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.

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.

Pages that have changed

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.

Personalization

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...

The new version of Dotclear, 2.6, which should be published in about two weeks (unless a blocker bug is detected but not fixed by then), sports a brand new administration interface; new in looks, and new in a few of its features. In the following entry and two more posts after that, we will present you what has changed since the last stable version (2.5.3).

Graphic design and ergonomics

An admin console adapted to all screens

As announced when 2.6-RC came out, Dotclear has a brand new look. New color palette, new icons, new forms, and, last but not least, the administration console adapts itself to the size of your screen. Here's what it looks like on a cell phone, on a tablet and on a computer screen:

A retractable menu

In order to make the most out of your screen, we have made the left menu retractable. It can be unfolded or collapsed by clicking the vertical band bordering it to the right:

A new visual identity

The new visual identity is presented in details as an appendix to the documentation embedded in your Dotclear installation. This can be very useful to those of you who develop plugins and configurable themes. To display it, go from any help block to the global help > Documentation développeurs > Conventions (bottom right box) > Charte des pages de l'administration. (We're working on a full translation of the documentation, I promise.)

A permanently available search function

You will also note the search box that appeared on top of the main menu. It is therefore always available. For now, it can only search through blog entries, but in the future it will be extended to make it possible to search through all contents.

A contextual help for each page

The contextual help has been enriched: you will from now on find help for every single admin page. Help is accessible through a link in the upper right corner of each page, illustrated by a small life buoy icon.

Development and code

There's also been many modifications and improvements on the development side of things. Particular care was put into introducing a minimal amount of mandatory modifications for developers. Most of the known plugins have been tested with this new version and work perfectly fine. A large number of them have already been adapted to integrate those changes as well as possible.

Items organization in the global menu

The global menu is, as before, divided in "Blog", "System" and "Plugins", but the organization has been updated to be more logical from the user's point of view:

• "Blog" contains the features that pertain to blog contents and the plugins that act or are set on a per blog basis;
• "System" contains the features related to the settings of the global installation;
• "Plugins" contains global plugin settings.

Multiple plurals

Some languages have plural forms that differ from those of French, or multiple such forms. For example, zero is plural in English and singular in French; Russian has three forms of plural while French only has one. Dotclear can now deal with these specificities.

And more...

You'll find on this page (currently only available in French) an exhaustive overview of what has changed for developers.

Recently updated plugins take those changes into account. If you are a plugin author, think about it for your next update!

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!