Dotclear

As promised, I am back with more news. They're very good.

Among the large number of people who subscribed to the mailing list after our invitation from July 10, many came firmly intending to contribute their little (or large) brooks of skills and ideas to the Dotclear river. Even better, they didn't just say so: they did it.

The first week after the (re)birth of the mailing list was, how to put it... intense. Between 200 and 380 emails per day; multiple different topics; newcomers to Dotclear (and to mailing lists, their uses, customs, and ancestral traditions) and hardcore coders; very short term plans and visions for the centuries to come. We have used and abused a framapad page to throw around ideas, and little by little an organisation around different poles emerged^[1]:

• development;
• animation and creation of content for the numerous websites of the Dotclear/Dotaddict galaxy;
• Internet presence management (social networking and others);
• events to organize or to which to participate;
• design update of the website and other work around the html/css/js toys.

We have opened a public Trello space where each of us was able to indicate which "cards" s/he joined. To this day, we are 36 contributors registered for one or more current or future tasks. From the magic-dev to the two-left-hands, there's work for everybody to do. The first quick and visible results have been the short time period between the beginning of testing and the publication of version 2.5.1, thanks to the daily feedback from the list members and forum users.

We also regularly chats in IRC meetings (irc.freenode.net #dotclear), every Monday evening at 8pm for the code and Thursday evening at 8pm for the design and integration, occasionally on other topics, continuously for those who login with their morning coffee and log out from their pillow.

A few brilliant or wild ideas have been welcomed and will be studied, a few modest and seriously effective ideas have been adopted. It is too early to know whether this dynamic will stand the test of time, but my personal impression (and Kozlika's as well) is that it will be the case. We will nevertheless have to pay attention to avoid our favorite guilty pleasure: that we bite off more than we can chew, and that one of us begins the ascent of the Annapurna without a single sherpa to their side.

Over the summer, each one of the five topics listed above will be developed in more details on this blog. It's not too late to come play with us, we'll make space!

Let me add here that while the team exchanges in French, there are many English speakers in the community, including on the forums and on IRC. Feel free to ask questions, test development versions, report bugs, and tell us that you love Dotclear!

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

That's Dotclear's birthday: we've been running for eight years!

There were some thoughts about celebrating by releasing a new version, but going on holidays seemed more fun. So we shelved things like a new theme or new refinements to the backend for a while. Holidays are not forever, though, and we plan to release a beta in a few days, leading to a new full release when it's ready™, but we'd like to have it ready by a month or so.

Meanwhile, enjoy the summer (if you have one) and have fun!