Some time after the 2.7.5 release, here it is, today, right on the Dotclear's 12th birthday, the 2.8 release which comes with a new companion, the proud Dotty[1], our new mascot[2] :

Dotty the new Dotclear mascot

Dotty

This new version introduces a new mechanism to cope with module dependencies (plugins for this release and will be declined for themes soon), also includes the Breadcrumb plugin that some of you already use, updates the CKEditor editor and the jQuery library, and fixes lots of bugs et somes minor cosmetic issues.

The heritage/extension templating system has been applied to the legacy mustek templateset, in order to simplify the developpement of themes using it ; some new criteria and filters have been added for posts and comments (and spams) lists ; the tags and widgets are now lexically sorted for latin languages, and so on… We will give you some details about all of this in further posts here.

Important : If you have already installed the breadcrumb plugin, please uninstall it before doing this update.

Another point : we will drop the PHP 5.2 support and will require, at least, the PHP 5.3 version (which is already obsolete). Note that Dotclear has been tested with PHP versions 5.3 to 5.6.

Your dashboard should 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.

Notes

[1] We due the pretty name to Noé (aka Lomalarch) and when we, french guys, have discovered what dotty means, we decided that was really suitable !

[2] This illustration has been designed by our friend and artist Alain Korkos.