Release of Typo 6.0 Irving Penn for Ruby on Rails 3.0

Almost 7 months after Typo 5.5, we’re proud to announce the release of Typo 6.0 Irving Penn for Ruby on Rails 3.0. This major version of our application is mostly about upgrading to Rails 3, but it also provides a bunch of new feature.

You can download Typo 6.0 as a zip archive or as a tarball.

Upgrade to Rails 3

Upgrading to Rails 3 was a long and painful path. Typo was born when Rails was very very young, and the framework took some path while we chose another path to fix its lacks. Typo 6.0 is only a first compatible version, and we’re still planning to ditch the remaining piece of antiquities we still carry.

Bye bye Typo installer

Typo installer has been around for 6 years now, and what seemed a really great idea at Rails 1.0 era rapidely became an unmaintained burden. There are now lots of easy ways to deploy a Rails application, while Bundler handles all the dependencies issues. Installing Typo is now easy as, let’s say, installing any other mainstream blogging engine: fill in your database credential, run bundle and you’re done.

Finally a real plugin API

Thomas Lecavelier did a wonderful job working on what’s going to be the real plugin API we’ve dreamt of for a while now. He started with making avatar provider pluggable and knows how much he still has to be done. Good news as he’s the latest addition to Typo core team. We’re really glad to welcome him onboard.

Theme changes

Theme structure has been change to be compliant with Rails views structure. If you’re using a custom template, you’ll have to move the layouts folder into the views one. Nothing you can’t handle.

Admin, SEO and usability

We’ve made some SEO improvement, adding a bit more options, and making tags URL really SEO friendly. Admin usability has been improved to, but we’ve many other things we want to make better as well.

That’s all for now. We’ll be glad to hear your feedback if you’ve got some. For now, we’re going to celebrate this release by working on the next one.

Release of Typo 5.4.4

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

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

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

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.

Release of Typo 5.4 Willy Ronis

After 9 months of hard work, we’re proud to announce the official release of Typo 5.4 Willy Ronis, the most advanced and user friendly blogging platform on Rails. Despite having a minor version number, Typo 5.4 is a major release, coming with a lot of new features and some bugfixes as Willy Ronis was a great photographer who died this year at the age of 99. Since Typo 5.4 fixes some major security issues, you should really think about upgrading.

Typo 5.4 is also a major release because we had many contributors from all over the world sending new features and fixes along this year. After contributing for a while, Matijs van Zuijlen (http://www.matijs.net/) finally joined the core team in late February and did a great job on this release. We would also like to thank, in alphabetical order: Diego Elio ‘Flameeyes’ Pettenò, Edward Middleton, Erik Ostrom, Hans de Graaff, Jakob Skov-Pedersen, Kurt Werle, Michael Reinsch, Mike Mondragon, Wei Jen Lu, Yuka Ouka, jzellman, and mpagalan.

News from a summerish Typo

This has been 4 months since Typo 5.3 release, and this calm month of July may be the perfect occasion to look at what happeded on the Typo planet.

Cyril and I have been quite busy lately. He quited his job and started a new adventure in a new company. Cyril also moved to Paris, which is great as we’re now able to gather and work together, when we have time. He’s also been dedicating more time to Oupsnow, a bug tracker he’s writing in Merb. I’ve also been quite busy lately, starting lots of Rails projects around Twitter, having less and less free time left by my daily job, and starting a number 3, delivery due next December, so I’ll have to move soon. And that takes a lot of time too.

Hopefully, we had many contributors who came to help us while we were too busy to care about Typo. Erik Ostrom updated Wordpress converter, Michael Reinsch fixed some bugs and did some nice refactoring, and Wei Jen Lu did a fantastic job on translating Typo to Chinese. Wel also had a couple of people submitting patches fixing bugs on Lighthouse. May they be all thanked for the great job they did.

Our main concern lately has been reducing Typo memory footprint. We’ve already dropped lots of useless code and fixed a few bugs, even though there’s still lots of work to be done. By useless code, we mean 3 things:

1. Removing dead code that is no longer called anywhere. And there was plenty of it, trust me. Typo is an old house, inhabited by lots of different people, and every house needs a bit of cleaning sometimes.

2. Code that’s trying to reinvent the wheel when the same functionnality has been integrated into Rails for a while now. I know we still carry a lot of this one, and we still have a lot of refactoring to do.

3. Code that should simply not be in a blogging engine core and can be moved elsewhere as a plugin. Deciding what to keep and what to drop is not always easy, but that’s the usual step in the life of a software.

I’m not really sure yet, but I don’t think Typo next release will carry any major feature. Instead, we’re focusing on performance improvement, bug fixes and usability improvement here and there. I guess it’s a needed step to take before restarting on a fresh, clean ground.

Release of Typo 5.3 Robert Franck

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

Features frozen for Typo 5.3

Yesterday, Cyril and I have decided to freeze the long list of features of the soon to come Typo 5.3, pushing password protected posts and spam filter daily digest to a later release.

many bugs have been fixed lately, and, unless we discover remaining bugs, we consider the current version as usable in production, which means a first release candidate may come quickly. Stay tuned !

Typo 5.2 Helmut Newton for Rails 2.2 released

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.