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The first release candidate for Serendipity 1.4 can now be downloaded.

Serendipity 1.4 mainly addresses improvements in the now Double-Opt-In comment subscription (plus support for fulltext comment notifications) and ships with a new bundled default WYSIWYG editing component (Xinha, the successor of HTMLArea). This new component is more reliable and cross-browser capable than the old version, by still supporting everything that worked with HTMLArea previously.

Things that are visually noticeable include a new "widget-style" configuration option for the "Entryproperties"-Plugin, so that you can arrange and enable/disable each feature of that plugin to your own liking. Also you can now configure each sidebar plugin directly from your frontend.

Also, the Bulletproof has now been promted as new default template, imitating the design of the previous default template - but offering a now completely new distinct default look to the admin panel.

The Remote RSS-Feed sidebar plugin now is templated, so that you can achieve distinct look for certain feeds on the sidebar.

Serendipity also addresses some minor bugs usually only affecting very special environments. Other changes include new PostgreSQL ts_vector fulltext search, comment approval-by-mail for the spamblock plugin, better HTTP header status updates for CGI environments. For developers, some API improvements and new variables/parameters have been added. The performance of the entryroperties plugin can be enhanced by new configuration options that let you fiddle with the involved SQL generation.

The complete list of all changes is documented within the docs/NEWS file of the release. This serendipity release is also the first one to include checksums to verify your installation integrity.

Updating is easy and documented online: Just upload the new files onto your web, possibly refresh/purge your browser cache (and if you upgrade from Serendipity older than 1.2, you might need to purge your old cookies), go to the admin panel and you're done. For shared installations, make sure all deployed htmlarea directories are updated with the new files (if not, the old htmlarea will still be there, not Xinha).

Also, the new version contains release checksums. This makes sure that the files you uploaded correspond with the checksums generated through the release. This way, bad FTP uploads will no longer be driving you nuts. If this makes any trouble for you, try to upload the files in BINARY mode in your FTP client.

Please report any trouble with this new release candidate on the Serendipity Forums or here on this blog. Even though we find this release quite stable and generally believe it production ready, feedback is much required. If all goes well, the final version will be released in december.

For the future, Serendipity is still planning on minor and major features. We always keep a close ear to the wishes of our users, some of those that cannot be solved instantly have been documented here: Future of Serendipity. If you're a developer or designer, and want to help in proving that Serendipity is a flexible and easy to use Blogging/CMS-application - your help is needed and appreciated!

I have just checked in the initial qooxdoo TextMate bundle into qooxdoo-contrib. TextMate is a very popular editor on the Mac, which is very easy to extend. Some time ago I started to hack on a TextMate bundle for qooxdoo just for fun. Thanks to some requests from the community and from my Mac using colleagues Jonny and Martin, I polished the old bundle, added some support for qooxdoo 0.8 and checked it in. You can easily give it a try by following the installation instructions in our wiki.

The bundle is still very basic. It supports building and running the application (Both source and build versions). Further it is able to verify the validity of the JavaScript code and checking it using qooxdoo's lint program.

I would like to encourage everyone to help growing this bundle. There are many simple yet very useful ways everyone can contribute. E.g. I would like to see much more code snipplets for common qooxdoo constructs and maybe some file templates to create new files. Let me know if you want to contribute.

After a couple of late nights reloading repository dumps and learning new and wonderful unexpected “features” of mixing svn:externals and svnsync, I’m happy to announce that publicsvn.songbirdnest.com is finally available again.

Timelines are back up as well.

All external developers will need to repull their trees; these repositories—multiple—are entirely new SVN repos, with different UUIDs. Some Subversion clients will ignore this (minor?) detail, and you can still update repos, but it’s likely to cause grief later.

Also, the repository paths have changed; please see our developer documentation on Checking out the Code for details on the changes and to figure out what you will want to repull.

We apologize for the inconvenience caused by having to repull trees, but we were long due for a repository reorganization.

An overview of some of the changes:

• Different kinds of code are split out into different repositories
• Branching and tagging will now follow standard Subversion practice, i.e. no more $tagName/trunk directories.
• Brand new, faster publicsvn server (thanks Tyler!)
• https is no longer supported on publicsvn, since it’s not necessary. This reduces load on the server, meaning faster pulls for you!
• Backups are more manageable; backups of our main repository now take five minutes instead of three hours; restores take twenty minutes instead of twelve hours); this means other processes, like mirroring changesets to publicsvn, is faster!
• We’ve pruned code that wasn’t necessary for a standard Songbird build, meaning faster pull and update times!

Thanks to everyone for being patient while we worked all the details out, and thank you to Mitch on IRC, whose pestering kept me honest while we did this; I needed it.

Now that you’ve had a chance to try Songbird 0.6, here’s a view to the road ahead.

Today we are launching the Songbird Release Roadmap. Behold the next three Songbird release codenames and themes:

• Fugazi: Improve performance and focus on usability.
• Genesis: Continue to improve performance and add features consumers expect in a music player.
• Hall: Integrate Web services.

The roadmap has deep links to feature specifications, Bugzilla implementation tracking and your feedback powered by GetSatisfaction. We’ll continuously update the roadmap with the most current planned features, specifications, release dates and more.

Please have look and give us a chirp. We’re listening.

Over the past few months we’ve heard from a number of users asking us to focus on performance optimizations for the next version of Songbird. Today, we’re excited to share our progress. If you can’t wait for Songbird 0.6 to ship (it lands in early June) you can try our latest blessed nightlies and judge our performance improvements for yourself. Alternatively, you can watch the following video to see the progress we’re making!

Songbird Library Performance Enhancements from Songbird on Vimeo.

The screencast linked to above focuses on the performance gains we made during this release specific to optimizations around the library. You’ll note Songbird now supports importing and managing significantly larger media libraries, scrolling in the application is now fluid, and filtering media is much faster.

But wait, there’s more!

We have made some huge improvements that should greatly reduce memory usage on Windows and Linux. We now have jemalloc turned on for the base framework, XULRunner, on Win32 and Linux. We followed Mozilla’s lead and didn’t turn it on on the Mac because the OS X allocator performs well. On Linux, jemalloc has been turned on for over a month, but Win32 took a little more work.

We provide packages to the developer community of the Mozilla base of our code (XULRunner) in both release and debug mode. When we first tried to enable jemalloc + XULRunner the application would not compile out of the box when set to debug mode. We spent a lot of time and effort getting that specific configuration working, which was the cause of the delay for Win32. We’re currently working on upstreaming that patch, since Mozilla engineers ran into the same exact problem with Firefox a few days ago.

The performance improvement in memory is about 15-20%, depending on task. jemalloc is currently only used for the XULRunner stack; while this represents a significant portion of where we spend our processing time (as can be seen by the memory usage improvement), we’re investigating using jemalloc as the allocator for our Songbird stack.

jemalloc’s design goal was a “scaleable, concurrent” allocator. Since we make more use of multiple threads than many applications, we’re excited at the prospect of another possible performance gain.

Songbird 0.6 is still a few weeks out from launching, stay tuned for some additional performance improvements that will land that improve our search functionality!

With the recent release of Safari 3.1 the WebKit team has completely reworked the handling of key events. John Resig has an interesting blog article with some details. Safari 3.1 now behaves pretty much like Internet Explorer and is in general much more sane than before. For instance, all those strange key codes larger than 64000 for special keys are gone and finally modifier keys like "shift" and "control" fire key events as well. Interestingly, Safari is now the first browser to support the key identifier property defined in the DOM level 3 event specification. In qooxdoo we already emulate this property in key events for quite some time now, and it really helps to simplify key handler code in our widgets.

Unfortunately, this change in Safari 3.1 broke the existing qooxdoo key event handler. But it is already fixed and available in our subversion repository for legacy_0_7_x branch and trunk. The fix was basically to detect the current WebKit version and use the existing Internet Explorer key handler code also for Safari 3.1 and above. Since all browser quirks are handled separately this was a pretty simple fix. Of course, it will be part of the next minor release 0.7.4 as well as the final 0.8. If you need Safari 3.1 support now, please checkout the latest version from the legacy_0_7_x branch.

In our constant quest for cross-platform compatibility we are especially proud to announce support for the legendary Netscape Navigator 4 browsers with qooxdoo 0.8. This browser, in its latest stable 4.08 release, has had a major impact on Internet usage and browser experience, and still maintains a small but die-hard community of users (Netscape's shares of the browser market total at about 0.68%).

This is another step forward to show qooxdoo's commitment to real world technologies and to help protect existing investments. We are particularly happy to present qooxdoo support for this platform in the 10th anniversary of its most recent release.

Happy Birthday, Netscape 4!

we are proud to announce the first official release of QWT, the “qooxdoo Web Toolkit”. In short this contribution to the qooxdoo framework is like “qooxdoo for Java”: Write your qooxdoo application in Java, and QWT will translate the client part into a pure JavaScript application. It is quite similar to GWT, the Google Web Toolkit, but with QWT you can use the high-quality qooxdoo widgets and its comprehensive set of classes.

Have a look at the preliminary QWT homepage and give it a try. Please use the regular qooxdoo-contrib-devel mailing list for feedback and discussion.

Cheers,

Michael

Get Onboard

Download Songbird 0.5 (release notes)

New in 0.5

0.5 Final has entered the station with hundreds of bug-fixes and several new features:

MTP Device support
Windows users have a shiny new MTP Add-on that introduces MTP Device Support! Most portable media players and cell phones integrate the MTP spec so try plugging in your device and share your findings on the MTP Device Compatibility Wiki Page. The extension requires Windows XP-SP2 or Vista, as well as WMP v11.

Media Views
Tired of music players that look like spreadsheets? Media Views provide new ways of displaying, manipulating, exploring, and contextualizing your media library. Songbird ships with two default views: a traditional playlist view, and a second playlist view with three filter panes. Developers can create new Media Views and upload them to the Add-ons site. This example media page replaces the standard playlist filters with tag clouds. To experience your music web 2.0 style, load your library, then select Tag Cloud from the View menu. Click the tags to toggle the filtering on and off.

Improved Filter Picker
Genre, Artist, and Album aren’t the only useful ways to filter your music collection. We’ve streamlined the filter picker list and fixed a few bugs that make it easier than ever to navigate your collection.

New List Background
After several requests from our community we’ve made our Library and Playlist backgrounds easier on your eyes. Keep sending us your ideas, suggestions, and requests, your feedback helps us improve the ‘bird!

Improved Rating UI
We’ve clarified the rating widget display by showing circles for unrated items and improved usability by allowing you to more easily change or un-rate a track.

Hot Keys on the Mac
Mac users, you can now use common hot-keys to quit, hide, or open Songbird preferences just like the rest of your applications. We also fixed the issue which allowed the application to be dragged under the menu bar, yay!

Always on Top
Never lose your Rubberducky Mini Player under a stack of windows! Now you can set it to always be on top. Any Feather developer can expose this feature in their feather.

Developer Resources

New Webpage API Events and Listeners
The Webpage API features new events you can observe. The events, and examples on how you can observe them, are detailed here.

Media Views Guide
We’ve created a Media Views guide to help you get started.

Always on Top
It’s now a simple install.rdf change for Feathers developers to flag their Feathers as capable of supporting Always-on-Top.

Feather Updater Guide
We’ve also added a guide on updating 0.4 Feathers to be 0.5 compatible.

Release Notes

We’re in the early stages of migrating our iPod Device Support Add-on to Songbird’s new device API so you’ll notice it’s missing from the 0.5 Add-ons bundle. Note that while you can still manually add the iPod extension to 0.5 it is known to exhibit issues. Fret not, the update will be released either in 0.6 or shortly after the launch (which should land in late May/early June.) Stay tuned, additional details on what’s planned for 0.6 coming soon!

ShareThis

Serendipity 1.3 has finally been released. The new release is mainly a feature consolidation release, but also contains XSS security fixes:

• The karma rating plugin has been upgraded to support nice, CSS-based rating graphics (see this post) and an overall rehaul on the its coding.
• Make the Spartacus plugin be able to use FTP upload, a workaround for SafeMode PHP restrictions. Also add a remote backend for plugin update checks.
• An importer for phpNuke and lifetype has been added.
• Support for pingbacks has been improved a lot. Trackbacks can now be blocked based on Sender IP checks.
• Add better CSS styling for some internal plugins and the embedding of images. Also made the Remote-RSS plugin to be capable of Smarty-Templating.
• Increased Smarty templating features for the {serendipity_fetchPrintEntries} function, to be able to check for entry properties.
• Add support for SQRelay.
• Minor CSS and graphic updates to the Bulletproof template.

The full list of 41 changes to this release are documented within the NEWS file.

Regarding Security, the bundled Smarty library has been updated to version 2.6.19 and adresses an issue in environments where the PHP security mode is required. Also, the new Serendipity release contains tighter backend XSS checks so that environments with untrusted authors can be more secure - many thanks to Hanno Böck for addressing this. Most importantly, an issue with XSS attacks within received trackbacks has been discovered by Peter Hüwe and was fixed.

The update is easy as usual, and recommended for Serendipity users - especially if you do not regularly moderate or check your incoming trackbacks.

Upgrade pointers can be found in the FAQ and is as easy as just to upload the new files.

Have fun!

We are planning to build a base of official testers for WikkaWiki, this post is to announce the launch of our beta-testing programme and the availability of (unstable) nightly builds from our code repository.
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we are proud to announce the first official release of QWT, the “qooxdoo Web Toolkit”. In short this contribution to the qooxdoo framework is like “qooxdoo for Java”: Write your qooxdoo application in Java, and QWT will translate the client part into a pure JavaScript application. It is quite similar to GWT, the Google Web Toolkit, but with QWT you can use the high-quality qooxdoo widgets and its comprehensive set of classes.

Have a look at the preliminary QWT homepage and give it a try. Please use the regular qooxdoo-contrib-devel mailing list for feedback and discussion.

Cheers,

Michael

We are happy to announce a comprehensive maintenance release qooxdoo 0.7.3. It includes many bugfixes and improvements that any qooxdoo application should benefit from. It is recommended that existing custom applications built with previous qooxdoo versions are being migrated to this stable and mature release.

Besides the many bugfixes, there are a few new features to mention:

• Cross-browser logging features based on Firebug Lite
• A source-code validation utility similar to JSLint, executed by a simple "make lint"
• Re-worked feedreader to demonstrate best practices for application development
• Early preview of the next-generation build tool generator2.

For more information about the many bugfixes and other improvements of 0.7.3 please see the detailed release notes. Be careful that a very small number of changes (particularly related to theming the virtual table widget) might effect your custom application and require manual adjustments. Other than that migration to the current release should be fairly easy, since the (semi-)automatic migration support doesn't really have anything to cover. Most changes were made "under the hood".

Thanks to all the people that not only noticed some problems, but made them known to everybody else by either posting to the mailing list or opening a ticket in bugzilla. Some community members took the chance to further analyse, and fix some issues, and contribute them back to the project. Whatever your involvement into this open source project is, it is highly appreciated.

Enjoy the new release!

• Download qooxdoo
• Rate qooxdoo

Ring in the new year with Songbird 0.4!

Us birders have been giving Santa’s hardworking elves a run for their cookies this holiday season, and we’re ready to release a final Songbird 0.4 for Developers just in time to ring in the new year.

Download it from the Songbird Developer Center.

It’s been less than 2 months since we released Songbird 0.3 and introduced our new open development platform, but we’ve built in a few new juicy tidbits that we couldn’t wait to get out. In particular, check out the following new features:

Our new year’s resolution is to release early and often, so you can expect similarly quick cycles throughout 2008.

Happy New Year!
The Songbird Team

We love all the feathers that have been coming in lately. Since the 0.3 pre-release lots of people have been customizing their birds, and the results have been pretty cool.

With 0.4 coming out though it's time to make sure the existing feathers continue working. Fortunately not too much has changed, and updating is almost as easy as modifying the version compatibility metadata.

If you designed feathers for 0.3, take a look at our Updating to 0.4 HOWTO (Thanks to Pino for helping with this).

If you'd like to create new feathers for 0.4, grab the latest nightly and check out the developer center.

At WikkaWiki we love wiki markup. Wiki markup is a simple and fast way to generate well structured XHTML output using a light, plain-text format that you can safely copy and paste. This is the reason why we all tend to prefer editor toolbars (or directly writing wiki markup) over feature-bloated and unaccessible WYSIWYG plugins that produce ill-structured XHTML.

Following this idea, Olivier–who recently joined the Wikka Developer Team–has done a tremendous work and rewritten the editor toolbar from scratch. The result is truly amazing and is called: “WikkaEdit”.

WikkaEdit is a new streamlined Wikka editor toolbar with more user-friendly features and a new and improved look-and-feel. It replaces the WikiEdit toolbar by Roman Ivanov, bundled with Wikka since the very first release and currently discontinued.

The basic version of WikkaEdit is included in the development branch of WikkaWiki 1.1.6.4 and features the following improvements:

• lighter and more performant code;
• improved cross-browser compatibility;
• self-resizing editor;
• additional buttons;
• improved search and replace functionality;
• indent/unindent using tab;
• new keyboard shortcuts;

But–guess what–this is just the beginning! If