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2013 Oct 20

Dotclear 2.6-RC — codename: Traviata

By Krazy Kitty on Sunday 20 October 2013, 13:56

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:

palette-traviata.png

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!

commits.jpg

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/

dashboard.png

3 comments

2013 Sep 13

Dotclear 2.5.3

By Krazy Kitty on Friday 13 September 2013, 10:33

And, once again, a new version! This one is slightly ahead of plan—a good sign of sustained development activity—and arrives before the upcoming meeting at Mozilla Paris on September 21st.

It features bug fixes, improved antispam filter management (to better address the ongoing plague polluting our favorite blogs), and a few minor improvements here and there, such as the newly implemented transparency for the thumbnails of PNG images.

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.

This branch of Dotclear, containing all versions from 2.5 to 2.5.3, will from now on be under maintenance only, mostly to fix critical errors should there be any. Indeed, we are now focusing our efforts on the next "major" version, 2.6, which we plan to release in the coming weeks (ideally in October, but time does fly...).

Regarding this future version, let's just say that we're very impatient to have it out, because it's much sexier than the current one!

Finally, let's all congratulate JcDenis (and the mother!), esteemed long-term contributor, for the birth of his little boy \o/ Welcome to the baby and best wishes to his parents!

3 comments

2013 Aug 15

Dotclear 2.5.2

By Krazy Kitty on Thursday 15 August 2013, 19:10

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.

Note

[1] see CHANGELOG

2013 Aug 14

Dotclear and us, a love story

By Krazy Kitty on Wednesday 14 August 2013, 12:13

It's still August 13 in parts of the world. And I've always liked birthday parties to last a little bit longer. I've already shouted my own personal love for Dotclear within my own walls, as if becoming part of the team that is the English-speaking window of Dotclear to the world wasn't proof enough. Today, I'm here to tell you more about how it all happened...

Continue reading...

2 comments

2013 Jul 21

Dotclear 2.5.1

By Krazy Kitty on Sunday 21 July 2013, 23:48

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!

3 comments

Something's in the air

By Krazy Kitty on Sunday 21 July 2013, 23:31

Wow! Quite a lot has happened in the Dotclear community recently. Let me try to sum it all up for you.

On July 9th, Franck, who had been in charge of Dotclear since February, around the time when version 2.5 came out, decided to leave and slam the door on his way out.

While he was full of hopes, projects and enthusiasm, the community didn't follow. Team members, from lack of either time or eagerness, were less and less available. The new projects he announced (redesign the admin interface, replace the wysiwyg editor by something more advanced, give the Dotclear and Dotaddict websites a fresh look...) weren't enough to drive the team. Most of all, Franck missed what was for him the most important in Dotclear: the conviviality and team spirit. So Franck was quitting, and what would happen to Dotclear?

The door slamming certainly did one thing: suddenly, the community awoke.

People started talking, on Twitter and the Dotclear blog more particularly. On July 10th, Kozlika started outlining three possible futures for the project.

The first possibility is that a number of new, motivated and energetic developers (and, more generally speaking, contributors of all sorts) join Dotclear. The problem hasn't so much to do with money, marketing or communication, but mostly with contributions. With a vibrant community, there is no doubt that Dotclear can find its second wind.

The second possibility is to focus on simply keeping Dotclear afloat. No major changes, no projects for new features, simply a small team of developers, testers and webmasters devoted to fixing bugs and updating the code with new versions of PHP.

The third possibility is to slowly move to a close. Take the time (one or two years) to help users migrate towards new solutions, to ask the developers of other CMS for migration plugins, and so forth. This only requires a small team of people, with few programming skills, for a short time.

Then Kozlika opened the discussion on the dev mailing list. Everyone, independently of skills, was invited to join. Dozens and dozens of people did. Hundreds of messages were exchanged. Looks like Dotclear's not quite dead yet...

... And, indeed, we're releasing a new version !

Thanks to the wonderful community, changes are coming. Stay tuned for further updates!

one comment

2013 Mar 16

Dotclear 2.5

By Franck on Saturday 16 March 2013, 01:42

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.

Notes

[1] It will mostly depend on everybody's availability and abilities, of course.

[2] This might break compatibility with some shared hosting companies who still run versions of PHP that has been deprecated for seven years. In IT, dinosaurs have been known to disappear in a shorter time.

2 comments

2013 Feb 24

Upcoming 2.5 (and a bit of news)

By xave on Sunday 24 February 2013, 20:00

Today nearly sees the release of Dotclear 2.5: what we release today is a Release Candidate, meaning that we hope it's the real deal, but we'd like it to be tested by a few madmen before releasing it in the wild in a few days.

Why this waryness? We've had a big crash on Dotclear sister server: Dotaddict.org, and we had to stop everything to reinstall it from scratch, and I mean nearly really from scratch, as we discovered in the process that our backup plan hasn't been working for several months (and let that be a warning: automation is good, as long as you automatize some checks in the process.)

And because we had to stop working on that nearly finished 2.5, we prefer now to introduce it slowly, just to be on the safe side.

Users won't find any big changes in it: webfonts can now be used in Ductile and the daInstaller plugin is included in the main release. Other than that, there have been a whole bunch of small changes, both functional and cosmetic. Changes two are to be found for themes and plugins builders, and we can't even count all the small bugs that were fixed. As important for sysadmins: we are confident that Dotclear is now PHP5.4 compatible, for people using top-notch hosting.

Another important bit of news: having got a new job for the last 18 months, I finally had to admit that my schedule doesn't allow me to manage the project any more. It was really becoming a burden and a problem for the project, as I had often had no time to dwell into things. As nobody wants things to stall, waiting for my decisions or approvals, it became important to allow someone else to make those decisions, even if I stay in the team.

That's why we now welcome Franck Paul as the new project manager. It was an easy choice, as Franck not only is an historic member of the Dotclear Team, but is also the guy behind that new release, fixing most of the bugs single-handedly and driving the team for changes. Dotclear won't change: albeit with a role re-distribution, that's still the same team working on it.

And working we are, we're already working on several projects, stay tuned.

Do I forget something? Yep, the 2.5RC: it's now available in the nightlies at http://download.dotclear.org/nightl..., or by defining DC_UPDATE_VERSION to "testing" in your configuration file, if you want to take advantage of the autoupdate feature. The final version should be available within two weeks.

one comment

2012 Aug 13

Dotclear 2.4.4

By xave on Monday 13 August 2012, 13:13

Today, Dotclear is 9 years old, and we can't help but be emotional, thinking that it will leave the house one day. But it calls for a small celebration, so here are three things:

We're starting with a new release. Dotclear 2.4.4 is mostly a bugfix release and you shouldn't notice any difference. Except if you're using the "Program post" feature that was broken in the last release: it's back. Grab the 2.4.4. here: http://download.dotclear.org/latest.zip

In order to clear the backlog of things we'd like not to think about any more: the DC Loader, the script that allows you to install Dotclear in three clicks, has been updated, is now prettier, and is localization ready (only English and French are available, for now, though.) Grab it there: http://download.dotclear.net/loader/dotclear-loader.php

Last but not least, a small pre-announcement: the team has started to work on a Dotclear version nicknamed "Sexy". It should coexist for a while with the good old official one and aims to rewrite a good part of its internals in order to be lighter, quicker, sexier! Watch this space for a future announcement, explaining what it's all about.

2012 May 19

Dotclear 2.4.3

By xave on Saturday 19 May 2012, 20:42

Hi all! Here comes a new Dotclear version. This one has been made necessary by ... well, nothing, really. Just a couple under the hood enhancements, small bugfixes here and there and a new option to hide the shortcuts menu should you wish to do so. As usual, it can be downloaded there : http://download.dotclear.org/latest... or by launching the automatic update from you admin.

2012 Feb 11

Dotclear 2.4.2

By xave on Saturday 11 February 2012, 17:45

Hi all!

Here comes a new Dotclear version. This one has been made necessary because four XSS vulnerabilities have been found this week[1]. No time to lose: we corrected them and here comes Dotclear 2.4.2.

As usual, it can be found there: http://download.dotclear.org/latest.zip

As always, have fun.

Note

[1] By the High-Tech Bridge Security Research Lab.

one comment

2011 Dec 24

I'm dreaming of a white Dotclear

By xave on Saturday 24 December 2011, 20:11

Here is our Christmas surprise: Dotclear 2.4.1.2... We did not skip a version, we just decided to numerate this one specially for Christmas (for the more Americans among you, "24/12" means the 24th day of the 12th month, you date-order-challenged! :)

You won't find many new features in this one, but some small tweaks here and there and the patching of a an SQL injection vulnerability that hid itself so well no one found it until now, except for our forum member Adjaya.

That's all. Enjoy yourself, happy Holidays, have fun!

2 comments

2011 Nov 13

Dotclear 2.4

By xave on Sunday 13 November 2011, 16:13

You can now download our new version:Dotclear 2.4.

In this version, you'll find an new iconset, specilly designed for us by Thomas Daveluy. This allow us to go back to a full GPL distribution, as the version for the icons introduced in Dotclear 2.3 was limited.

You'll also find a new theme, named Ductile, designed to be both easy to adpat to your needs and to fit wathever screen size your readers may use. Along with this theme comes a new plugin, named SimpleMenu, whose purpose is -you guessed it- to allow you to manage a menu of links in a simple way.

This version includes, as is now usual, incremental ergonomic and accessibility modifications. It can be found, as always, at the following URL: http://download.dotclear.org/latest.zip

You may have noticed that two files are attached to this post. once unzipped in the /admin/images/iconset/ folder of your blog[1], they'll allow you to find a new setting in your user preferences, where you will now be able to chose your iconset. Don't let the new icons prevent you from installing the 2.4 if you just loved the 2.3 ones, you can install them if you want.

EDIT: Please note the if you did not apply the changes needed for Dotclear 2.3.1, you will now see a warning in the admin interface.

Notes

[1] That folder has to be created, and each file has to be uncompressed in a specific sub-folder of it. We plan to create a GUI for that feature.

one comment 3 trackbacks 2 attachments

2011 Sep 13

Dotclear 2.4 beta

By xave on Tuesday 13 September 2011, 20:43

The new version promised a month ago is not yet ready (holidays in the team spread from june to this week, I switched jobs and one of us is even getting maried!) but the curious and the bolds can as of now try the new Dotclear 2.4 beta. It includes new icons, a new theme, and other tweaks and functionnalities that will be detailed once we'll get out of beta.

You can download it here.

2 comments

2011 Jun 14

Dotclear 2.3.1

By xave on Tuesday 14 June 2011, 22:22

Here comes another maintenance release for Dotclear. in this one, you'll find:

  • Some internal clean-up for development files that were preventing a clean upgrade under unusual circumstances.
  • Localisation problems have been corrected for our new dashboard system.
  • Cleaning and refining for some CSS & JS files.
  • There were a problem with the user preferences in the import/export module. This has been corrected.
  • You can now configure the email address used to send password reminders.
  • A potential security flaw has been fixed + some others security tightening.

About the last two points:

Starting with this version, the email address for reminders is set up in the config file. On new installations, a default one will be defined. For security reasons, it will not be the case with upgrades. Please add the following line to your inc.config.php file:

define('DC_ADMIN_MAILFROM','dotclear@theaddressyouwant.com');

If you don't do so, Dotclear will work as usual. You'll just raise the password reminders mails' score in antispam system.

About the security fix and tightening: you don't have to worry about the tightening, we just enhanced the security for the software's future life. There is a true security flaw, though, that could have been used under certain rare circumstances to gain access to a administrator account. You are still encouraged to update, better safe than sorry.

Those security enhancements were indicated by Jérémie Boutoille, while he was participating in Pirate-Moi, a monthly hacking contest that chose Dotclear for its last edition.

Dotclear was not hacked during this contest. :)

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