LightPress

Work on WP 2.0 compatibility is mostly completed, and has been already merged to the trunk. You can now test Lightpress with WP 2.x using one of our nightly tarballs.

I have also made substantial changes to the administration interface, simplified the installation process, and made use of some of the WP 2.0 changes to the DB layout to further improve our rendering speed.

New plugins you get in the nightly tarballs:

AltTemplate

used to change one of the default templates in specific contexts, eg change the sidebar when viewing a post details page

ContactForm

add a contact form wherever you might need it (by Iñaki Ecenarro)

PostNavigation

show links to the following/preceding post in the post detail page, like MT (by Iñaki Ecenarro)

PostAdRecursion

show different template snippets every n posts in index pages

The most important change in this release is the new formatting function used for post and comments, that adds full XHTML support to Lightpress, as you can see on my Italian blog. You can read more about the evolution of this function in this thread on the forum. Thanks to Shadow Seraph for pointing this out.

This release fixes the few remaining reference warnings (remember to disable error display on production sites), and adds the new CommentsList plugin to list the latest comments.

Download: from our downloads page

After having tested it for a couple of months on small and medium-sized blogs (eg autoblog.it, Jerome's blog, my blog), we feel that the 1.2 branch is stable enough to be released as a beta. The major features in this release are compatibility with the 1.2 packages from our themes site, Spanish translations for all of our templates (thanks bolonki!), and some performance tweaks.

This release should be very similar to the first 1.2 stable, with the exception of a few improvements to the admin console and WP integration that we will add in the next few weeks. Read the rest of this entry for a summary of changes from 1.2.0 alpha2.

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.

Patrick has just released the first user-contributed plugin for LightPress: TagSidebar. It will work only on the 1.2.0 alpha release, and will be included in the next alpha (beta?) if Patrick has nothing against it. Thanks, Patrick!

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

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.

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.

Just a short announcement about a few bugs in the latest beta. Most are minor and are either usability-related or affect how the plugin synchronizes WordPress and LightPress options. But there's a major one that will prevent Windows users from enjoying the new backend interface. It has to do with paths and escaping -- although that may sound like the basis for a great movie, trust me, it's not so exciting.

As the token Windows user on the team, it's normally my job to find these things and fix them. I apologize for letting you all down. If you really want to try the latest beta, why not try another OS at the same time? Or you could wait a few days until we release the next beta. [Or you can grab the wp-plugin/ folder from our anonymous CVS --ludo.] Your choice.

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.

I have just uploaded 1.1.0 alpha2 to Sourceforge. This new version features the much needed WP plugin that lets users configure LightPress from the admin console, and it's also the first version of LightPress to run from the WP plugins folder (well, most of it). In short, you can now try LightPress without messing with your WP files (it was possible even before, but it was much much harder to do).

We have mixed feelings about LightPress running from the WP folder, so if you have an opinion about this (and other LP features too), please let us know by commenting to this post or sending us an email. We still have lots to do (apart from spotting and fixing the inevitable bugs) before declaring 1.1.0 stable, mainly in the WP plugin (checking and setting .htaccess, checking options for consistency, etc.), so you still have a chance to ask for new features.