During the night from Tuesday, July 5th to Wednesday, July 6th we will move the whole Diem project sites to a new server.
Erik (4levels) did manage to get this server for our project and he will take care of the server movement.
Therefore please be aware that neither our website nor our community site will be available for probably a couple of hours in that time.
If there should be any issues with our sites on Wednesday we will take care of it as fast as possible.
If you find any please let us know on community site's forum (if available) or by sending a mail to our Google Group mailing list.

Even more to come ...

This also will be the starting point for some important project organization structure changes that will hopefully help users and developers to be better integrated in the project.
More on these changes will follow the next days.

Redmine is a platform written in Ruby on Rails, providing opensource tools for software development. We've set up the plugins, discussed the features and our current situation. We were using GitHub for the Diem source code and issues, the website for documentation and phpBB as forum, all obvious choices but quite separated from eachother.

Redmine as project management: community.diem-project.org was born

We voted in the mailing list and decided to go for Redmine. We moved all issues to Redmine, moved the forum into the Redmine forum and started to build the documentation in it's wiki. So from now on, the development community is going on in Redmine, working it's magic on our beloved framework.

Some quicklinks:

• Redmine forum
  http://community.diem-project.org/projects/diem-project/boards
• Redmine wiki
  http://community.diem-project.org/projects/diem-project/wiki
• Redmine bugtracker (Registred users only)
  http://community.diem-project.org/projects/diem-project/issues

So developers out there using Diem and feeling to contribute in any way, signup and we'll be happy to hear and help you out!

What is Redmine?
Redmine is a flexible project management web application.
Written using Ruby on Rails framework, it is cross-platform and cross-database.
Redmine is open source and released under the terms of the GNU General Public License v2 (GPL).

Installing Ruby and Redmine was not a breeze on our Debian / Nginx box but hey, we managed after all! Using Redmine will allow all of us to follow up more easily and closely to the current and inevitable future issues.

Send in the bugs!

Please feel free to register an account on bugs.diem-project.org and start reporting those head-aching, PITA bugs that we all want to squash and forget.

Give us a break..

We're all in this together, so please keep in mind to provide as much information as possible when reporting new bugs. First of all check if no similar bug already exists by searching the existing ones. Do mention the steps to reproduce the bug and please address us in a friendly way to get things sorted out quickly. No one is getting paid for developing Diem, not to mention following up on bugs. Yes, they can be very frustrating but please don't use us to get this of your chest, we hate them as much as you do ;-)

Want to help?

We'll need to collect and verify all existing bugs reported in our forum, on GitHub and the mailing list to insert them into Redmine as well, any help with this is greatly appreciated!

A big thanks to Stéphane for pushing me to give the Ruby install another chance as I gave up before, a big holla to our founding father Thibault for creating the DNS records and big love to all of you enthusiasts using and improving Diem every day!

Thibault, Diem's founder and spiritual father, is no longer able to maintain Diem full time. Therefore a new team is being formed to maintain this beautiful OpenSource CMS and it's community to support the many websites using Diem today.

In a first phase, Thibault granted all admin access to 4levels (myself) and Stéphane. We're both very honored to take on this challenge and have nothing but the best intentions with Diem as we both use it for our own projects and clients. But since neither of us is able to maintain Diem full time as well, we're looking for people to keep Diem and its community as alive as before.

Things to do

Setup a team

We're looking for passionate people to do all kind of things:

• Find issues and fix them from a core developers point of view
• Enhance Diem by creating / updating challenging plugins and core improvements
• Write and update documentation on how Diem is used
• Moderate our community to have a helpful and active forum
• ...

As we are in the middle of starting to bundle our efforts together, please allow us some time to catch up with the many things to do ;-)

Plot a road map

We need a clear vision on the future of Diem as OpenSource CMS. A decent release planning will be necessary as the new team comes from various directions and has different views and needs on how Diem should be. Therefore we created a new Forum Diem Team / Release planning where we can discuss and determine a solid view on what's next.

Things to consider

Diem today

Diem is a great CMS: it has the skills and the right method's to quickly develop a nice web-application, it's easy to maintain and fun to play around with. It's powerful extensions of symfony and Doctrine allow you as developer to use both projects to the fullest. With it's nice and tested plugins, lots of extra functionalities are available with very little effort, leading your project to it's targets in no time!

The future of Diem / symfony / Doctrine

As symfony is being metamorphosed to symfony2 and Doctrine to Doctrine2, everything in the Diem CMS core needs to be transformed in order to use these next-gen frameworks as supposed to be. This task is far more complex than a simple rewriting / refactoring run on the Diem core plugins. Everything literally needs to be rewritten from scratch as all the fundamentals have changed.

A lot of talented developers, including Diem's very own Thibault, coming from different PHP opensource CMS projects have now teamed up to found a new Content Management Framework, named symfony-cmf, based on symfony2/Doctrine2. Check the Google group symfony-cmf-devs for more insights on the status and activities..

Maintaning Diem in it's optimal state

Enhancing Diem with tons of extra built-in features goes beyond it's purpose: Diem should remain the barebone core CMS it is today. Extra features can perfectly be implemented as plugins as everything in Diem is configurable and extensible because it's clean code usage of symfony. Plugins can be easier reviewed, tested and maintaned and allow us to chose on a per project base which features we want, keeping Diem as the clean, fast core CMS we need. Naturally, new development is always welcome and greatly encouraged for all of us to learn.

Thanks to all for your support and interest in Diem!

What’s different about an organization account?

A GitHub organization is a profile on GitHub that is managed from your personal account. Organizations are best suited for businesses who need to manage permissions for many employees.

In short: organisations make it easier to manage different people and repositories.

If you want to contribute to Diem, moderate the forum's, update documentation or support Diem in any other way, please create an account on the Diem forum and post your request to the new Diem Team Forum Membership application.

As the Diem team is currently being reorganized, please allow some time for things to be back to normal. More about this soon!

We'll stay in touch and keep you posted..

• Website get a Diem website built by the Diem team
• Support get plugins built specifically for your needs
• Training become more efficient working with symfony and Diem
• Web-design get a nice looking theme for your Diem website

I'm personally involved in this expert team, and eager to work on your project. Except the web-design part, of course. Believe me, it's a good thing.

At the same time development of 5.1 continues, powered by the community, and 5.2 is on its way. We're also experimenting with Symfony2, to prepare the next generation of CMS.

Stay tuned, and get in touch with Diem experts now!

It works by changing the "robots" meta value. This is usefull for keeping control of your SEO, especially when your website content is not fully ready for indexation.

However, until today, the "Site indexable" setting was set to false by default. This means that all your pages had robots meta "noindex,nofollow". In light of this you are strongly encouraged to check this setting and change it to true in order to make your website appear on search engines like Google.

Be aware that this setting is culture dependent. If your website is multilingual, you need to change the setting value for each culture.

Next versions of Diem (5.0.6, 5.1.2, 5.2) will have this setting set to true by default.

I'm pleased to anounce the immediate availability of Diem 5.1 stable!

This new version brings popular features like mailing, enhanced symfony filters, "Forgot password" widget, unlimited Areas per page and layout... and many others new features.
It is NOT compatible with Diem 5.0, but upgrade is easy.
I'd like to thank the community for the huge work completed on this release. 11 authors contributed to Diem 5.1, with 374 commits.

• Download Diem 5.1.0
• Learn about new features
• View changes on GitHub

Diem documentation is quite complete:
22 Reference Book pages
+7 Diem Ipsum pages
+7 Howto pages
*2 versions (5.0 and 5.1)
= 72 pages

Untill today, only diem-project.org webmasters were able to write and fix Diem documentation. That was a hard time.

So I took some time to move all documentation to GitHub: Diem Documentation GitHub repo. Now you can create documentation issues, and even better, fork and improve it!

Git branches are used to separate 5.0 and 5.1 documentation: 5.0, 5.1.

The best thing is that diem-project.org pages are synchronized with the documentation repository. Each time we push to GitHub, the website is automatically updated, thanks to a post-receive hook.

Synchronize a Git repo with a database

In case you need, as I did, to update a database each time a Git repository receives data, this section may help you.

Install a local repo on the production server

As diem-project.org is itself a Git repo, I added the documentation as a submodule:

git submodule add git://github.com/diem-project/diem-docs.git data/diem-docs  

Configure the GitHub repo

Add a post-receive hook url to the GitHub repo. The url must execute a symfony action on the website.

The symfony action

So this action gets called each time Diem GitHub repo receives data.
We need to fetch the files using Git, then read them to upgrade the database.

// handle GitHub post-receive hook  
  public function executeUpdateFromGit(dmWebRequest $request)  
  {  
    $this->forward404Unless($request->isMethod('post'));  
 
    $repoDir = sfConfig::get('sf_root_dir').'/data/diem-docs';  
 
    // include phpGitRepo  
    require_once(sfConfig::get('sf_root_dir').'/lib/vendor/php-git-repo/lib/phpGitRepo.php');  
 
    // create a git repo instance  
    $repo = new phpGitRepo($repoDir);  
 
    // run the synchronizer passing it the repo instance  
    $synchronizer = new gitDocumentationSynchronizer($repo);  
    $synchronizer->execute();  
 
    return $this->renderText('done');  
  }  

See the action code on diem-project.org GitHub repo

To get new files from the GitHub repo I used php-git-repo, a lightweight PHP abstraction layer to Git.
I create a phpGitRepo instance and pass it to my database-specific synchronizer.

The synchronizer

For each Diem branch (currently 5.0 and 5.1), the synchronizer will checkout the appropriate Git branch and update it from the server using php-git-repo.
Then it compares files to the database content, and updates the database if needed.

class gitDocumentationSynchronizer extends dmConfigurable
{  
  protected $repo;  
 
  public function __construct(phpGitRepo $repo)  
  {  
    $this->repo = $repo;  
  }  
 
  public function execute()  
  {  
    $this->repo->git('fetch origin');  
 
    foreach($this->getBranches() as $branch)  
    {  
      $this->checkoutBranch($branch);  
 
      $this->updateBranch($branch);  
 
      $this->updateDatabase($branch);  
    }  
  }  

See the synchronizer code on diem-project.org GitHub repo

If you find a typo on Diem documentation, or wanna see something documented better, feel free to create an issue. Or even better, fork the repository and pull your contribution request.

Happy Dieming and stay tuned, Diem 5.1 is coming along very, very nicely!

The world will remember March 11 2010 as the day Diem 5.0 stable was released! Champagne!

Diem development has been frenetic and many Alpha, Beta and Release Candidate versions have been released. Finally, the time for the long-awaited stable version has arrived!
The 5.0 branch will be supported for a long time and is suited for production websites.

By the way, Diem 5.0 is already being used by many websites. It also has a vibrant community, aided by the excellent symfony developers from all around the world. When I write these lines 16 Diem plugins are available. The documentation is solid, with a reference book, a complete tutorial and some usefull howtos.

I'd like to thank the amazing community that made this possible. Thank you guys!

Did you contribute to Diem but don't see your picture in this post? Let me know, I'll fix that!

Download Diem 5.0.0

See what's new

• Download Diem 5.0.0-RC5
• See what's new inside

As usual the community made a great work testing it out and reporting every problem. Keep up the good work, the stable version is coming along very nicely!

• Download Diem 5.0.0-RC4
• See issues fixed since Diem 5.0.0-RC3
• See what's new in Diem 5.0.0-RC3

We're working hard to bring you a perfect 5.0 final release. This release candidate is one big step farther in this direction: it fixes a bunch of issues you reported, and comes with solid translation and performance improvements.

• Download Diem 5.0.0-RC3
• See the goodies brought by Diem 5.0.0-RC3 in the release notes.

Our team is happy to announce the immediate availability of A week with Diem Ipsum. This is a Jobeet-like tutorial that describes the creation of a complete website with Diem. Each day, new features are added to the application, with clear explanations on how to use them and how they work.
Following it is a sure way to becoming an efficient Diem developer!

The 7 first parts will cover the creation of a full-fledged blog. Then, depending on the community feedback, we will add other features. The goal is to build a very flexible application that would be able to be easily go in new, unpredictable directions.

More than ever, Diem Ipsum is a community-driven work. Big thanks go to everyone who helped write and proof-read it.

Go on, build your first Diem website now!

• Download
• Release notes

Features completed

A long-time requested Doctrine behavior is now natively supported and documented: DmBlameable. It remembers who created and modified a record, and is really useful when used with DmVersionable. Also, the versioning interface has been refactored to show more information, with less database queries.

The front editing tools have been enhanced according to community feedback, and more resizing/cropping options are available in the media widget dialog.
Each authenticated user that accesses to the admin app now has a dedicated page to modify his/hers email and password.

French & Italian translations have also been updated.

Bugs fixed

A possible issue with Google Analytics, some minor problems with JavaScript and an error when using onDelete: RESTRICT on a Media relation have been fixed.

Documentation

A new documentation page is available: Learn how to use Diem Doctrine behaviors. The Security and users doc has been completed to explain how to allow visitors to modify their information.

Updated Plugins

• dmWidgetGalleryPlugin
• dmTagPlugin
• dmFlowPlayerPlugin
• dmGithubPlugin

Upgrade is easy and strongly recommended.
Enjoy!

Diem 5 Release candidate is here! This is the first Git release, full of great stuff, so go get it now!

• Download
• Release notes
• Fork it on Github

This release is the result of an incredible amount of work from the community. It brings all requested features, and even more!

Admin goodies

Media Library

The media management interface has been refactored and completed to give you full control of files and folders. Furthermore, uploading an existing file no more replaces the existing one, but saves a new one with a unique suffix.
Try it on the demo site! (username: admin, password: admin)

Code editor

The admin interface now features an ajax editor. It allows you to browse the entire project, open, modify and save files.
Try it on the demo site! (username: admin, password: admin)

Page management

Now you can sort and move pages around easily with a nice JavaScript tree.
Try it on the demo site! (username: admin, password: admin)

Manual SEO

Admin now features a great way to review and modify all pages metas and url's.
Try it on the demo site! (username: admin, password: admin)

Usability

As content writers will be spending hours working with your site's admin, we revised it:
Usability has been enhanced a lot with icons for translatable and required fields, helpful tooltips, JavaScript search for big checkbox lists, better record and diagram generation, ajax pagination of big related record lists, and more...

Front goodies

Edit records

In Diem 5.0.0 BETA5, you could modify everything directly on the front, except... the records (Product, Article, ...).
Things have changed! Users who have the "record_edit_front" permission now see a big edit icon on these pages. It opens a box and lets them modify a record using the admin interface, and the page content are refreshed with Ajax upon saving. Damn easy and secure, it offers the best interaction with your site for your customers.
Try it on the demo site! (username: admin, password: admin)

Tool Bar enhancements

All adding features (including adding pages) have been moved to the "Add" menu. This menu features a JavaScript search to help you find Widgets faster.
Try it on the demo site! (username: admin, password: admin)

Developer goodies

Upgrades

Diem always provides cutting edge software. Symfony has been upgraded to 1.4.2, jQuery version is 1.4.2 as well (hey, it's not even released on jQuery site when I write this post!) and the jQuery UI version bundled is 1.8RC2.

Social websites

It's now very easy to allow your visitors to signin and/or register themselves from the front. Learn how to use the new user/signin and user/register widgets.

Plugin conventions

To allow plugins to provide both admin and front modules, a new convention has been introduced. See the upgrade for 5.0.0-RC1 documentation.

Better automatic cache invalidation

The cache is now cleared selectively when you manipulate records or media or when you modify files from the front or admin code editor.

New plugins

Plugins continue to come quickly. You should try dmTagPlugin, that allows to add tags to your records with a nice JavaScript autocompleter, and create one page per tag on the front. Also, dmGithubPlugin allows you to interface your site with GitHub repository. It's as easy as a Drag&Drop!

Bugfixes and tests

As always, I'd like to thank the community for testing Diem in depth. Bugs are fixed quickly and Diem has now more than 3800 tests to prevent any regression.
Please continue to report any issues you find, and suggest improvements, with the very user friendly GitHub issues interface!

Oh, and two new translations have been added: Slovene (thanks Mitja Debeljak) and Romanian (thanks Manea Liviu).

Enjoy!

As explained some time ago in symfony blog, Git is a a distributed revision control system that eases contribution. It's already used by jQuery and Symfony 2.

Core

Diem official repository is now http://github.com/diem-project/diem.
To fetch it the first time, clone it, then update its submodules:

git clone git://github.com/diem-project/diem.git    
cd diem    
git submodule init    
git submodule update    

Then, later, to update it:

cd diem  
git pull  
git submodule update  

Be aware that the Diem SVN repository is no more updated.

Plugins

All plugins have been moved to GitHub. You can access plugins repos on the plugin pages.

Tickets

We now use the excellent and very user friendly GitHub issues system. It's way more easy and fast to report bugs and request features than with the good old symfony trac.

Contribute

Git makes contributing damn easy. Just hack your local Diem repo, then send a pull request on Diem GitHub page.

Having Diem on GitHub is a very good thing.
Come on, we're waiting for your issues and contributions!

Menus

The dmMenu class now allows you to create dynamic recursive menus very easily, thanks to dmMenu->addRecursiveChildren($depth) method.
Additionally, Diem now provides a new Menu Widget. It allows you to create and manage menus directly on the front, without any technical knowledge. Just drag, drop, and click.

Admin enhancements

Real time resource locks

Diem is designed to be used in a team. If many writers work on the same content at the same time, some work could be lost. To avoid that, resource locks have been implemented, using Ajax ping requests. Users modifying a resource are displayed in real time, so you can wait they leave to start modifying it yourself.

Markdown editors

The markdown editor now provides a Full Screen mode, that resizes the textarea and the preview zone to the window height in one click. Also the preview scroller is now synchronized with the textarea scroller.

Media library

Entirely refactored and 100% tested, the new media library now allows you to move and rename files and folders. The media synchronizer has also been rewritten. When you add files and folders in your upload dir with your OS, then open the admin media library, everything is automatically synchronized.

Front enhancements

Copy and paste widgets

You can now cut, copy and paste your widgets from one page to another. Open the widget dialog, click on Cut or Paste. The widget appears in the "Add" menu, on the CLIPBOARD section. You can now drag&drop it normally onto the page.

Plugins

New plugins are available:

• dmGoogleMapPlugin displays google maps on your site without writing a line of code
• dmContactPlugin allows visitors to send you contact requests
• dmCommentPlugin adds commentable capabilities to any of your models.

Other plugins have been improved and are 100% backwards compatible.

And more

Updated libraries

• jQuery 1.4.1
• jQuery UI 1.8rc1
• Zend Framework 1.10

Performance

Front widget cache is now faster, more assets are loaded asynchronously and the editor javascript code has been profiled and improved.

Compatibility

• stylesheets have been optimized for WebKit-based browsers like Google Chrome
• you can now decide to include a JavaScript library in the head section to make some symfony plugins work
• template helpers do not use the "£" symbol anymore

Stability

Many bugs have been diagnosed and fixed. The continuous integration server now runs more than 3300 tests on each commit, to ensure the stability of the trunk.

• Download Diem 5.0.0-BETA5
• See version notes and upgrade instructions

We're really happy to bring you this fourth BETA release.
It makes Diem faster and more stable than ever.

Now translated in seven languages

This week, two complete translations were added by the community!
Big thanks go out to Vasiliy Ivanov for the Russian and to Bojan Jankuloski for the Macedonian translation.

Faster front editing

A new asynchronous asset loading system has been developed.
Front editing uses lots of cool JavaScript to make page editing fast and fun. Now they get loaded only when necessary, making page loading faster than ever.
Page, widget, zone and code editor dialogs already use this new feature.
Also, jQuery UI was upgraded to 1.8b1, which proves to be very stable.

Google Chrome support

Diem editing features can now be used with Firefox or Google Chrome.
Next step: make it available for Safari.

Plugins

The dmWidgetTwitterPlugin has been released. It allows to display tweets from a user or from a search query in your site. All you have to do is drag&drop, as usual.

The dmWidgetFeedReaderPlugin has been released. It displays feed items from a url, and works the same way.

These plugins are well documented and fully extensible.

Additionally, all widget based plugins have been updated to use the new asynchronous asset loading system, and you should consider to upgrade them.

Internal changes

Log services

On the admin homepage you can see logs updated in real-time.
They show the users browsing your site, and report notable events like page creation.
Behind them are the request_log and event_log services. For this release they were rewritten to be faster and more stable. Also, the log format has been changed to make log files lighter.

Transliteration

Transliteration is the practice of converting a text from one writing system into another in a systematic way.
Now Diem transliteration is culture aware and can handle different alphabets.

Bug fixes

Thanks to the rich community feedback, lots of bugs has been fixed.

Code cleaning

An intense internal refactoring and cleaning was performed to keep the Diem codebase as light and clean as possible. Some unused classes and methods were removed. The law of demeter was applied whenever possible in Diem's internal services.

As this release is compatible with Diem 5.0 BETA3, upgrading is highly recommended to get the best Diem has to offer!

• Download Diem 5.0 BETA4
• View Diem 5.0 BETA4 version notes

Let's try it

front http://demo.diem-project.org/

admin http://demo.diem-project.org/admin

Username: admin
Password: admin

What to try

Admin

Content

Open the content menu and browse the site contents.
Try the Diem admin interface and verify that it will fit your customers needs.
Have a look at the versioning interface, the sorting interface, batch actions, search engine, foreign column sorting and markdown editors.

Tools

Open the tool menu and try some features Diem packages natively.
Have a look at the customizable configuration panel, the nice generated charts and the log view.
Also, give the media library a try.

SEO

Open the Seo menu and run the sitemap generator and the automatic page meta builder.

System

Have a look at the generated database and dependecy injection diagrams, check the server configuration and browse the error log.
Unfortunatly, for obvious security reasons, you won't have access to the AJAX terminal nor the code editor ;)

Front

Open the left PAGES panel and navigate with the page tree, or the right MEDIA panel and browse the media library.

Try the buttons on the lower toolbar. You are allowed to create pages, and modify urls and metas.

By clicking on the magnifier, you toggle ON the page edition. It allows you to drag&drop widgets around the page, and transform it to a joyfull mess.

Click the Add button and drag&drop nice things all around.

See the code

As you probably noticed, the demo is a full copy of this website.
Play with it is fun, but do you wanna see what's inside?

This is possible as this website is open source. You can download it, and get the exact same demo running on your computer.

Download and install diem-project.