The main piece of news is that, a few months ago, our friend Olivier decided to leave the project leadership. It was a bit of a shock as he was the creator of Dotclear and its main coder for six years. At first we thought of tying it down to his chair to enslave him but finally decided to acknowledge the fact and let him enjoy his new found freedom.

We quickly decided to carry on anyway, and it is with his blessing that I took the leadership of the team he created years ago to help him on the project. Everything Dotclear related was up until now under Olivier's name. Not being the creator, I did not want to carry on this way and in the last few months, we worked on the creation of a separate legal entity: the Dotclear Association (as in Association Loi 1901, the French legal structure for non-profit organisations.)

At the same time, we started to work on Dotclear itself. The 2.1.6 release is our first one, with nearly no new functionality but we planned it that way to make our teeth, and we did: several dozens of tickets were closed.

For the near future, we planned to be compatible with PHP 5.3, and we will try to rethink the interface to enhance its ergonomics: we recently launched a big user survey for that purpose in our French speaking community.

That brings us to our last point: as refining the whole project after Olivier's departure was all but an easy task, we choose a few months ago to concentrate on the important matters: planning the future, creating the structure, trying to be as familiar with the code that the guy who created it... That is why we were not as communicative that we could have been, and our few communication efforts were mostly directed to our French speaking community, hence our silence here. Be assured that such a long time without any news will not happen any more and that we plan to include you, non French speaking users of Dotclear, involved in the project's life.

Without further ado, here is the new version :

Please note that internal changes were made that could disturb some of your plugins (we updated JQuery to the 1.3 version and support for jquery 1.1 obsolete selectors were removed in this version[1]. A discussion on the forum gives more details on the changes and the attached plugin to ease the transition.)

Thanks for your support!

Notes

[1] as per that page: In jQuery 1.3 [@attr] style selectors were removed (they were previously deprecated in jQuery 1.2). Simply remove the '@' symbol from your selectors in order to make them work again.