Dotclear

Let's go!

We're taking our next step in Dotclear 2.2 development: we are officialy in beta.

Should you be bold enough, you can install it, and share with us any peculiarity you could find. This version is stable enough for several people to use it in production, but you have to know what you do, as there may be side effects with the occasional plugin. If you prefer to stay on the safe side, please be patient: we plan to release the final version in a few weeks.

DSLS, one of our more prolific team member, created a plugin to update your installation by uploading an archive, you can find it here.

Dotclear 2.2-beta1 may be downloaded here.

It may look as if development on Dotclear has dramatically slowed down. Well, in fact, it has. That does not mean that our blogware is dying, just that it was necessary to stop and think after Olivier's departure from the project, as he was its creator and the main coder.

When I was handed the wheel, I chose to release a 2.1.6 version, that mainly was a much needed bugfix one. I had to do it alone (but for the help of a few contributors patches) as it was then the way the project was running, everything having been centralised around Olivier for years. Launching the (still running) ergonomic audit and rethinking was the first real collective teamwork we did, but it still wasn't coding Dotclear.

That is where we allowed ourselves to pause in order to discuss how to evolve from a centralised project to a community driven one. We still are in the process of refining that, but we finally were able to resume coding: in the last two weeks, almost 50 tickets were closed, several underneath changes were introduced that will allow the next version to be easier to code with, whether you are a plugin or a theme developer, and we even managed to introduce new features under the hood while lowering the processing and memory footprint!

The whole team is now hard at work to bring the next version to life. Should you decide to try it, nightly builds are available. Several technical changes may be problematic to some plugins, so don't use those build in a production environment (I do and feel fine, though.)

Stay connected, we have more in the pipeline.

Here comes Dotclear 2.1.6. This new version brings a whole bunch of bugfixes. You will find nearly no new functionality but many little thing should work more smoothly here and there.

While I'm here, I would like to apologise for that long silence. Dotclear was all but dead during our "intermission". As a matter of fact, it was a very busy time and several things happened for the project and we have important news.

The end of year 2008 is nearing, we can now look back on what we have achieved. The outcomes are both positive and encouraging, but it's certainly nothing compared to what is coming up in 2009.