LightPress

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.

I have just published on our Wiki the first draft of a Howto for designers: Writing Templates. Your comments are welcome. :)

Since moving this site to TextDrive, things have progressed at an astonishing speed.

The news of the day is that LightPress is now an officially supported TextDrive project. I am very impressed by what Jason and the TXD people are doing, and becoming part of the team is both an honour, and a challenge.

As for LightPress, we have not been idle after releasing 1.1.0alpha1. Jerome has started working on our own distribution of WordPress, which will feature an integrated install for both WP and LP, and a few patches to the WP code to enhance usability.

For my part, I have put my modest web design skills to test and started work on a new template, to replace Kubrick as our default. While Kubrick is nice to stress WP compatibility, it's getting a bit old. The new template is an elastic design, and you can see a test install on my English blog. It's not finished, but I hope to be able to release it in the next couple of days. BTW, if you have web designer skills, why don't you join the LightPress development team?