Apostrophe 1.5 is out!
Tom Boutell
Here’s a partial list of new features. We’ve tried hard to edit this
down and remove technical things you’ll discover simply by enjoying a
better experience, but it is still a long list!
* Manual cropping in the media repository. You can now select images
that would not have met the constraints for a particular slot
previously, as long as you crop them
* Big improvements in performance: CSS and JavaScript are minified and
compressed to reduce the number of requests and the amount of traffic,
speeding page load and helping the server run more smoothly. A new
JavaScript integration strategy improves overall performance as well
* Page permissions completely reworked: you can now set “view”
permissions on a per-page, per-individual-or-group basis. Edit
permissions can now be set on a per-group-or-individual basis.
Inheritance of permissions from parent pages has been discarded in
favor of explicit one-time “cascade to child pages” features
* Pages you cannot visit due to a lack of privileges are no longer
shown in navigation
* “Audio” media type added, allowing you to directly host MP3 files
with a nice MP3 player and an audio slot that embeds it
* Built-in support for the LESS CSS compiler make stylesheets much
easier to maintain
* Media types are much more open. For instance there is now an
“Office” type for MS Office documents, plus text files and a few other
related things. You can override these types via app.yml
* We added a “File” slot and deprecated the old PDF slot. The “File”
slot can be used for any downloadable file format you have chosen to
allow on the site, such as a Word document
* Vimeo, Viddler and SlideShare now gets the same “special treatment”
as YouTube when adding video (integrated search, support for pasting
just the URL), and there is a simple way to add support for more such
embedded services via plugins. We've also improved our support for
"unknown" embed codes
* You can set up Vimeo, Viddler, SlideShare and YouTube accounts to be
automatically synced to your media repository via a cron job and our
new “Linked Accounts” feature. This too can be extended
* Videos can be replaced with new videos, even videos from another
service, without editing each slot that uses them
* A new “Smart Slideshow” slot brings in images automatically via
categories or tags
* Categories have been unified throughout the site; there is a single
category admin page. This makes Apostrophe more consistent and
extensible
* A single “Upload Media” form now accepts all permitted file types,
no more separate UIs for images vs. PDFs etc. Uploaded filenames are
automatically “humanized” to become a suggested title, saves a great
deal of time if your media is already well-labeled
* iPhone and other cameras that save orientation hints in JPEGs are
now fully compatible, Apostrophe auto-rotates these images
* Pages now have meta tag and description fields; Google doesn’t care
about tags, but our internal search feature can leverage them to
produce more relevant results
* Eliminated confusing distinction between “template-based” and
“engine” pages (engines still exist "under the hood" for developers).
There is one page type menu and configuration has been simplified as
well
* New import-site task accepts XML files and loads a full-fledged
Apostrophe site, including conversion of HTML blocks with embedded
images into a series of rich text and image slots in an area
* Batch import of all filetypes supported by the upgraded media
repository (Word, Excel, etc. in addition to images, PDFs…)
* Button slots can now feature an optional rich text description for
more flexibility
* Search has been enhanced. You can now search on specific fields
(title, slug, tags, categories, body) and appropriate fields are given
extra weight in ordinary search results. Example: title:”monkey
mittens”
* The culture can be part of the page URL for better SEO of
internationalized sites
* Apostrophe sites can be a subdirectory of an existing site (although
we strongly recommend a holistic rethink of your site if you're
considering this in most cases)
* Better pagination
* “This Page” button eliminated in favor of separate “Page Settings”
and “Add Page” buttons. You can now set all of the properties of a new
page at creation time. Managing pages is just plain pleasant
* Many other usability improvements
* Full names and email addresses are now part of the user management
system, not just usernames
**** Blog Plugin Upgrades ****
* A major upgrade to blog plugin functionality, stability and usability
* Apostrophe’s events feature is integrated with Google Calendar,
Outlook and iCal among others thanks to the vCalendar standard. Fully
tested for Outlook compatibility back to 2003
* Completely revamped the "blog posts" and "events" slots with
excellent typeahead search for picking individual posts, easy
selection of tags and categories for automatic selection of relevant
content
* Extensive usability and reliability improvements to the blog and
event editing and browsing experience
* Separate public blog pages can be separately designed, in addition
to selecting specific categories for inclusion as before
* Category, tag, search and date filters can be combined naturally
when browsing events and blog posts
* Blog posts can be searched from within the blog, events can be
searched from within the events calendar
* Better outgoing RSS feeds from the blog plugin
* * *
The team has worked long and hard on Apostrophe 1.5 and we look
forward to building many beautiful sites with it. We know you will
too.
We’d also like to acknowledge numerous thoughtful tickets and helpful
patches from the Apostrophe open source community. Your contributions
make Apostrophe a better and more stable content management system for
everyone.
* * *
Apostrophe 1.5 is now the latest stable and officially supported
release of Apostrophe. We are upgrading our own projects and there is
an upgrade page in the Wiki. We are addressing security bugs in 1.4,
but the answer to many questions will henceforth be "first upgrade to
1.5."
Finally, a note about i18n: yes, we know we need to make up to date
i18n phrases available and give svn access to more translators, and we
will hit that. Feel free to nag me about it. (:
--
Tom Boutell
P'unk Avenue
215 755 1330
punkave.com
window.punkave.com
Geoff DiMasi
Tom Boutell
Quentin Dugauthier
Thanks P'unk Avenue for this new, great release!
On a sidenote: Tom, I can't find back information about me getting write access for French translation in the SVN. Can you check if I have access with my account and give me necessary rights if necessary?
Quentin.
introvert
Justen Doherty
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Tom Boutell
handing out svn access again (:
Pablo Godel
Geoff DiMasi
Geoff DiMasi
