Typo official weblog : Category Releases, everything about Releases

Typo 5.5 Richard Avedon for Rails 2.3.8

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 17:10:00 +0200

On July 22th, 2010, Typo version 5.5 named for famous photographer Richard Avedon was released to the public. Typo 5.5 is the result of the work of the Typo community, just like you, on adding or suggesting feature, reporting and fixing bugs.

With its new admin and setup, Typo 5.4.4 was supposed to be the latest minor version running on Ruby on Rails 2.3, and we spent a few months exploring 2 new ways.

The first one was being able to upgrade to Ruby on Rails 3.0 as soon as it would be released as production ready. Despite porting our own code without problems, we promptly discovered that too many plugins needed to be ported to Rails 3.0 before we could release.

The second one was making Typo multiblog aware. Despite some interesting results, making it production ready was not the work of a single release. Our architecture is definitely mono blog oriented, and making it multi blog would force us to rewrite most of the code.

So, we decided to make one more release on Ruby on Rails 2.3, upgrading to Rails 2.3.8. This release is Typo 5.5. It comes with a few new feature, bug fixes, and internal improvements.

Highlights

Typo now runs on Ruby on Rails 2.3.8, which means it won’t run with an older Rails version.

Being a long time wanted feature, Typo now handles password protected posts.

Typo visual editor had no way to upload, browse, and use images. Thanks to htty, we now have a very nice resource browser CKEditor compliant.

As I wrote on Typo Weblog (http://res.to/aQz6), we’ve added a way to display users plugins setup into Typo admin. This is a first step on the way to a real plugin API.

Typo now comes with a new cache system, way simpler than the database based cache we used to do. Files are stored into public/cache and Typo knows how to served cached file. You may need to update your configuration, please read doc/CACHE.SETUP.README

For more information on Typo 5.5, please read the CHANGELOG file.

As usual, we want to thank the Typo community, and in particular, by reverse commit order: Daniel Schweighoefer, htty, Yannick Francois,Szymon ‘jeznet’ Jeż, Diego Elio ‘Flameeyes’ Pettenò, Kristopher Murata and Michael Reinsch.

Release of Typo 5.4.4

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 19:26:00 +0200

After releasing Typo 5.4.3, we realized something we actually knew for a while. If we wanted Typo to spread more, we had to make it prettier, easier to install and easier to use. That may sound obvious, but we were working with a quite old product, having legacy feature we didn’t need, but, for some reason, we kept release after release, trying to work around instead of just dumping them. If we wanted to make Typo better, we first had to make it smaller. Dead obvious once again.

Being the fourth of the Willy Ronis series, that version is the first going towards simplification: less useless feature, simpler, better interface, and lighter memory footprint.

Typo now comes with a new, easier to use setup that suppresses needed initial configuration. Just provide an email and a blog title, and you’re done. This setup is the first stone in refreshing Typo installation process.

Previous admin refresh was not very satisfying, and we needed to rework it. Instead of trying to play the webdesigners, which none of us is, we used Jquery UI for the graphic part, and focused on Typo interface instead. The result is, for now, quite satisfying, even though we know we still can improve it.

IPs and pattern blacklist has been completely removed. With Akismet and real time blacklist (RBL), Typo already provided 2 simple ways to fight against spam. Blacklisting IPs and patterns was a very advanced feature, which is definitely not a blogware job. If people want to do that type of filtering, they have many way to do it, using intrusion detection systems (IDS), Apache mod_security, or even packet filtering such as Linux Netfilter.

For ages, Typo provided a full iTunes metadata support for podcast publishers. We’ve completely removed them since it was useless for 99.99% of us. Typo still supports enclosure (files attached to a blog post, appearing in the RSS feed but not on the post itself) though.

Instead of SQL stored sessions, we’re back to plain old cookie sessions. Sessions table was never emptied and this was part of Typo heavy memory footprint.

We’ve also resolved a bunch of bugs as well:

The main reason why we’ve released that new version so early was because of a bug in the visual editor, losing posts content at saving time. Editors are very difficult to test since they rely on Javascript. However, we plan to add some Watir tests in a near future.

Issue 152: fix poor email grammar.

Issue 148: fixes a bug that prevents admin to edit a user without providing his password.

Issue 160: 404 error on the lightbox loading.gif and closelabel.gif.

Issue 155: after deleting an image, the file page is loaded.

Issue 143: publishing posts in the future didn’t work unless you manually unpublishes them.

If you’re still wondering whether or not you should upgrande, give our demo site a try first.

Release of Typo 5.4.3 Willy Ronis

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 19:17:00 +0100

We’re happy to release Typo 5.4.3, the third version of the Willy Ronis branch. Typo 5.4.3 fixes some nasty bugs that went through Typo 5.4.2 despite running tests before releasing. If you’ve been using Typo 5.4.2, you really should upgrade. And if you’re running any prior version, you should upgrade too.

Here’s the changelog:

Fixing a critial bug that made the page editor crash at loading.
Now sorting articles by publication date instead of creation date in the admin.
In the admin, comment forms fields are now filled with the user info. Url and email fields have been switched too to fit front end comment forms.
Extending the editor a little bit, easier to use now.
Ticket 143: Publish at post setting does not work
Fixing a bug in RDOC that raised an error when installing.

You can install Typo using the gem way or download the sources

Release of Typo 5.4.2 Willy Ronis

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 19:42:00 +0100

3 weeks after releasing Typo 5.4.1, and only 1 month after releasing Typo 5.4, we’re happy to release Typo 5.4.2, an important bugfix release. Don’t expect many feature here, even though we thought about some of them, it’s really a bugfix, and nothing else.

Typo 5.4.2 is avaliable as a source package on Rubyforge, or as a gem from Gemcutter.

Features

We’ve split the attachments between images and non images assets. Provided you’re using the simple editor, you can now use a fancy images carousel and insert your images in your text within a single click. This comes with a nice set of thumbnails.

Finally, the long awaited “forgot my password” link is here. It will send you a new password whenever you lose yours. Cool isn’t it?

We’ve also done some optimization in the way Typo sends assets and manages cache. CSS and Javascript are now sent into 1 file, making them faster to load. RSS generation has also been fastened up.

Bugs

A bug screwing up the editor when switching from simple to visual, causing users to lose their content when switching. Fixing that is a good reason to release today in itself.

A bug preventing your registration email to go when creating your account, making you lose your password unless you change it manually before logging out.

Fixed a security issue making the user passwords to be logged in clear in the application logs.

Fixed a bug causing CKEditor to crash under MS Windows due to the lack of symlinks on windows.

That’s all folks. See you in a while for our next update!

Release of Typo 5.4.1 Willy Ronis

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 01:53:00 +0100

Only 1 week after releasing Typo 5.4, we’re back with another Typo release. Since it was fixing a major security breach, we had to release Typo 5.4 was released a bit faster than we expected, and we left some unfixed bugs here and there. Typo 5.4.1 is a bugfix version and should be considered as the first stable of the 5.4 series.

Don’t expect any new feature here, it’s only about bug fixing and code refactoring. We also started to work on the first Typo user’s guide as part of our documentation effort. The 0.1 version is provided in Typo 5.4.1. We’ve also upgraded every theme at Typogarden to make them 5.4.1 compliant.

Now that we’ve made Typo 5.4 slightly more stable, we’re open for any request for enhancement. So don’t mind opening a ticket if you feel something is missing.

[#68] Atom feed has duplicated content
There was a duplicate content in atom feed because of the use of atom:summary with extended content. Since summary is not mandatory, and it should not duplicate content, we’ve decided to remove it one from the feed.

[#75] <typo:code> textfilter need change all < by < in atom feed

[#86] Migrations out of necessary sequence

[#124] > and < entities are decoded in the atom feed

[#126] Previews give an application error

[#127] Changing post’s title changes the permalink slug

[#128] Fix typogarden themes
Seems obvious isn’t it?

[#130] Theme editor textbox is too small
There was actually wet paint in our new admin. We fixed that quickly.

[#131] New Tags are created two times
The way autosave on new / saved articles worked was quite complicated and ended with strange behavior.

[#132] Categories are brocken
A typo in the category views.

[#133] Installer parameter database=sqlite3 doesn’t work
Awated parameter was database=sqlite, but since this could be confusing, we’ve made sqlite3 avaliable as well.

[#134] “Continue reading …” link appears for posts that do not have additional content.
This one was actually the tree hiding the forest of all our themes being brocken because it constant renaming of the read controller and action name.

Release of Typo 5.3 Robert Franck

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 12:50:00 +0100

We’re proud to announce Typo 5.3 “Robert Franck” release, 1 day hahead our due date. After moving to Rails 2.2, Typo next release was just supposed to be a minor version, some bug fixes, maybe some enhancement, but nothing more. Unfortunately, what we decided to do went far beyond our foolishest expectation, and Typo 5.2.1 finally became Typo 5.3, as a major release.

But let’s start with the new features first.

The main feature is without contest the new dynamic permalink scheme (with automated redirect from the old permas). You can now chose your favourite permalink format for articles only. Have a look at http://blog.typosphere.org/typo-gets-dynamic-permalink-url.html for more information.
Adding this went with lots of code ditching and refactoring. Cache system has been rewriten from almost scratch, and buggy semi static caching has been dropped.

We’ve finally added the long waited Feedburner support. Just add your feedburner ID in the admin, and let the magic happen.

Another feedback from 5.2 was to get text filter settings on a per user and a per article basis. This is now back. When upgrading from a previous Typo version, every user will be given the blog default’s text filter.

Even more SEO capabilities. Tags and categories can be removed from search engines, using noindex, removed from sitemap.xml, and Typo now has a robots.txt editor…

The old drop down menus were replaced with some fancy calendar like date pickers in article date editor.

Notifications for sidebar save and autosave are now done using growler, a fancy growl like javascript thing.

Inline editor switching à la Wordpress. Isn’t that one really cool?

Admin can now deactivate users.

More performance improvement, Typo is really fast now

Thank you to all the contributors who helped us, sending improvements and bug fixes We’re now waiting for your feedback, ideas for the next roadmap… Enjoy.

Your Typo team

Typo 5.2 Helmut Newton for Rails 2.2 released

Sun, 25 Jan 2009 16:31:00 +0100

Even best things must come to an end, and that’s just what happened to Typo 5.2 Helmut Newton for Rails 2.2 development cycle which has been released today, Sunday January the 28th, 2009, 4 months after Typo 5.1.3, the last of the Cartier Bresson series. Eugène Atget, Don Mc Cullin, Henri Cartier Bresson, and now Helmut Newton, maybe those names don’t sound familiar to you. They are just legends of the photography, from the 19th century to today, and tomorrow.

Many things have passed since last summer, which are worth being told. First, Cyril Mougel, another frenchie, has joined the crew, and done a real hard and good work on Typo port to Rails 2.2, making this release possible. Having someone working hard on your project is incredibly motivating at a point you can’t imagine. Second, we’ve moved our sources from subversion to Github. That may seem meaningless to you, but I consider it as the most important step we’ve done since I took over the project. It gave us more visibility than I was ever able to have in 2 years, showing people we were still alive, working, and doing good job. Which led the the third point. Third, we had numerous people submitting patches. We had more contributors on this version than I had in 2 years of releases. I really want to thank them all, because, by adding some improvement here and there, by fixing bugs, they made this version exist. That’s just great, you’re just great. Fourth, we’ve moved our bug tracker to Lighthouse. Redmine is too damn buggy and was permanently using 100% of my 2.4GHZ CPU and 2GB of RAM. Maybe moving to something owned by Mephisto’s creator sounds ironic to you. There is more in terms of irony. One of the guis who made this release possible, being our biggest contributor, is also the one who helped Mephisto to come back alive. Isn’t it ironic? Don’t you think?. I finally made my mind on using lighthouse because it’s a very good product, and that’s the most important.

It’s now time to talk about the release, isn’t it ?

Typo 5.2 is more than a simple port from Rails 2.0.2 to Rails 2.2, it’s a major, deep, rewrite of the application. Sometimes in a software life, you have to stop the run of feature addition, seat down, and watch the path done so far. Typo has known lots of Rails version, including a number of major versions, 1.0, 1.2, 2.0, and now 2.2, lots of additions, improvements, to a point where it became bloated, coming with some pieces worth figuring on Coding Horror. We’ve ditched lot of code, sometimes slaughtering Typo with an axe before rebuilding things, aiming at stability and performance. We’ve also removed some useless features, and managed to divide Typo’s memory footprint by 4 on some really huge blogs. Some of them, like the preview, are useful and are already on our TODO list for the next release.

We’ve also fixed a huge, very huge amount of bugs, too many to be told here, actually, from functionnal aberrations to security breaches. See the CHANGLOG for more information.

What about the features ?

There are hopefully some new features.

We’ve rebuilt the admin, almost from scratch, focusing on both efficiency and usability.
The new editor is easier to use, and is designed to display every needed information on the first part of your screen. Simple editor comes with easy to use XHTML quicktags toolbar, allowing most widely used tags as well as Typo macros. We plan to improve it in the futur.

Some global configuration items have been moved on a user basis, like the editor choice. This is the first step to more personnalization. The first one to move was editor.
Search engine optimization everywhere on your blog. You can now define keywords and description for your whole blog, as well as for categories. Specially crafted titles and description are also avaliable for your posts, making them easy to index by search engines. Last but not least, in order to avoid content theft, you can add some content at the bottom of your RSS telling where the article comes from, with proper credits and link.

A new theme catalogue, plugged to John Wang’s one, which is soon going to be our Typogarden. You can now browse and download up to date themes from your Typo install, instead of browsing the web here and there, looking for outdated templates. All templates at Typogarden have been updated to work with 5.2. That’s cool.

The long waited delete all spam button, so cool when you have thousands of them coming each day.
Our old code syntax highlighting plugin has been replaced by Coderay, which supports coloration for many more languages: Ruby, C, Delphi, HTML, RHTML (Rails), Nitro-XHTML, CSS, Diff, Java, JavaScript, JSON and YAML. This makes Typo coder friendly as well as user friendly.
Excerpts, that allow you to display on your index something completely different as on your article, which won’t appear on your RSS feed.
Our live search, which was so hype 2 years ago, showed itself to be horrible to use and inefficient. It’s now avaliable as a plugin and has been replaced with a more traditionnal and clearer search engine.

And many more.

You can now download Typo 5.2 on Rubyforge, or just install the Gem the old way. Documentation on how to install from sources or with Typo installer are up to date at Github.

Once again, thank you to every contributor who made it possible. Hope you’ll enjoy.

Release of Typo 5.1.98 for Rails 2.2

Sun, 04 Jan 2009 19:27:00 +0100

Time has passed since we moved to Github, and Cyril and I have been quite busy working on the next major version of Typo. Migrating from Rails 2.0 to 2.2 was not an easy trip, but we did it and we now can look forward with pride.

Typo 5.1.98 is the release candidate for Typo “Helmut Newton” 5.2, meaning all the work done so far since last September is almost done. So, what?

Typo 5.2 was half rewriting the existing with bugs removal and performances in sight and half adding new features. For the first part, the job was hard, but we’ve divided the memory footprint by 4 for a blog with a hundred articles and a thousand of posts, and the results are faster.

For the features part, Typo comes with :

Brand new admin, easier to use. We’ve worked on usability and simplicity, rethinking the whole blogging experience.
SEO improvements. We’ve added lots of SEO related things like the ability to choose categories meta keywords and description, remove duplicate titles, descriptions and keywords between pages, clever robots.txt…
Coderay support for more code syntax hilghlighting
Default live search is now brought to you as a separate sidebar plugin and search internals and results display have been completely rewriten for a better result.

And so many things that I can’t write them down

You can instal Typo 5.1.98 with the gem or download it at http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=555&release_id=30089

Install Typo from the gem: http://github.com/fdv/typo/wikis/install-typo-with-typo-installer

Install Typo from sources: http://github.com/fdv/typo/wikis/install-typo-from-sources

You can also install: Up to date plugins : http://github.com/fdv/ Up to date themes : http://typogarden.org

Typo 5.1.3 Cartier Bresson bugfix is out

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 18:13:00 +0200

We’ve just released Typo 5.1.3, which is the fourth release of the “Cartier-Bresson” series and released on sunday August the 31th. It is mostly a bugfix and behaviour fix version, so don’t expect many visible changes, except for people having problems with the closed bugs (thank you Captain Obvious). Typo 5.1.3 is avaliable as a gem with installer or sources.

Following some discussion here, I’ve removed the database dependencies from the Typo installer. We now assume that you have the bindings for any supported databases and won’t force you to install them anymore.

Complete CHANGELOG here:

Bug #1244: error with postgresql database on admin/content
Bug #1251: Documentation on dashboard is 404
Bug #1252: migrations alter updated_at timestamps of articles and comments, affects RSS feeds
Bug #1253: Twice redirect in admin/user#list if no admin
Bug #1254: Fix little error when you use bad id in AdminUser#edit
Bug #1255: Doesn’t autosave if no define title
Bug #1256: /article/ 301 redirect hits the default buffer which is not the expected behaviour
Bug #1257: Articles redirect doesn’t work with non-nil relative_url_root

Rev #1784: Fixed requirements and added our official Typo mascot
Rev #1786: Fixes a stupid behaviour that forces tags display name to be the same as the name in the url. IE : “web 2.0” would display on a page as web2-0 after transformation, which is stupid. Adds a migration that changes ‘.’ into ‘-’ in tag already in the database. Otherwise, it makes typo crash when accessing that tag. Allows edition of tag display name in the admin.
Rev #1787:Removes database dependencies from installer. Now we assume you already have MySQL, PgSQL or SQLLite adater installed. Deletes 2 themes from FCKEditor, about 300k lighter now. Suppress caching from development environment
Rev #1789: Fixes a stupid bug that allows a non administrative user to change his profile
Rev #1792: Removing tmcode textfilter. It now has its own life at http://svn.typosphere.org/plugins/typo_textfilter_tmcode/. Removing amazon textfilter. It now has its own life at http://svn.typosphere.org/plugins/typo_textfilter_amazon/. Removing sparkline textfilter. It now has its own life at http://svn.typosphere.org/plugins/typo_textfilter_sparkline/
Rev #1795: Fixes 2 nasty bugs with autosave. The first one broke autosave when no title was set. We now set a default title. The second one was overriding permalink with a void string when post was autosaved because the permalink field was empty after autosave. For autosave: If no title is given, Typo gives it a title like “Article Draft + post_id”. When publishing, every article-draft-something permalink is just replaced with the article title crafted permalink.
Rev #1796: Enables in admin database migration back, gets rid of the old pre 4.1 general controller, sets the CHANGELOG for 5.1.3.

Many thanks to Cyril Mougel, Matijs van Zuijlen and Frédéric Logier for submitting patches.

Typo 5.1 Cartier Bresson is out

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 20:40:00 +0200

Typo 5.1 “Cartier-Bresson” was released on monday July the 21st at around 8PM GMT and can be considered as a major Typo Version.

It contains :

Multiple users and roles

This point actually makes Typo 5.1 a major version. This release introduces 3 roles, coming along with various privileges :

Administrator, who owns full administrative and publishing power.

Publisher, who owns full publishing power on his own contents.
Contributors, who only have the right to login and edit their profile.

There is now an option to allow new users to register by themselves or not. If not, the administrator will just have to add them himself in the admin.

Improved admin

The admin has been heavily refactored to be lighter, easier to use, and offer more capabilities.

<li>You can now save your posts as drafts. Drafts now appear in a separate area of your administration to separarte them from offline posts.</li>
<li>New editing interface.</li>
<li>Tag autocompletion.</li>
<li>A new dashboard that makes daily administration easier.</li>
<li>Save as draft capabilities</li>
<li>Autosave capabilities (only with simple visual editor)</li>
<li>Revamped UI</li>
<li>Many more...</li>

New default theme

After leaving the too much long used Azure theme for some templates found on open source design websites, we realized Typo needed a new default theme. We asked O2Source a French web Agency involved in many free and open source templates, and they came up with Typographic.

We wanted something new, far from the classic white and blue fixed width wordpressish thing, something with its own personnality, that would take the whole screen and adapt many resolutions, and we’ve been quite delighted with what Hélène produced.

Come back of the gem and the installer

After fixing numerous bugs happening with Typo installed through our installer, we were able to provide the gem again, making Typo installation easier than ever.

MySQL is now the default database and SQLITE dependency has been removed.

Lots of code improvement and refactoring

The code have been improved and refactored, maing Typo lighter than ever. This is a guarantee of less errors.

New migrators

We’ve included new migrators, allowing easy import from Wordpress and Dotclear 1.2 and 2. Typepad and Textpattern may follow soon.

New site with up to date documentation

The bugtracker has been moved from Trac to Redmine, so has the documentation, which has been rewriten in many ways. Access to the doc has also been made easier by merging redmine.typosphere.org with trac.typosphere.org.

Lots of bugfixes, too much to say here.