Siena 0.9.3 and an important note for developers 2011-07-02

We wish you enjoy Summertime. To make it even better give a new Cotonti Siena 0.9.3 release a try. What's new:

• Support for multiple parsers and editors on site and parser/editor selection in Administration => Configuration.
• Fixed important bugs in mail sending function. User activation is back to normal.
• Extension management tool now lets you remove broken plugins and install extensions with no actual parts (just a setup file and nothing else).
• CoTemplate debug output now contains full block paths to avoid confusion.
• Several minor bugs fixed.

For more information please visit the release page.

Important notice for developers and contributors: we are moving the repository and project management to Github. Please inform us of your Github account as soon as possible!

Cotonti Updates in May 2011-05-15

This site has been moved to a faster server. Google Site Performance analyzer says it now loads faster than 95% of sites on the web. Nice results reinforced by Siena's JS/CSS consolidator tool.

Oh, the updates! Genoa site owners should update their sites to 0.6.17, the patch is really small but won't hurt applying. Siena enthusiasts, head to 0.9.2 - this is a bugfixing update, but a very important one. We apologize for 0.9.1 which had some bugs which made it harder to use than 0.9.0, so we have solved those problems in 0.9.2 and you can have more fun with Siena now!

Community updates include our new Twitter page. Besides the official announcements it also tracks links to useful articles, so follow us there! Another important thing is that we are going to launch a plugin conversion campaign soon and so far we have opened a Wishlist for future conversions.

The following month probably won't bring many major features to the engine, but we plan several helpful community actions, including rewards for support, relaunch of donations and of course the plugin conversion campaign.

Server Maintenance Apr 12-13 2011 2011-04-12

Today, April 12 2011 from 20:00 to 23:00 GMT the site/Trac/SVN may be unavailable for some time due to server upgrade. If you encounter problems accessing the site, please try again some 15 minutes later.

Update: the site was unavailable from 08:00 to 18:00 GMT due to unpredicted problems with the server. Sorry for that, we are finally back online.

Thank you for your patience!

Cotonti Siena 0.9.0 is finally available! 2011-04-04

The biggest major Cotonti release ever is finally available. Here are some figures to realize the scale of the work wich has been done since the beginning of Siena branch:

• 20 months of hard work - over 1.5 years of development
• 140 tickets closed - over a hundred new features and improvements
• 1110 commits in the repository - more than a half of all

We have done our best to deliver you a modern Content Management System and a powerful Content Management Framework. The most significant changes are:

• Easy installation and automated updates.
• Modularization allows you to choose modules and extensions you want and put away those you don't.
• WYSIWYG and search engine optimizations out of the box.
• CoTemplate 2.5 with nested logical blocks and callbacks support, better performance.
• Skins are now called Themes. Modules + Plugins = Extensions. Extensions provide fallback templates, so you don't need to redefine all the templates in your theme.
• PDO database layer, several useful Developer APIs, refactored code which means that extension development is now 30% more productive.

For more information please visit Release Notes page.

As you can see, the status of the 0.9 branch is currently "testing". It means that it is not yet recommended for large production sites, but is fine for smaller ones, for new projects or to start using the new system to migrate in future. The 0.6 branch has the "stable" status and will be supported at least until 0.9 becomes "stable" and all sites are safe to migrate to it.

Currently the number of plugins available for Siena is limited. The APIs have changed a lot, so a "porting" procedure is required for plugins to work with the new version. We would like to encourage plugin developers to start porting their plugins to Siena. If you don't want to wait you can try running the old plugins with the Genoa compatibility plugin enabled, but this is for your own risk.

I would like to thank all the developers who have contributed during these 20 months, including those who had left our Team before their work was finally adopted. And those who continue supporting us and making our beloved Cotonti system and community better day by day.

Announcing Cotonti Union ver. 1.o.O 2011-04-01

Cotonti Development Team is proud to announce you the recent changes in our project roadmap. We have made an important decision about the next major branch which is now called "Union 1.o.O" instead of "Renaissance 1.0.0".

The word "Union" in its name means that the new system is a combination of all features currently present in Cotonti and such popular open source content management systems as WordPress, Joomla, MODx and Drupal. It also means that Cotonti switches its license from BSD to GPLv3. The compatibility is established both on database level and system behavior. For example, you will be able to install Drupal modules and Wordpress plugins and combine them with Joomla templates. Such amazing abilities are made possible by our new revolutionary technology called "Cotonti Site Cloud" which automatically maintains a cloud of different CMS systems and provides the end user an abstract service from all of them.

The "1" in the name means that it will be the CMS №1 in the world, the ultimate CMS. Meanwhile "o.O" stands for "object.ORIENTED", which indicates that the new system has been written from scratch in pure OO. Inspired by Ruby On Rails, Django, Yii and ASP.NET, the new "object.ORIENTED" development framework follows the most modern trends in web development: automatic code generator tool, YAML data model descriptions, visual component editor written in HTML5, AJAX comet client-server communication and lots more.

Will your new Cotonti Unity 1.o.O site work fast still? Yes! The new platform comes with an optimizing binary compiler, which keeps track of machine code being executed on the site and thus creates a binary image of the system originally written in Ruby. Oh, haven't I mentioned that? Yes, the new system is written from scratch in Ruby, except for the actual PHP CMS containers which are kept in the "Cotonti Site Cloud" as they are.

P.S.: if you are still reading, Siena 0.9.0 is finally coming on April 4th. Have a nice beta testing weekend before that!