Typo official weblog

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.x temporarily retired for critical issue

There’s a critical bug in Typo 5.0 that has forced us to retire Typo 5.0.x from Rubyforge until we find out what really happens.

It seems that, under certain still undefined cicumstances, when runnin SQLite, which is at the same time our default installer and Ruby on Rails 2.0 database, Typo just erases itself with its parent directory.

We’re actively working on this issue, even on new year’s eve, trying first to find out if it’s a Typo or Rails VS SQLite matter. Be sure we’ll release a 5.0.2 version fixing everything as soon as possible. We apologise for the inconvenience.

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.

We're late ? So what !

We’re late at releasing Typo 5. By 4 days as far as I know. Don’t think we’ve just been slacking, that’s false. Truth is out there used to say agent Mulder, and I do agree with him tonight. I’ve always been a Danna Scully fan. So what ?

We had to choose either to release an unready buggy Typo 5.0 just to keep the delays, or let you wait a few more days and give you a cool nice Xmas present. We choosed the latter without hesitation. So what happened ?

I’ve spent my sunday evening and my monday morning porting the 117 themes from dev411 Typo themes viewer to the new version. Most of them were 2.6.0 compliant and they all needed some tweaks. That’s done, and they will be online in time for the release. I’m now porting a bunch of 63 wordpress themes. Feel free to help, it’s easy, all you need is some HTML knowledge, a text editor, Firefox and Firebug.

We’ve added 2 new themes as default, replacing the old Azure with Standard Issue, and adding Dirtylicious as a secondary theme. Scribbish stays in the default themes for backward compatibility. There are too many blogs using it as a default theme to just remove it that way. We’ve also added a theme editor, useful for people who don’t want to mess with FTP to edit their templates.

We’ve been bumping into some huge issues with Rails 2.0 caching and Piers is working on it to get everything fine before we release. There are still a few minor bugs left now, and they will be fixed as well before release time.

That’s all folks, stay tuned.

Poll : a new default theme for Typo 5.0

After last week Rails 2.0, Typo 5.0 is soon to be released. As this is a major change, we have decided to change the default theme and to let you decide what you want as a default theme.

Standard issue

View Standard Issue in action.

Dirtylicious

View Dirtylicious in action.

Abstract

View Abstract in action.

Rambling Soul

View Rambling Soul in action.

Nautica

View Nautica in action.

New admin for Typo

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!

Typo plugins: what's next?

If you’re following the trunk, you may have noticed that many plugins have moved from the core to svn:externals. Source have been relocated into the new Typo official plugins repository. As I said a few weeks ago in The futur of Typo sidebar plugins, we’re only going to keep a few plugins in the core. The complete list is:

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

And now, what’s next? As we now have our official plugins repository, I’ve been thinking about giving Typo a plugin manager. The manager will get a XML file with the official plugins list. Users will install plugins in 1 click.

How will it work? Very simply. The plugin manager will just run script/plugin install myplugin, and here you are.

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.

The future of Typo sidebar plugins

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.