2013 Nov 22
By Franck on Friday 22 November 2013, 13:07
You can now download Dotclear 2.6.1. This maintenance release includes several fixes for bugs discovered since the 2.6 release and some cosmetic enhancements.
Your dashboard should also offer you to upgrade your installation today or tomorrow (depending on your settings). There's also a patch for the developers who prefer this method.
2013 Nov 13
By Franck on Wednesday 13 November 2013, 12:14
Stop talking, play time now[1]!
Some information about this version:
2013 Nov 11
By Krazy Kitty on Monday 11 November 2013, 13:55
And here's our last post before the one that will announce that Dotclear 2.6 has been released and will offer it on all dashboards. Let's talk about rearranging pages, personalization, and how to cook green peas.
The media manager now allows you to delete multiple selected media items at once. Another new feature: you can now choose the number of media items displayed per page. What with the new visual identity of Dotclear, there are also brand new icons. Finally, repertories and files are now easier to distinguish from one another.
In the page to create or edit entries/pages, the right menu has been organized more clearly, thanks to the logical grouping of attributes under three classes: Status, Filing and Options, together with their folding/unfolding: the folded/unfolded state is persistent, meaning that it is conserved, for each user, in the last chosen state.
Many of you had complained about not being able to see the comment(s) you were replying to while typing your response. We have heard you, and you can now add comments to an entry on the very same page on which you can read all other comments.
The widgets management page has also been updated, both in terms of graphics and of keyboard use.
For the list of categories, and years after it disappeared (back in ancient times, when we introduced sub-categories), the drag'n drop is making its comeback. One of our oldest tickets is now closed \o/
Incidentally, the Categories page is one of those that best illustrated that just because you can doesn't mean you should. We boldly started implementing moving entries from multiple categories at once, deleting multiple entries at once, and who knows what else, and once all that was in place, we realized that, (1) nobody needed all those things, except on the first Thursday of every other leap year, and (2) the page had become entirely incomprehensible and way too complicated to use.
The Categories page offers a great segue (what a fantastic coincidence!) towards our next topic: personalization. The first steps towards personalization had been made in Dotclear 2.4 when we introduced favorites. We're continuing down that path. The My preferences page allows you to deactivate drag'n drop across the whole console—without deactivating all javascript features, or to deactivate multiple file upload in the media manager. There you'll also find knobs to configure the dashboard, such as your choice of favorites and modules.
We will carry on this work with time and versions. For instance, we are planning to make it possible to personalize the choice of columns and the sorting order of lists of entries or comments; to rearrange the items of the dashboard at will; to create a temporary trash to help absent-minded users; in short, we want to implement all what can help make you feel entirely at home :-)
We will let you discover the rest by yourselves. We sincerely hope you'll have as much fun using Dotclear 2.6 as we had polishing it.
For the next version, we'll give in to the public side of Dotclear. But that is another story that we will tell at a later date...
2013 Nov 7
By Krazy Kitty on Thursday 7 November 2013, 18:17
Let's continue our overview of the new features of version 2.6, which should be officially coming out very soon. Today, let's take a look at the pages that have been reorganized in depth.
Reminders
Maintenance tasks, which include operations that are sometimes made necessary by the hazards of computer systems (power outages, network disconnections...), now come with regular reminders. Not unlike your car mechanic calling you one week before each oil change to remind you to make an appointment with him!
You'll have the possibility to define a general frequency for all reminders, or set a specific one for each taks (or even get rid of reminders altogether if you don't want them).
Backups
Backups, which used to be located together with imports, have been moved towards the maintenance page. This is one of the consequences of the ergonomics study we did... some time ago. The various backups (blogs, medias, and so forth) also benefit from the reminders described above.
Because one must call a cat a cat, we've decided to stop using words such as "extensions" and "modules" to describe these little pieces of software that can be plugged on top of Dotclear to bring it additional functionalities and call them... plugins. Even in French. Purists may disagree, but we think that today everyone knows what this term means.
We've now completely integrated the (former) daInstaller plugin, which made it possible to automatically install and update plugins from the DotAddict directory. All actions related to plugin management are therefore now in a single place, which is more convenient for blog administrators.
The "Blog appearance" page has also been completely upgraded, and we have integrated, as for plugins, the "Themes" part of the former daInstaller plugin. It is now therefore possible to activate, configure, install and update themes from DotAddict or a (local or remote) archive on a single page.
Regarding themes, we are currently working real hard to integrate theme submission to the DotAddict console. This should make the life of themes developers much easier.
That's it for today. We'll soon talk about all the other pages, which have changed enough although not in as much depth to make it interesting to present them.