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.

The long road to 5.0.4

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.