Dotclear

A bugfix release in order to allow again normal user (not admin) to use the Dotclear Wiki editor.

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.

Woohoo!

TL;DR — There's a new WYSIWYG editor, and HTML5 all over. Update and enjoy :-)

It's now been thirteen months^[1] since 2.6 came out. It's now about time (at last!) to move on. Dotclear 2.7, being released today, is less spectacular than the previous version, with its updated administration graphics chart, but it brings forth significative changes for users (on the admin side) and its rendering (on the public side).

On the admin side

We have integrated (she typed, as if she had done any of that) a new editor, dcCKEditor, which is built, as you can imagine, on the CKEditor library. You will therefore find a more advanced editor (presentation-wise). The old editor is still here, and is now called dcLegacyEditor.

As several editors (two with this version) can be installed, you'll have to pick your favorite for each of the proposed syntaxes (wiki and XHTML, so far). Go and have a look at the "My Options" tab under "My Preferences", and check the "Edition" frame. You'll probably need to clear your browser's cache as well.

It's not all on the administration side, as we have also started to integrate, together with the switch to HTML5, the main ARIA Roles. (If, like the author of that note, you are wondering what ARIA Roles are, you can read this, which is the first link she decided to click on that topic. If you don't want to read, know that the first of those As stands for Accessibility and that accessibility is A Good Thing.)

On the rendering side

Well let's talk about HTML5 some more. We've implemented two sets of templates, upon which the basic themes are built. The first one is called "mustek" and corresponds to Dotclear's old default theme (that good old Blowup). The second one is called "currywurst" and corresponds to Dotclear's shiny new default theme, named... you guessed it, Berlin.

Both sets of templates and themes are now in HTML5 and include ARIA Roles. For those of you who use Dotclear's wiki syntax, do note that the XHTML code it produces is now HTML5 compatible.

You'll note that it is not any longer mandatory to copy the default theme repository when using an external repertory. You can also choose, in the blog's parameters, the jQuery version that must be loaded on the public side (both 1.4.2 and 1.11.1 are shipped with this version of Dotclear).

We certainly advise you, after having upgraded, to clear the templates' cache (see the Maintenance plugin), to ensure that your blog's rendering is up to date.

Moreover, new options have been added to let you tune your blog's appearance more finely. You can for instance deactivate widgets without needing to delete them. You can also define a number of notes to be displayed specific to the home page (and which can be different from that of the following pages).

Back to HTML5, now that audio files and videos will, as much as possible, be integrated to your notes with HTML5 tags (<audio> and <video>), degraded to Flash when supported.

Miscellaneous

A couple more things about this version:

• Drag'n'drop on the admin side on touch screens is now possible;
• You can activate protection against clickjacking in the blog settings;
• Comments preview is now optional (see Blog settings);
• Hidden folders (with a name starting with a dot) are now hidden in the media manager.

In addition, the CHANGELOG file at the root of your brand new installation will give you a more detailed list of all changes.

Conclusion

I'll hope you'll enjoy these changes! There's still a lot more work planned for future versions, including better accessibility (ARIA, Opquast good practices, ATAG...), an alternate template engine (Twig), a new media library...

To conclude I'll thank all those who contributed (in particular Franck, ahem, but also all the others we don't dare naming in case we forget someone), to development, to design, to testing, to ideas, to the wild cheering by delirious fa... ah no wait, I was just supposed to translate something along the lines of support and cheers. More wild cheering by delirious fans for Franck et al., Dotclear users! It's crucial to people who contribute to an open source project like Dotclear on their free time only.

To sum it up, we (well, mostly they, as far as I am concerned) did a lot of work!

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.

You can now download Dotclear 2.6.3. This maintenance release includes fixes for two potential security defaults on XML-RPC authentification and on category ordering. Many thanks to Egidio Romano for his advices about them.

He also warned us on the possibility to send PHP scripts into the media folder and to get them executed from there. Dotclear cannot entirely protect against this kind of defect and you should ensure to not leave such files in your medias, or if it's necessary, to make sure that they are not executable. In order to do so, a few methods exist and rely essentially on the web host and the sofware used for the server.

For Apache in example, a .htaccess file located in the public folder and including the following directive allows to avoid the issue:

php_flag engine off

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.

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.

It is not without emotion, as Violetta would say, that we are getting ready to unveil before your astonished eyes the candidate release of the next version of Dotclear. This version precedes the final one by a few weeks. We were so eager to expose it to your rigorous and nevertheless gracious testing that we indeed decided not to wait until the final version to make it public. Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce to you Dotclear 2.6-RC.

The set

Because every show needs an appropriate set, we have entirely repainted the stage. We therefore present you with a new visual identity, together with a set of icons that match the new color scheme:

We have also taken advantage of this opportunity to create an additional variation to the Blowup theme, Plumetis. Let it be known that our secret plans to take over the world include projects for major improvements in the development and configuration of themes in the next version (2.7).

Stage direction

We have also carried on our ameliorations in terms of ergonomics and accessibility. There is still a long way to go—ARIA, ATAG and others aren't fully there yet—but we have made a number of noteworthy improvements in this domain.

The administration area will also be easier to use on various supports. Our objective for this version was to drastically improve the usage of the administration on mobile devices and small screens. Mission accomplished! A few pages aren't fully optimized yet, but we will work on them in the future.

The orchestra

Dotclear 2.6-RC is brought to you by a beautiful, merry, and prolific team work. We have sustained a few minor storms, but the mood was (almost) always delightfully good. While JcDenis, baby bottle in one hand, kid in the other, and keyboard on his lap was entirely recoding the maintenance and backup interface as well as the management of plugins and themes, nikrou was lovingly cooking up categories and media management in between two javascript implementations. Kozlika was making icons and torturing DOM, CSS, coders and users together. Lipki was aflutter around the widgets, closing ticket after ticket with artistic dexterity; so did sogox and bernardleroux. Dsls delved once again in the deepest of our basements to secure the stage and prepare the shows to come.

Franck Paul directed the whole with the big booming voice of the irrascible and grouchy dictator he ought to be. Cherry on top of this masterful production: a commit by Pep himself!

In the meanwhile, community managers Samantdi, Guillaume, Krazy Kitty (smoothly acknowledging yourself: one of the perks of translation) and Otir were, well, managing the community on the digital waves. Pinkilla, Tomer, Llu_ne, BG, mirovinbien, Jean-Michel, Aide Pour—yes, that's an odd name even for us—, Sacrip'Anne, Lomalarch, Philippe, xave, anthom, Patidou, Tetsuo, Cunégonde, Denis, Gilsoub, Pierre, brol, Armony and others also put their shoulders to the wheel, documenting, testing, animating the mailing list, writing whimsical minutes of our weekly IRC meetings, making coffee, updating the server's Dokuwiki, geolocalizing photos, and much more.

(Now's the point where we realize with utter dread that name-dropping will necessarily result, as we cannot but have forgotten people, in bitter chiding... and a few beers!)

The singers

That's you!

We need you to test this version, to report bugs, to help updating the documentation, to report potential translation mistakes (in French, English, and other languages while you're at it), to send us marshmallows.

So, in short: download, install, use, and let us know all about it!

We will publish here, before the final version of 2.6 comes out, more detailed information on the changes brought by this new version, particularly on the code side.

Overture

Paa, paa, paa, paa, papam... you can download version 2.6-RC here. Avanti la musica \o/

We just waited until the excitation about Dotclear's 10th birthday started to die down to give you the possibility to update to version 2.5.2.

You will find a number of bug fixes and technical and ergonomic improvements^[1]; talking about ergonomics, there's a lot of work going on about that for the future 2.6. We'll talk about it again soon.

Many people who have replied to our call to test this version. You are very precious to us, many thanks!

The possibility to update your installation should have appeared on your dashboard. There's also a patch for the developers who prefer this method.

We're already working on the future 2.5.3, which will hopefully be available some time in September.

The possibility to update your installation should have appeared on your dashboard.

Here's the brand new 2.5.1, which only came out rapidly after our call thanks to the numerous testers who got together to help us finalize it. You've been perfect, don't change anything!

In this new version you'll find: bug fixes, cosmetic improvements, a better quality of thumbnails in the media manager, and, most of all, the replacement of the old Flash multiple media upload thingie by another thingie that does exactly the same but in Ajax and without any security vulnerability.

There's also a patch for the developers who prefer this method.

May thousands of roses flower under the steps of Nikrou, who has taken care of the conversion of the upload manager with selfless commitment and in the echo free desert of the last weeks. This silence, the last straw that made our ex-but-still-in-the-team-boss throw the towel, has been broken by a mailing list featuring ten times as many users as before and users at the ready every morning on the forum to test updates and report bugs.

I'll be back very soon to tell you more about what's being discussed on the mailing list, but that isn't the goal of that note.

For now, let's rejoice about that new step, update our installs, and for the Parisians, let's celebrate Monday night, from 7pm onwards, at Quigley's Bar.

Talk to you very soon, there's much to tell. Happy times!