Cotonti Developer Tools 1.3 05.10.2011

Did you know that a GUI tool for generating Cotonti extensions from templates and converting plugins from Genoa to Siena exists? Now you do. The program is available in English and Russian and has some powerful wizards which will automate some tasks for extension developers and experimenters.

System requirements: Microsoft Windows, Microsoft .NET Framework 4.

Download: from developer's site.

Siena 0.9.5 and Genoa 0.6.20 are available 02.10.2011

Both stable and testing branches have been updated recently. What's new in Siena 0.9.5:

• Fixed all the bugs we have found in 0.9.4 during a month.
• Improvements in SEF URLs, i18n, JS/CSS consolidation.
• Performance has been optimized so that Siena is now faster than Genoa.
• A lot more, see full list on Download page.

Genoa 0.6.20 just reverts page_text field back to non-mandatory status and... brings CoTemplate 2.6.3 from Siena branch. Enjoy!

Plugin conversion campaign results are now available.

As Siena is now just a few releases from stable 1.0.0, the big announcement of 1.x to 2.0 Roadmap is expected soon. Stay tuned!

Siena 0.9.4 released! 03.09.2011

Cotonti Team is proud to present you a massive update of Siena branch. The most important changes include:

• SEF URLs bundled with the system. Read more.
• Corrected page publishing/expiration feature.
• Improved content internationalization.
• Confirmation of potentially dangerous actions.
• Language strings can now be overloaded in theme_name.php files.
• CoTemplate 2.6.1 supports nested FILE includes.
• Custom SQL column types in extrafields.
• Lots of bug fixes, including some security-related ones.
• Lots of small enhancements...
• ... and as a bonus - Administration Panel with significantly improved usability.

By now we have implemented all the major features we originally planned for our 1.0 release. This means that no major changes and no changes in the APIs will be performed in 0.9.x branch anymore. Starting with 0.9.5 all the changes will be aimed at stability, usability and performance enhancement. This also means that plugin and theme developers can do what they want without worrying about upcoming updates: their plugins and themes will work even on Cotonti 1.0.x without changes.

Visit the release page to try it out or for more information.

Plugin Conversion Campaign 13.07.2011

Are you missing your beloved Cotonti Genoa / Seditio / LDU plugins in Cotonti Siena? Chin up! Go and add them to our Genoa to Siena Wishlist. If the plugin has functionality which has not been covered yet, then it will participate in the Plugin Conversion Campaign. You can also Donate to support this campaign.

Are you a plugin developer? Help us to convert those plugins and earn money! We will give you $5-15 for each converted plugin from that topic (if confirmed as useful for conversion and not redundant) and even for each plugin which is not in the list but is still useful in Cotonti Siena. The procedure is simple: pick a plugin from the Wishlist topic, and make a post that you are converting that plugin. When you are done, post a link to your results. If the person who originally requested the plugin confirms that the plugin works fine, then you will get the money when the campaign is over. The actual sum ($5, $10 or $15) depends on how difficult the plugin is. The more plugins you convert, the more money you get at the end of the campaign.

The campaign has already started, developers who have already converted plugins in that topic will get money for them! All the conversions should be done and confirmed as completed until September 15th.

If you need more information about the conversion process, please read this guide.

More good news: we have enabled "Thank you" system on this site, so members can thank each other for useful articles, add-ons and replies on forums. Don't hesitate to thank somebody who helps you. People who get thanked often and provide good support and feedback will be given bonuses, either with money or with upgraded privileges. Scammers will be sacked.

Even more good news: we have enabled internationalization on this site, the interface is currently available in 3 languages and will be available in more. Translations of the documentation can be contributed as well, we have added a few Russian translations so far.

Cotonti goes Social! 03.07.2011

I'm glad to inform you that Cotonti Team has just moved the Development area of the project to GitHub, the next generation project hosting and social coding platform.

What benefits does it give to the Cotonti community? Here they are:

• Git - a modern distributed version control system. Our repository is now 18 MB instead of over 300 MB with Subversion.
• Watch the repository to get all the updates of issues and source code automatically to your e-mail.
• A powerful Source browser which can easily switch between branches, tags (releases) and make comprehensive changesets just like Trac did and even more.
• Task/issue management tool with modern Web 2.0 interface.
• Automatic Download builder.
• Create your own repositories for plugins, modules and themes to let the other people collaborate with you or report bugs.
• Share the code and communicate with thousands of other geeks at GitHub!

What about the old good Trac and SVN? They will stay online in read-only mode for several months more to let the people grab necessary stuff from there if needed.

Another reason to move plugin/module development to separate Git repositories is that when the Cotonti Extension Center will be launched, it will use public Git information to provide automatic packaging, updates and extension listing.