Typo official weblog

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.

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.

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.

Once again, we’re late on our planned schedule since Typo 5.0.4 should have been released 5 days ago. Piers and I have been pretty busy lately, and I’m now waiting for some external material in order to release a 5.0.4b1.

Since I was moving Typosphere to a new server, a nice 2.33ghz dual core with 4gb RAM running an Apache and mod_rails on FreeBSD, I also wanted to stop using trac as a bug tracker. In spite of being used by many open source projects around, trac is just a bloatware. I was really fed up with cleaning the session table twice a month just to avoid having it consuming 99% of my server resources. There was another reason why I wanted to ditch Trac: it’s Python, and Redmine is Ruby. As far as I know, every URL but the RSS has been redirected properly.

Typogarden is going to change too and become a theme repository based on a Typo install. I will certainly call for gardeners someday to maintain the thing once I’ve installed the new Typogarden in its new home.

More to come soon, stay tuned.

Guess what? We’re not dead, and we’re even working on Typo next minor release which should be 5.0.4.

Last week-end, we finally added tag administration, after integrating Cyril Mougel’s tag autocompletion. You can now edit tags, delete them, and you will soon be able to merge them.

We’ve also fixed some of the remaining bugs, leaving Typo with only 3 open bugs now. We now there’s still much to do, and we’ll run extensive tests to find remaining naughty bugs.

There is still lot to do and guess what ? You can even help us submitting patches (and tests, never forget tests).

Doc

We know how much our doc is outdated, and the next release will change this for 3 major docs:

• Typo user guide.
• Typo install guide.
• Typo theming guide.

Converters

If we had to find a single common point between our doc and our doc, it would certainly be not being up to date at all. Wordpress and Movable Type have evolved as we were evolving too, and converters were left aside since 4.0.

We now need to update these converters to reflect last Wordpress and Movale Type version, and allow people to switch from them to Typo. A migration doc should also be written.

Multiple users

Multiple users has been on our TODO list for a long time now, and is still slowly going its way. It will be made in 2 times : multiple users with profiles and grants, then per users settings for the whole blog.

More admin tweaking

I’m still unsatisfied with the current admin and plan to improve it a bit. I’ve asked a designer frend of mine to help make the current one cleaner while keeping it the way it is, which mostly implies CSS tweaks.

I also want the admin to be the simplest possible, following the Habari project path I really felt in love with in terms of usability.

And last but not least, more dashboard information.

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 “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 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.

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.