Announcing Cotonti Union ver. 1.o.O 01.04.2011

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!

New site layout and 0.6.14 update 01.03.2011

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 15.02.2011

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 04.01.2011

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 02.12.2010

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.