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

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.

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.

Yet another typo weblog

This should have happened sooner, but we’re proud to announce the opening of the official Typo blog. This blog is dedicated to major announcements, releases, infos, tweaks and tricks abbout your favourite blogging engine.

Things have been running fast lately, and some people are working around Typo to build the next major release. Translations are on their way but we still need people to help localize Typo. We are supporting English, French and German, so if you’re ready to translate, just join us. YOU can make Typo the wonderful blogging engine it may be.