LightPress

Wordpress 2.1 has finally been released. Here's a pick from the list of new features:

• Autosave makes sure you never lose a post again.

• The lossless XML import and export makes it easy for you to move your content between WordPress blogs.

• Much more efficient database code, faster than previous versions. (We'd have to check how that compares with lightpress-queries..)

• Links in your blogroll now support sub-categories and you can add categories on the fly.

• Pages can now be drafts, or private.

• Better internationalization and support for right-to-left languages.

• A new version of the Akismet plugin is bundled.

You can go grab the update at wordpress.org but beware: Lightpress won't work with Wordpress > 2.0.x yet! Mainly this is because of the changes to the posts-table and the link-categories.

The posts-table now has a column named "post_type" (which can take 'post' or 'page') and one named 'post_status' which is the usual 'publish', 'draft' or 'private'. The link-categories have been merged into the global categories-table (PLUS, old link-categories get a new id!) and there is a new table called 'link2cat' linking between the two tables.

I'm working on a patch (since my site is already working with wp2.1RC2 and lp2 nightly) and i hope it won't be long.

I have just committed preliminary support for Lighttpd rewrite rules in LightPress. If you feel adventurous, you can download our development package and let us know of anything that needs fixing. I am not a Lighttpd expert, so any input is welcome.

I've been promising this for some time, but now it's finally done: our very own themes site. Now you can try out some of the themes available for LightPress and download the ones you like. There are only a few themes up at the moment, but we'll be adding more as they get submitted. Should be fun!

Our long silence on this blog does mean we have disappeared: we are developing our next batch of major features for LP, and brainstorming our own backend which should hopefully see the light in a couple of months.
If you are feeling adventurous, you can have a look at our internationalization framework which I committed yesterday to the repository. It allows us to centrally manage our themes with a single master copy of each, and output it in different language/charset combinations using gettext translation files. Expect to see its output in our next beta, due RSN.

K1.5 is a new LightPress theme, borrowing heavily from Michael Heilemann's beautiful K2 theme for WordPress. K1.5 is included in our latest release, 1.2.0 alpha 2 (tar.gz archive), which also features a few bugfixes and several minor improvements. On a clean install, alpha 2 automatically activates most tag-related plugins, and uses the archive and category list pages which were unused in previous releases.

If you are curious, you can see K1.5 in action on my English blog. I will probably migrate this site to K1.5 while we finish designing our new layout with Aaron Schaefer.

Fresh off the press, we've decided to release a very early alpha release of LightPress 1.2.0. What's new in this version? Integrated tags.

There's certainly more changes coming for 1.2 but we didn't want to keep this feature to ourselves. Remember that this is an early alpha, so it hasn't gone through much rigorous testing. That said, I've been running it on my personal site for the past few days and it seems to be working out ok. :)

What you get:

• Add tags to posts and pages in the post editing screen. Tags need to be separated by commas but can contain whatever you wish, even spaces.

• Display tags for each post with the PostTags plugin.

• Display a tag cloud with the TagCloud plugin.

• Add your tags (and categories) to the meta keywords field in the page header with the TagMetaKeywords plugin.

• Search your site for tags using the search function or tag URLs.

If this sounds very similar to a certain WordPress plugin, you're not far off. But I like to think this version is better.

Download: lightpress-1.2.0-a1.zip or lightpress-1.2.0-a1.tar.gz

After much testing, feedback from our RC1 users, some bug fixing and copious amounts of coffee, we're pleased to announce the release of LightPress 1.1.0-final.

New since RC1:

• Includes all of the plugins from Plugin Fun Pack 1.0

• Fixed date/times for users whose server is not in the same time zone

• Improved conversion of options from WordPress

• Plus several minor bug fixes

Download: lightpress-1.1.0.zip or lightpress-1.1.0.tar.gz

The elves in the LightPress factory have been working overtime since the last beta, so we are very pleased to announce the release of version 1.1.0-RC1. Fred, the newest member of our development team, was instrumental in buffing this release to a polished shine.

What's new in RC1:

• A built-in caching feature (see Ludo's post on speed comparisons) which can be activated from the plugin pages

• Improved integration into the WP interface

• PostMeta plugin which auto-populates template tags using post meta data

• A regression testing framework and our first test suite, "Fred" (not part of the download)

• Minor bug fixes

The rather long Changelog is copied below can be viewed here.

Beta 3 is almost ready to be released, with two new important features: a regression testing engine that Jerome is developing which will allow us to thouroughly test new releases, and a new built-in caching system.

We already had a few caching objects lying around, but were missing an appropriate hook where to plug the cache. We now have the hook, and a sketch of the supporting WP plugin to configure the cache engine. The results are not so bad, as the speed with caching enabled is 8x the speed without caching, which should make us faster than wp-cache (did you have any doubt?).

What spurred us into action is an interesting thread on the wp-hackers mailing list (take the time to read Jason Hoffman's messages as they are worth it), and particularly a phrase by Matt which we hope won't hold true for long. :)

1.1.0 beta2 fixes the paths and escaping bugs spotted by Jerome, and adds a couple of new features:

• comments are now enabled for pages (called static posts in LP)

• the new

  NestedPages

  plugin sorts and displays nested pages in the sidebar

The two above features will hopefully enable us to manage documentation and support requests without having to resort to a Wiki. As usual, the ChangeLog is available on SourceForge, and also copied below.

After more than twenty days of development, we have managed to release 1.1.0 beta1. The long wait is due to the number of new features we have added, mainly to improve WP integration, and to ease installation and management.

The most notable features added in beta1 are:

• new permalink structure that follows the WP conventions, and makes it possible to use the post_id as key

• one-way (for test installs) or two-way synchronization of the relevant WP options

• support for nested (static) pages and categories in the URL

• easier installation, everything runs from the WP plugins folder

• automatic .htaccess generation

In the next release we will concentrate on the administration UI, and will also add new plugins to manage tags and nested pages. If you are upgrading from alpha2, you might want to reset your LP options. As usual, the ChangeLog is available on SourceForge, and also copied below.