Out now: BETA1!
December 21, 2009 by annis
After several internal rounds of ALPHA versions we are proud to release our first beta into the wild today – champagne!
What's this about, anyway?
You are probably wondering what delicious new things made it into this release so I will give you the birds-eye view. Firstly, this release is about implementing features that the community requested and also about fixing bugs, bugs that were also reported by the community!
Features, features, features
Secondly, this release marks a point in Diem's development, so as long as the community requests features that are worth the effort of implementing for the final version or reports bugs, we will keep iterating in new BETA releases. Keep these feature requests and bug reports coming! You can reach us through the usual channels (Google group, symfony trac, Google Wave, IRC).
What's in it for me?
Usability and accessibility
Also important to us were usability and accessibility. We added the new Diem Core plugin dmAlternativeHelperPlugin which provides Diem template helpers for people without the pound sign on their keyboards. In the Markdown editor you can now select some text and add a link to it by dragging and dropping a page from the pages panel onto it, whereas previously this drag and drop operation resulted in the link being added to the end of the text. This is a big improvement and a real time-saver (we do know from personal experience)! Also of note here is that the Markdown syntax was extended to allow for the addition of css classes and ids to links and media. Of course, in case of images, image dimensions can also be added. You can find the documentation for this right here.
We also took some time to make this version the first to be able to run on Windows©-based servers, thanks to the community providing insight, bug reports, and patches!
Database goodies
The database part also got some love, with Diem now running smoothly on PostgreSQL and SQLite. Furthermore, database versioning is now fully supported with a generated admin interface to manage record revisions (see record versioning documentation) but this needs to be enabled explicitly and does not work on tables that use internationalization.
Simplified installation
That's a nice one as it really makes the installation smoother, which means you can start playing with it even faster! Here's the new way:
mkdir myproject
cd myproject
php ../diem/install See? Smooth.
And a few other...
A few other things also made it into this release. A complete Italian translation has been added thanks to Marco Barberis and the French, Spanish and German ones were updated by their respective authors. The media system is now more flexible to allow for plugins providing media players. Lastly, the unit test suite saw a significant boost in coverage due to the community's work! We now have over 1000 unit tests and will continue towards a full coverage but that will take more time, so keep the tests coming!
Start playing with it now!
To start playing with it, you can either take a look at the installation page or you can do a Subversion checkout:
svn co http://svn.symfony-project.com/plugins/diemPlugin/tags/RELEASE_5_0_0_BETA1 diem As always, report any bugs you find!
The Diem Core team thanks all people that made this release possible and as awesome as it turned out, thank you community!
