Releases

Release of Typo 5.1.98 for Rails 2.2

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/?groupid=555&releaseid=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

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 updatedat 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 relativeurl_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/typotextfiltertmcode/. Removing amazon textfilter. It now has its own life at http://svn.typosphere.org/plugins/typotextfilteramazon/. Removing sparkline textfilter. It now has its own life at http://svn.typosphere.org/plugins/typotextfiltersparkline/
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

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.

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

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.

Typo 5.0.4 beta 2 is out, fixes a critical security vulnerability

Michael Morin has discovered a critical vulnerability in Typo prior to release 5.0.4.98.1 which may lead to arbitrary code execution and privilege escalation on Typo blogs. Even though 5.0.4b1 was released yesterday, this vulnerability is critical enough to make us release 5.0.4b2 today.

This release also fixes a bunch of bugs such as:

• Missing dependencies in the installer.
• articles.rss and articles.atom bad naming.
• Bad unordered lists display on the new default theme.

You can download this new version on Rubyforge, or just install the gem.

Typo 5.0.4 beta is out

After 4 months of hard work, doubts and refactoring, Typo 5.0.3.98, aka Typo 5.0.4 beta is finaly out. As for any beta release, it was mostly done for testing purpose, and to let our happy translators do their job. So please, fill in bug reports when you find one, and don’t be shy, submit a patch along :-). All the features are not frozen yet, even though any addition will be minor.

So, what’s new there? Many things.

Multi roles, we did it

Multiple roles are finally here, thanks to the work of Davide D’Agostino and Cyril Mougel. You can now choose between Administrator and Publisher. Contributor may come soon, but this special profile needs some more development.

A new default theme

Typographic is a simple, clean theme made by Hélène from O2sources, a French company involved in free and open source projects. Typographic relies on lightness, simplicity, warm colors, and adapts your screen… up to a certain extent.

Dirtylicious and Standard issue have been removed and are now hosted at Typogarden. If you want to keep using them, you’ll have to download them first.

A brand new admin

The admin has been rethought, lot of code has disappeared, and it’s now cleaner, lighter and easier to use.

We now have tag management, which we plan to improve with things like tag merging, or detection of too close tags. We also offer tag autocomplete in the publishing interface.

The publishing interface has been rebuilt to be easier and clearer to use. We’ve dropped the live preview powered editor since it was really killing the server by sending continuous AJAX requests.

The come back of the gem

The gem is back and working, which means Typo has never been easier to install. Just run

  # gem install typo
  # typo install /some/path

And you’re done. Typo is now running on a random port using sqlite database.

However, we don’t recommend this configuration for production use. Even though there are many ways to run a Rails application, we have chosen and support Passenger aka mod_rails with MySQL as the easiest and most reliable way to run Typo.

Typo 5.0.3 Don Mc Cullin release

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

Typo 5.0.2 bugfix release

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.

Typo 5.0.1 bug fix release

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 "Eugene Atget" is out

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.

It's here, it's new, it's improved, it's...

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:

h4. 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.

h4. 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.

h4. German and Romanian translations

The Typo internationalization effort continues apace. Thanks to “Alex Deva”:http://alxx.dv8.ro/ for the Romanian and “Frithjof Eckhardt”:http://www.rubykids.de/ for the German.

h4. 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”:http://www.bofh.org.uk/ for an example of this in use.

h4. 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.