ANN: Mezzanine 1.1 and Cartridge 0.5 released

[Stephen McDonald]

Hi all,

I'm happy to announce releases of Mezzanine 1.1 and Cartridge 0.5!

The lead up to Mezzanine 1.0 and Cartridge 0.4 a few months ago was mostly about dropping support for older Django versions and generally cleaning things up. These latest releases are the result of a focus on new features over the last few months. Here are the major additions in Mezzanine 1.1:

- New mezzanine.accounts app that extends the existing signup/login functionality to include customisable user fields, AUTH_PROFILE_MODULE integration, profile forms, public profile pages, auth backend for login via email or lost password token, and optional email verification for new account

- Full multi-tenancy, where multiple sites can be hosted on a single running instance 

- New optional caching strategy, using a combination of two-phased rendering and mint caching

- Integrated fabric deployments for building and deploying production environments

Other minor enhancements include:

- Akismet integration for filtering spam comments and form posts 

- Better support for hosting static content on CDNs

- Content field sanitization with varying configurable filter levels 

- Full support for Django 1.4's timezones 

- Automatic integration with django-compressor when installed 

- New "Link" content type for external links 

- Page loading and page processor handling is now in middleware - this allows seamless "zero config" integration between the page tree and third-party apps 

- New {% overextends %} tag allowing project templates to simultaneously override and extend app templates (circular inheritance)

- Enhanced primary nav (now uses Bootstrap's dropdowns)

The work on Cartridge since 0.4 has been minimal, and mostly been around keeping it in line with changes to Mezzanine. Other than that, there have been a couple of nice new additions:

- Authenticated users can now view their order history

- Discount codes can now have a limited number of uses

And of course for both projects, there have been a ton of fixes and documentation updates. We also now have a #mezzanine IRC channel on freenode, so please drop by.

There's been a huge increase in community participation and contribution since the Mezzanine 1.0 release a few months ago. A big thanks goes to everyone who has been a part of it.

- Mezzanine 1.1 changelog: http://mezzanine.jupo.org/docs/colophon.html#version-1-1-0-jun-03-2012

- Cartridge 0.5 changelog: http://cartridge.jupo.org/colophon.html#version-0-5-0-jun-03-2012

- Mezzanine project homepage and Mezzanine/Cartridge demo site: http://mezzanine.jupo.org

- Mezzanine/Cartridge mailing list: http://groups.google.com/group/mezzanine-users 

- Mezzanine docs: http://mezzanine.jupo.org/docs/

- Mezzanine repo: https://github.com/stephenmcd/mezzanine 

- Mezzanine issue tracker: https://github.com/stephenmcd/mezzanine/issues 

- Cartridge docs: http://cartridge.jupo.org

- Cartridge repo: https://github.com/stephenmcd/cartridge 

- Cartridge issue tracker: https://github.com/stephenmcd/cartridge/issues 

Cheers,

Steve

--
Stephen McDonald
http://jupo.org