Typo official weblog

No news good news is not a motto that should be applied to an open source project. In spite of very few commits during August, be relieved as Typo is not dead at all, as Piers and I are keeping things up when we have free time to do so.

This week-end has been pretty busy around Typo, with many new things happening. Many tickets have been closed, which means less bugs for the next version we’re working on. But the most visible change is without a doubt the new admin we’ve added to the trunk, which is better, cleaner and easier to use. We’re still working on it to give you the most enjoyable experience in terms of usability. You can already see what has been done on our Typo demonstration platform.

Typo basic settings

Typo article lists

Typo edition screen

Stay, we’re not done yet with the news.

Jordan Bracco, a French Ruby on Rails developper is porting Classicish as a new Typo template. Classicish aims at replacing Scribbish as a more appealing but still hatom compliant secondary theme. Jordan has already contributed to Typo in the past, porting Hemingway to 4.1 and Wordpress Kubrick theme to Typo. Those will soon join our official themes repository. We’re also looking for a replacement theme for Azure which looks a bit old fashion now.

And for the last quick stuff.

I’m still working on giving Typo a real mutiple users capability, and I may profit from my last week of holliday to finish this and maybe release a 4.2 version before the end of the week. We’ve been warned by some people of Typo performances issues, and we’re working on them. And last but not least, I’ve used my insomnia to set up a new Typosphere site using Typo as a CMS. We’re currently refactoring and moving every user related doc from the trac to that site. I’ll write about it very soon when I’m done with it.

Stay tuned!

• Archives.
• Amazon.
• Categories.
• Static.
• Tags.
• XML Syndication.

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.

A French translation is avaliable on my personal blog

Between 4.0 and 4.1, there were lots of changes in Typo sidebar plugins architecture. Plugins have been rewriten to become basic rails plugins one can install with script/plugin install {#PLUGIN_SOURCE_URI}. This is aimed at removing some sidebr plugins from the trunk and create an official Typo plugin repository.

Why should we do this? After all, the more functionality you have in a program, the better it is, isn’t it ?

Well, this is not always true. Here are the 4 main reasons :

• Typo is somewhat heavy for what it does, and too many plugins is part of the issue.
• People need to wait for a Typo release every time a service changes its API. This won’t happen anymore. We just fix the plugin and users can update.
• I don’t think users use both Delicious AND Magnolia. And I wonder how much people really use the xbox card stuff. If code is not used, it doesn’t need to be there.
• We want to give plugin authors some visibility. The repository and plugin directory will help this.

Here is the plugin list we’re going to keep in the trunk :

• Archives. This one will be activated in the default install.
• Amazon. It may seem odd to keep it, but it’s the best example we have of interaction between a Typo text filter and a sidebar plugin.
• Categories. Activated in the default install.
• Recent comments
• Static. A Typo developers blogroll will keep being activated by default.
• Tags.
• XML syndication. Activated in the default install.

We’re starting moving the less used plugins tonight, with Audioscrobbler and Xbox Live. The whole change will be done step by step before the next release.

We know that it may break blogs using the trunk, just like this one or my own blog, and some people will complain. Please, before doing so, remember that running off the trunk is always at your own risk.

Wow… we finally got this working? How long did that take?

If anyone’s interested in the future of Typo’s innards, you might like to swing by a brain dump I just posted to my personal blog.

Bear in mind that it’s not a roadmap, it’s more of a pencil sketch, but I’d appreciate any feedback you may have.