a bugfix and refactoring release, going along with some improvements, everything leading slowly but surely to 5.1.

Less bugs, more speed

Honnestly, Typo has never been so fast and so bugless as well. We’ve rewriten most of the caching engine, and it’s now running flawlessly. Our effort to speed up the code has also been pursued and we can be proud of what we’re releasing.

Brand new editor

The blog editor has been rewriten too, to be more functionnal and user friendly. We’ve also switched the rich text editor from TinyMCE to FCKEditor for 4 important features :

• Fullscreen edition (kicks ass baby)
• Spellchecking
• Safari compatibility
• Impressive localization

More localisation

We’re continuing the localization effort to port Typo in your language. Default themes has been localized, and we now provide up to 8 languages :

• English (default)
• French
• German
• Italian
• Japanese
• Mexican Spanish
• Polish
• Romanian

Many thanks to all the translators. Currently, only French translation is really complete.

No gem?

We won’t provide you the habitual gem we used to. Rails app installer – formerly known as Typo installer – is brocken with Rails 2.0.2 and Typo instances installed this way just don’t work.

We hope you’ll enjoy Typo 5.0.3 as much as we enjoyed bringing it to you.

Download Typo 5.0.3 at Rubyforge

After releasing Typo 5.0, we’ve discovered a critical bug making Typo deleting itself when clearing the cache. This is now fixed, and we’re happy to announce the release of Typo 5.0.2. Typo 5.0.2 is mostly a bugfix release with some admin improvements. It also fixes a Rails bug on update_all making Typo unable to save sidebars config under pgsl and sqlite.

You can install or update the gem as well as download the archives from Rubyforge.

Following Typo 5.0 release, we’ve released early this morning a 5.0.1 bugfix release that fixes 2 majors bugs we’ve discovered last night.

The first one deals with the cache wipe being too agressive and sometimes wiping the whole blog directory. The second one with users listing crashing because users profile were not populated properly.

Typo 5.0 “Eugène Atget” finally finished after about 7 month of slacking making. This in an important release, stuffed with great new features, loads of fixes and an incredible amount of polish. This may sound like DHH introduction to Rails 2.0, and it does, because Typo 5.0 now runs with Ruby on Rails 2.0 and won’t run with anything else. That’s the reason of the major version change.

Before jumping into the breakdown of features, I’d just like to extend my deep gratitude towards everyone who helped make this release possible. From Piers who made this possible to the (hundreds of) contributors who got a patch applied to everyone on #typo who kept the spirit alive. You can all be mighty proud of the role you played. Cheers!

Why Eugène Atget ?

I’ve wanted to give our releases a name for a while now, but we needed to find a path we should follow from along the versions. Piers and I are both photographers, and most of the visible work on Typo has been done in Paris, which is a town Atget spent his life to picture. That’s the reason why his name came first when we had to choose one.

Sidebars removal

As we announced earlier, we’ve decided to move most of the sidebars plugins out of the trunk. There are many reasons why we think that, out of some basic functionnalities, sidebars should be third party softwares apart performances issues. We’ll continue to maintain these plugins anyway.

If you’re using one of the following plugins, be sure to install it, or your blog may explode with lots of nasty error messages.

• AIM presence
• Audioscrobbler
• Backpack
• Delicious
• Flickr
• 43 things
• 43 places
• Magnolia
• Recent comments
• Tada
• Upcoming
• Xbox

Plugins are now in our plugins repository, and installs like any rails plugin. Expect basic archives soon.

/path/to/typo$ ./script/plugins install http://svn.typosphere.org/typo/plugins/some-plugin

Code refactoring

The immerged part of the iceberg, but not the least one, most of the existing code has been rewriten. Typo was started when Rails was young, very young, and lots of things were added to the framework after we had to write them.

The result is impressive in terms of performances, and bug fixing as well.

Admin refactoring

Admin has been entirely revamped, twice, between 4.1 and 5.0, and we’re quite proud of how it works now.

The existing admin was the result of a scaffold during Typo early days, and even though some improvements has been done, many things were not as user friendly as they should have been. New admin now aims at giving a clear view on the information, and eased access to the most daily used functionnalities in your blogging life.

Simple and avanced admin

We now deliver the admin in 2 flavors, simple and advanced, because everybody doesn’t have the same need when it goes to blogging. We have also splitted the settings in 2 places, to separate basic and advanced settings.

More localisation

4.1 introduced Typo internationalization, but no one noticed it as it was hidden in the deep of environment.rb. You can now choose your prefered language from the settings. We hope the community to support the translation effort.

Comments moderation

Another hidden feature of 4.1 I think it’s important to mention here is default comment moderation. This is a stone in the build of a better discussion management.

Theme editor

A theme editor was a missing piece in Typo admin, and it’s now filled with a basic, but usable editor. For now it allows you to edit your layout and stylesheet. Views editing will come later.

Dashboard

We’ve also added a dashboard we plan to improve with time. It aims at giving you a view on the latests activity on your Typo blog.

Solving SEO issues

For long time now, Typo has been a pain to search engine optimisation, mostly because most pages, out of single posts, had the same meta title and description. That thing we never noticed before had nasty effects when melted with Google duplicate content algorythm, which even led some blogs to be banned from index. Expect some more improvement in a near future.

New themes

Azure which has been Typo default theme for a while now has been removed from the core and won’t be supported anymore. Standard issue is now our new default theme, and we have introduced Dirtylicious as well. Scribbish has been kept for backward compatibility as many blogs are using it, starting Piers.

Both themes were built above Scribbish markup and are thus hatom compliant.

Typo themes garden

I know this should be a community matter, and it may not have its place on a release note, however I think it’s important enough to mention it. Every theme listed on dev 411 Typo theme viewer has been updated to support Typo 5.0, and updated themes are already avaliable.

We do think having a usable themes and plugins park is important, and too many themes were only Typo 2.6.0 compatible. That’s the reason why we did the themes migration while finishing Typo 5.0, and we plan to port even more non Typo themes in a near futur.

And now ?

Now, we’re going to have some rest while you’re migrating and giving your first feedbacks. We already have a new roadmap to Typo 5.1, which contains

• Atom Publishing Protocol.
• Admin feeds.
• Working to make the admin interface talk APP.
• Themes with helpers.
• Customizing the Feedback state machine so different spam protection engines can use different states.
• Add users grants
• OpenID consumption.
• If we really have to, multiblogging…
• Even more admin improvement.
• Doc, doc and even more doc.
• Plugin manager tool.

We hope you’ll enjoy this release as much as we enjoyed making it.

We’re delighted to announce the release of Typo 4.1.1 as part of our ongoing program of shortening Typo’s iterations. Most of the changes this month are bugfixes, but there are a few new features:

Article previews

As anyone who has run Typo with a hosting service can testify, our AJAX based live preview, though lovely, can be a bit of a CPU hog. So, you can now choose between the old preview behaviour, no previews at all, or you can use the TinyMCE visual editor. Which is nice.

Statistics

We’ve added the Sitealizer statistics plugin. This is by way of an experiment, we’d appreciate feedback on how useful you find it. We expect to add configurability (if only at the level of whether or not to gather statistics) in a future release.

German and Romanian translations

The Typo internationalization effort continues apace. Thanks to Alex Deva for the Romanian and Frithjof Eckhardt for the German.

Easier rendering of multiple sidebars

You can now do things like:

  <%= render_sidebars \
    AmazonSidebar.new \
      :title => 'Citations', 
      :associate_id => 'justasummary-20', \
      :maxlinks => 10 %>

In your layouts. The hope is that this will make 3 column layouts easier to design. Check out my blog for an example of this in use.

Sidebar warnings

If you’ve been following the trunk, you’ll have noticed a bit of a dance as sidebars got moved in and out of the main repository. The policy now is that some sidebars are now deprecated and you should get a warning to this effect the first time you log in to your admin pages. They will be going away in Typo 4.2 whenever that happens.

The first step will probably be to move the sidebars out of the trunk and then include them back using the magic of svn:externals. Hopefully we’ll find a good way of flagging up which sidebars are deprecated so you’ll have some route for easily reincluding the ones you use before the ‘big bang’.

Hopefully we’ll find a way of doing it automagically and seamlessly. Watch this space.