Ariadne 9.0 RC 1

[Auke Van Slooten]

Hi everyone,

We just packaged the first release candidate for Ariadne 9.0. This release includes a lot of new stuff which we hope will help foster renewed interest in our CMS. You can download it at ftp://ftp.muze.nl/pub/ariadne/ariadne.9.0rc1.zip or ftp://ftp.muze.nl/pub/ariadne/ariadne.9.0rc1.tgz

Because it includes so much new stuff, we'd like to be really sure everything works as expected before you try upgrading any production systems to this version. We would however appreciate it if you could install and testdrive it and send us all your bug reports. We will be switching to github as our main repository starting with Ariadne 9.0 at http://github.com/ariadne-cms/ariadne/. If you do find a problem, please add an issue for it at: https://github.com/Ariadne-CMS/ariadne/issues

We will add documentation for all new features in the coming weeks, but the major changes are as follows:

• Ariadne now includes an inline WYSIWYG editor, built by Vedor.com. This is an opensourced and updated version of the Vedor Editor that was available closed source since 2005. It is completely overhauled and now touch-friendly. There are still a few minor issues in Firefox and IOS, but it mostly works. It also has keyboard navigation, use ctrl-space to trigger the popup toolbar and then use the cursor keys to navigate the menu.
  
• This release adds project scaffolds. This means that you can start a new project, choose a scaffold, and all the drudgery of creating a new project structure and adding config.ini templates is done automatically. Creating a new project has never been easier.
• Muze has created a set of re-usable components and a base project and layout library based on our years of experience building sites with Ariadne. This set of libraries is opensource and shipped with Ariadne 9.0. See /system/lib/muze/ for more details. We'll write extensive documentation and tutorials on how to use these libraries in the coming weeks. For now just take a look at the new demo site: /projects/madcat/, also available as a scaffold.
• Included in the muze libraries is a logging debugger and a preview version of our next-gen browser-based IDE: helene. The debugger is already usable, although it eats a lot of memory right now. Simply start the debugger by calling the 'debugger.html' template. It will run your normal view.html template and collect information along the way. This is then presented for you to dig down to any problems you may have. The debugger and helene are only active if you configure your project to be in development or test state, using the new config.ini setting: env.dtap. It is set to 'dev' by default in the /projects/ config.ini.

Other smaller new features are:

• Support for closures in pinp templates. You can create anonymous functions and pass them to PHP functions that require a callback parameter. You can also pass a closure to an event listener, or to ar::call(), instead of calling a template.
• A new and improved caching system gives you much more control over what to cache and how to cache it. In addition it magically detects if any part of a cached page is changed and flushes that cache to automatically generate a new up-to-date one.
• We added a new api to handle Ariadne files, with ar('content/files') and ar('http/files')
• We added filtering on event handlers using ar('events')->listen('event')->match($filter)->call($template)
• Support for less and markdown parsing using ar('formats/less') and ar('formats/markdown')

And lots more, see the Changes file for a full list as usual. We'll try to get a decent set of tutorials and reference documentation for all the new stuff, but we didn't want to keep anyone waiting any longer to see what we've been doing over the winter. So download and testdrive the newest Ariadne version from ftp://ftp.muze.nl/pub/ariadne/ariadne.9.0rc1.zip right now!

regards,

Auke van Slooten

Muze

[Auke Van Slooten]

Hi,

We've made a new release candidate, RC2, which fixes a number of issues. You can download it  from ftp://ftp.muze.nl/pub/ariadne/ariadne.9.0rc2.zip

This release fixes a few issues we had with the new typetree.ini templates on /system/. The template is now moved to /.

In addition we split the typetree.ini in /system/lib/muze/cms/base/ into a project part, which is still there and a site part, which is now in the base-layout lib in /system/lib/muze/layout/base/

The madcat demo scaffold had a missing library, so the pphotobook views generated errors. This has been fixed as well.

There were some issues with the new caching system. In certain cases it wouldn't clean or invalidate existing cache images. That now works as expected.

One thing that is not yet confirmed as a problem, but might be, is in the new mysqli store. We switched from the deprecated mysql_* functions in PHP to mysqli. This introduced a new problem, the mysqli functions don't handle persistent connections in the same way as the old mysql_* functions. So we've build our own connection pooling system. This should re-use existing connections, but it seems that there may be some problems here. In general you should need at most two mysql connections for each apache process. So if you configure apache to have max. 100 processes, you should configure mysql to at least accept 200 connections. It seems that in some circumstances this may not be the case and you can run out of mysql connections. We're searching hard to find the problem here, if anyone triggers this issue, we very much would like to know which webserver and version you are using, which mysql version, what the configs of both are, which PHP version you are using and any other 'non-standard' configuration changes you think may impact this.

So, please check out the Ariadne 9.0 RC 2 and tell us if you find any issues.

Auke van Slooten

Muze