New site layout and 0.6.14 update 2011-03-01

Surprise! You might not expect it, but we have changed layout of this site. And it is not just layout, we have converted this entire site to the latest beta of Cotonti Siena, reorganized Downloads a bit and there are more changes planned. During the next several days we will be fixing bugs which appear here and there after the site upgrade, tweaking things and converting some plugins to Siena. Then we are going to reorganize the Documentation section and enable content internationalization there. And the brand new core/extension repository will be deployed within next few months.

This is also a good chance for us to fix the last bugs before 0.9.0 final release which is scheduled on 15th. Right now you can update your Genoa site to 0.6.14 or try an hourly beta build of Siena.

End-of-life for Seditio 2011-02-15

A few days ago, a message appeared on the Neocrome homepage stating Seditio and Land Down Under development has been discontinued. In case you're not aware: Seditio is the predecessor of Cotonti. Seditio was forked by a small team of developers, and reborn as Cotonti.

The fact that Olivier "Neuro" C. has decided to pull the plug was to be expected. He has probably had trouble finding time and will to work on Seditio the last couple of years. Also, Seditio's popularity and number of (skilled) users has decreased dramatically. Although we can only guess at Olivier's true reasons, we suspect these factors to have played an important role.

More generally, it can be said that the golden era of CMS systems is over. Big players like Drupal and Wordpress have the market, and that's not going to change any time soon. For us, this is one of the reasons to take Cotonti in a different direction, focussing on application development (as a framework) rather than just content management. Luckily, we have an international team of developers rather than a single person running the show, which allows for a higher development pace and better support.

Are you a Seditio user? Consider switching to Cotonti Genoa. It is mostly compatible with Seditio and its plugins, and database migration is possible. You can always ask for support in the forums.

On behalf of the entire Cotonti Team I'd like to thank Olivier for the great work he's done. Cotonti wouldn't exist without all of his efforts and investments. It's the end of a great decade.

Happy 2011 and Siena beta release 2011-01-04

First of all the Cotonti Team wishes you a Happy 2011!

For Cotonti 2011 will be a very interesting year as we're very close to releasing Siena, which means Cotonti is finally disconnecting from it's predecessor. For those who don't know, Siena has been in development for almost 1½ years. It will bring new features and performance improvements that take Cotonti to the next level, where it's able to compete with other highly-developed CMS systems. More importantly, we've made some crucial design decisions along the way that allow Cotonti to be used as a webdevelopment framework rather than just a content management system. It's the biggest step we've taken with Cotonti so far, and it's a great leap towards Renaissance.

The community itself is also set to be changed. We intend to aim at a more professional audience and we're working on a new website for Cotonti.com. Not only will it get a fresh look, it's largely focussed on restructuring the entire website, including the downloads section and documentation. The documentation itself will also be revised, improved and extended.

Siena has just reached Beta state and is now ready for testing by wider audience. New beta builds are available every hour. Please have a look at it and let us know about any bugs you may find. Note that it's not yet possible to upgrade from Genoa, neither we recommend using the Beta on production sites, for that you will have to wait for the stable release.

Good luck, have fun and happy coding in 2011!

Hot December is on and Genoa 0.6.12 2010-12-02

IE9 support in markItUp, jQuery 1.4.4, native language domains support, a very important security and layout update of Tags plugin and more... Now hurry up to update your Genoa setup to 0.6.12!

View details and Download Genoa 0.6.12 here

We are following our previously stated timeline and this day comes as feature freeze on Siena 0.9.0. It means that no new features are accepted for this release from now and during this month we will only get done what we have already started, fix bugs and make obvious enhancements. The next alpha/beta is not ready at the moment, there are some preparations required before the next massive testing and bugfixing stage starts. You will be informed of it either here or on forums.

Genoa Update 0.6.11 and Roadmap Changes 2010-11-01

Genoa updates for November 2010 are available as 0.6.11 release. As usually it contains fixes for recently discovered bugs.

Details and download for Cotonti Genoa 0.6.11

As for more significant changes in Cotonti project, there are 3 most noticeable things:

1. Koradhil has become our Administrator responsible for cotonti.com site reorganization, documentation reorganization and public affairs in blogosphere and social media.
2. Cotonti Siena is in alpha testing and development stage. We have completed over 100 tickets by now, most of 0.9.0 features are already available and are still doing major changes.
3. The Roadmap has been corrected, it is described below.

Our current project schedule looks like this:

• December 1st 2010: feature freeze for 0.9.0. All major changes are to be done by this date. Then 0.9.0 enters “beta” stage when only bugfixes, minor enhancements and translations will be accepted. During December we will stabilize Siena and move cotonti.com site onto it.
• December 25th 2010 - January 2nd 2011: within this period 0.9.0 final will be released. This site will be relaunched with a new layout, documentation section, downloads repository and other improvements.
• January – March 2011: minor releases in 0.9.x branch (0.9.1, 0.9.2. etc.). Goals: rock solid stability, performance optimizations, plugin and module development, easy migration of existing Genoa sites.
• March 1st or April 1st 2011: by this time we expect 0.9.x to be stable enough, so that it will eventually become 1.0.0.

You can locate the Roadmap in our project tracker. Genoa will be phased out some time after 1.0.0 release, most probably when most sites will have been upgraded, e.g. in June 2011.