Today Web Framework / News: Recent posts

I have merged the Today project into the Drupal content management system, which is one of a very few CMS packages that seems to have captured the core vision I had for Today. The code for Today may still prove useful to people learning PHP or needing just a couple of simple functions, so I'll leave it publicly available. Please visit http://www.drupal.org/ to learn about the CMS that I am now using to manage my sites.... read more

Version 0.5.1 is now in CVS but will probably not be released as a tarball because it's about to be replaced. If you download, be sure to get the latest version of newswire.inc, because it had a subtle SQL bug that caused some stories to mysteriously disappear from the wire under rare conditions. The bug is fixed, and there was no actual data loss (just records not found).

The latest release of Today adds a lot of new features and bug fixes. This is the recommended version for all further testing.

The main feature of this new release is the ability for users to create their own login accounts. There is an email message sent to the new user, containing a coded URL which they must visit in order to activate their account. This ensures that the email address they enter is valid.

0.4.8 is the most stable release currently, but 0.5.0 (a milestone release) is due out approximately November 25.

The new alpha release is almost exclusively a bug fix, but it is the recommended version for all users. The next release is intended to be a feature-release cycle.

There is not a new checkpoint release in the past couple of weeks because of my being out of the country on business, but a new version is checked into CVS as of today. This is the beginning of another checkpoint release which should be out within a few days.

The current recommended version is the CVS snapshot even though it doesn't have a release number quite yet. It lacks features for the next (0.4.5) release, but what's there is pretty stable for an alpha.

Version 0.4.4 of the Today framework adds support for light HTML markup of news articles plus a feature to automatically document this capability for users. Pseudo-markup (e.g., having empty lines imply paragraph breaks) is also auto-documented for users. This feature is implemented for the Contribute and Story Edit pages.

Welcome to release 0.4.3 alpha of the Today Web Framework. The most important new feature is the web-based story edit function, which allows you to review and approve contributed articles without resorting to SQL commands. There are also numerous bug-fixes and some additional smarts in the security system.

This is still a very early pre-production release, and should accordingly not be used in production environments unless you are prepared to accept the commensurate risk.... read more

The prototype version of the RSS news feed now contains actual content. Newsfeeds are also able to select a specific national language edition.

I have uploaded the existing source code, including a bash script to create the database structures, to SourceForge. There is documentation, currently in AbiWord, but I want to do a little updating before posting that. The current documentation has some outdated material, and wrong docs are worse than none. The code contains a lot of comments, though. If anyone wants a snapshot of the AbiWord documentation before release, please e-mail me and I'll send it.

The SourceForge site has been established, and we are currently in the process of initializing things. Files will be posted very soon. Current release level is 0.4Alpha.