Dotclear

As stated in our Dotclear 2.5 Release Candidate announcement, this one mainly sees the thightening of bolts and screws everywhere, and dozens of tickets (say : a lot) closed (don't worry, we kept a few, thus there's still work to be done), some of them long overdue, whatever the reasons.

Among the differences beetween our RC and this release: a couple of bugs have been fixed, and more importantly, we had to fix two security issue comming from the multiple files upload system we're using. We are now planning to replace this (Flash) component by a new one, in Ajax. Expect a 2.5.1 one of these days. :)

The new version is, as usual, available there : http://download.dotclear.org/latest.zip

Let me use my very first annoucement as the new skipper to talk you about a few things I would like to see being worked on in the near future^[1]:

• The revamping of the back-office should benefit from the work currently under progress on the sexy branch, which now includes Twig, in order to make administration of your blog even more friendly and powerful.
• Still in the back-office, it would be nice to replace the "wysiwyg" editor by something like CKEditor. It is a big job, and we've had so far some unsuccessful trials... well, it is a bit of a holy grail but it would be cool to have that.
• Make some room for Dotclear 2 by moving Dotclear 1 closer to the attic on Dotclear and DotAddict websites, and harmonise a bit their designs.
• Progressively abandon PHP versions lower than 5.2^[2]

The main idea is to streamline Dotclear to the essential stuff and to externalise everything else in plugins (this is what the sexy branch is all about), to use whatever libraries others do better than we do (a template system, a wysiwyg editor, ...) in order to ease future developments. That being said, such deep changes might have a cost in terms of compatibility, but those questions will be dealt with at the right place, in the right time, we're not there yet.

If ever you're reading this English version of the announcement, it surely means you're a bit too far away for that, but if you have the occasion, feel free to follow the French blog, where we plan to give details about a meet-up in Paris somewhere next month.