I was going to call 0.3.7, "The Bugfix Release", and, while it's true, we did fix a whole bunch of bugs, the dev team has been kinda sidetracked here lately and I'm not 100% sure we got 'em all. So, I'm going to call this release, "0.3.7 - I haven't had a bug report in a while".
I could go over all of the fixes, and there are quite a few, but it'd be easier to just point you to the CHANGELOG.
I will tell you about one fix, because it's still fresh in my mind, Kurt Wall found, and fixed, a bug in the remote sync if you're using the scp option. I use rsync on my development machine, and this site is updated via a ssh session, so I don't think I've used the scp option more than once or twice during the initial testing. So, a big thanks goes out to Kurt as I don't think the problem would've been caught for quite some time were it not for his input.
As for some of the new features, (yes, features, because we can't leave well enough alone), Doug has been uber-busy. Doug has added some code to support user templates that won't get clobbered on subsequent updates. "What does that mean?", you ask. Well, basically, if you spend a lot of time tweaking templates to support all of the features that make your site uniquely your own, you won't have to worry about the updater for 0.3.8 coming in and wiping out all of your hard work. The trick to it is, put your modified templates in a directory called "user_templates" in your CONF_DIR. See, neat feature and really easy to use.
Doug also wrote the new installer, which makes use of md5sums to make sure nothing got fubar'ed during the download and also wrote libbblog, a little helper library used in the installer and parts of the bblog script.
Doug has also added a way for the community to add unsupported user scripts to the installation to provide functionality beyond what bashblogger provides. I would like to emphasize the emphasized unsupported. While I'm sure some of you out there are even busier than any of us on the dev team, work has been demanding on all of us and personal life tends to limit some of the things we have time or energy to maintain.
Kevin and his wife recently had another child, Doug has had a pretty hectic schedule at work, and I've lost an Uncle in the past month, been through a lot of weird work stuff myself and I have a 14 month old daughter to raise. If you have a script that does some neat thing that you want to share with other bashblogger users but it's in ruby, python, perl or some other scripting language or it's a weird edge case that only you and your cousin Edna will use, please don't be upset if we put it in the unsupported user scripts directory in the tarball. We really want to use your work, and we'd love to implement every cool feature we come across, but there are only so many hours in the day, and decisions have to be made on what we have the time and energy to maintain.
Well, now that I've sufficiently bummed all of you kids out, I can at least tell you about the three user scripts included by Doug. For those of you who want a calendar on the main page, there's now a user script that will create one, complete with links to the days you posted. There's also a script to list your "recently listened" stuff from last.fm and the final script grabs your "Currently at Home" queue from Netflix and tacks it up on the sidebar. I'd love to see more user scripts, so send 'em on in.
Speaking of the calendar, the archive functions have been rewritten to include a "days' archive. Meaning, if you post several times a day, there will now be a page listing all of your posts for that day. If you're not following me, here's a much better example. Check through the archives on this site (I haven't updated this site to 0.3.7 yet, I'll get to it, I'm busy). Okay, see how the archives look if you click links all the way through to an article? Okay, now check out Doug's archvies. Click all the way to an article. See the difference? No? Okay, then don't worry about it. It's different. I swear.
You can also, now, optionally, add a list of your article categories to the sidebar through an option in bblog.conf. There's been a little bit of discussion about article categories and link categories and, while it seems clear to me, (in my defense, incongruous shit always seems clear to the author), there has been quite a bit of confusion over some of the naming schemes. So, in the next version, we're going to be dropping article "categories" in favor of article "tags".
In a very real sense, the default behaviour for article categories has always been tag-like since its inception. When we make the change, however, it will be more than just semantics. The "new" tags will enforce slightly different behaviour. For example, tags will be limited to one word and will be forced to all lowercase to maintain consistency. Okay, you got me, it is mostly semantics, but I just know that the one word limit and all-lowercase is gonna net me a bunch of email. However, the link structure for the tags are going to be semantic, microformat-friendly (just like the article categories have been thus far).
Unlike, say, del.icio.us, where pages are dynamically generated and you can create tags all willy-nilly, you'll still need to declare tags with bashblogger under the article sub-menu before you can use them with a new post. I know this is a hassle, but if you happen to run bashblogger on an older server (say, a Pentium 1 with 16MB of RAM) or you're running over SSH on a shared hosting plan, you'll appreciate the fact that you haven't absent-mindedly gone tag-crazy and now have to wait a half hour for all of your tag archive pages to build statically (and your shared hosting provider doesn't find some loophole to kick you to the curb for eating into all of the CPU time).
Okay, I've rambled on long enough. I've still got to submit the new release to Freshmeat, Sourceforge and watch my Tivo'ed episode of Bionic Woman before I go to sleep. Aww crap, I also have to submit some copy to an article I'm writing for the upcoming issue of Full Circle Magazine.
Posted by Phil McClure in Project Release on October 25, 2007