Dotclear

I have been into open source pretty much since the first time I encountered the idea.

As a user, of course—who's to say no to free (as in beer) software? With forums where you can contact the developers to ask for help or new features? And the possiblity, for a programmer (like myself), to tweak here and add there and make it do exactly what you want? Even before I started considering the meaning of free as in

For years, however, I felt a bit uncomfortable. Taking was good, but what about giving back? My own fixes were often too hacky and personal to be shared with others. And what about all the non-technical people I was trying to convert to the cause? What could they contribute?

And then I met the Dotclear community.

I was on another continent. Blogging to keep in touch with the homeland, one way or the other. That's how I started using the software. Little by little, I also started exchanging with the contributors. Pouring over the documentation; asking for help in the forums; and, more and more, reading their blogs. Soon enough, this had become much more than a piece of software; this was a group of pals, thrown together into an adventure. An adventure I wanted a part of.

I started by the proud "powered by Dotclear" footers on my webite(s). If I could make only one person switch blogging engines, or decide for Dotclear when starting their own blog, that would already be a big deal.

And then I realized Dotclear was also an association. To which you can donate money.

Since then, I have moved back closer to the headquarters, first on the other side of the Rhine, now on the same side of the Seine. I have started contributing a bit more directly (mostly by translating blog posts once in a blue moon, but hey, I'm part of the team).

But still, if you like Dotclear, and that you want to contribute, there's no need to have the skills, time and desire to become a core dev. You can start by becoming a Dotclear member, and donating to the association.

Don't hesitate!

For full disclosure, I should also add that this is the kind of attitude that leads you to wanting to meet other Dotclearians, and from then on to picnics, crepes, beers, and fits of laughter.

A maintenance release with some bugfixes and improvements. Nice friday the 13th with “The Cat“!

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.

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...