Typo 5.0 “Eugène Atget” finally finished after about 7 month of
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
(http://svn.typosphere.org/typo/plugins/
), and installs like any rails plugin. Expect basic archives soon.
** 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.
Frédéric and Piers