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.
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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.

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.

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.
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We have not disappeared. We are working on 1.1.0 beta 1 which will hopefully be released in the next few days, and will feature quite a few improvements and bug fixes over the latest 1.1.0 alpha release:

• seamless integration with WP's permalink options and automatic .htaccess generation

• support for nested pages (static posts in LP-speak) and categories

• no need to touch the filesystem (move/rename WP files, copy LP files, etc.)

There are lots of other exciting new features scheduled after beta 1. Stay tuned...

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.