We celebrate today Dotclear's seventh anniversary, and Dotclear Organization's first accounting year .

Dotclear only makes blogs, and it does it well

This sentence by Dotclear's father, Olivier Meunier, pronounced during delivery of the first version, has been since slightly modified and became Dotclear almost only makes blogs, and it does it well. It is true, Dotclear powers a large number of blogs, really large, and also more and more commercial or non-profit web sites, where its easy and fast tweaking is appreciated. Slowly but surely Dotclear becomes more known everyday, and we can bet it will be surprising us again.

For our favorite blog software, the age of reason has now come, and we wish to thank you all for your participation:

• users, you are everyday more numerous to join us, and show everywhere your proudly Dotclear-powered blogs to share your ideas and knowledge
• members of the support forum, you help patiently newcomers and share your tips
• documentation builders, you work everyday to explain Dotclear's code, track misunderstandings and spelling mistakes
• translators, you allow Dotclear to reach the whole world, and even soon the galaxy with a future klingon version
• themes and plugins developers, you add everyday new functions and beautiful layouts to our libraries
• donators, you helped us to keep our independance, and offer new services and better work

You all, please take a seat at our table, to share with us this birthday cake

Dotclear's birthday is also the Organization's

Today we close this first year's accounts, and here a is a short version of the balance that will be presented to the next general assembly:

• members have contributed to more than 3.000 €
• generous donators have on their side contributed to more than 2.000 €

These funds were only used to pay for our servers, no money was spend on cigars and champagne, therefore we still have a bit of cash left for the future

And now ?

Dotclear goes now to big school, and you must be impatient to know what this year will bring as new features. But it is too serious a subject for today, so please relax, have a drink, and sing with us :

Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you, Dotclear
Happy birthday toooooo yoooooo !

And there it is: the new Dotclear 2.2 release!

Included here is a new installation wizard, a better handling of the tags in the administration interface, and more generally an administration interface that has been tweaked here or there to remove a bunch of small bugs. That's about it as long as we are talking about user-related changes, but more is to come, as most changes of this version were made under the hood, with new behaviours, some template tags refining, an updated JQuery, an exception handler mechanism, a better internal settings system, all things that will open the door to better plugins and themes.

On the administration side, this new release offers a smaller footprint on server resources, is more resilient to non standard PostgreSQL installations, is more tweakable and last but not least, is now fully PHP 5.3 compliant. As such it can now be installed on up-to-date Linux servers.

So there you are, go grab this new release and have fun. Most plugins have been updated to run smoothly on it and have new versions that can be installed in a click thanks to DAInstaller^[1] and the newly reopened DotAddict. Our French Blog will be updated with some posts detailing this release's changes and we plan to write a comprehensive digest of those posts here sometimes next week.

We released yesterday the 2.2-RC build. If no last minute problem is detected, that's almost the 2.2 release we got there.

There is no big change between this and the last beta, just small fixes and tweaking and ... a big refining of the template engine. Although fast and tidy, the one found in the beta version proved to put too big a burden on the PCRE stack of old (and Windows) machines. The new one, while not as quick and small, is still lighter than its 2.1 counterpart, runs without a glitch on smaller computers, and provides new internal structures that will soon allow the plugins to redefine tags on the go.

And while we talk about plugins, note that most old plugins work as well as ever on a 2.2. We even have reopen our sister site Dotaddict.org (still only in French for the time being, sorry) to contributors last week-end and since then, it's more than fifty plugins that wait there for a nice home, most of them wishing to find a 2.2.

You can download the 2.2 RC here. The final relase's date will depend of how that version works, but it should not be long, of course.

Let's go!

We're taking our next step in Dotclear 2.2 development: we are officialy in beta.

Should you be bold enough, you can install it, and share with us any peculiarity you could find. This version is stable enough for several people to use it in production, but you have to know what you do, as there may be side effects with the occasional plugin. If you prefer to stay on the safe side, please be patient: we plan to release the final version in a few weeks.

DSLS, one of our more prolific team member, created a plugin to update your installation by uploading an archive, you can find it here.

Dotclear 2.2-beta1 may be downloaded here.

You may have noticed it on your dashboard: Dotclear 2.1.7 is available. To make a long story short: if you plan to use the auto-update procedure, go for it. If for any reason you plan to update manually, forget it.

There is nothing new in the 2.1.7 but an update to the auto-update procedure (sic.) It was necessary because the upcoming 2.2 release has changes that cannot be handled by the auto-update procedure as we knew it. You won't be able to auto-update directly from 2.1.6 to 2.2!

Once again, if you plan to manually install the 2.2, you don't have to bother about the 2.1.7.

See you soon.

Update: It appears that because they were not expecting this maintenance release, some plugins may cause problems because they make the wrong assertion that this is the 2.2 already. Please consult the forum dedicated thread before upgrading..

It may look as if development on Dotclear has dramatically slowed down. Well, in fact, it has. That does not mean that our blogware is dying, just that it was necessary to stop and think after Olivier's departure from the project, as he was its creator and the main coder.

When I was handed the wheel, I chose to release a 2.1.6 version, that mainly was a much needed bugfix one. I had to do it alone (but for the help of a few contributors patches) as it was then the way the project was running, everything having been centralised around Olivier for years. Launching the (still running) ergonomic audit and rethinking was the first real collective teamwork we did, but it still wasn't coding Dotclear.

That is where we allowed ourselves to pause in order to discuss how to evolve from a centralised project to a community driven one. We still are in the process of refining that, but we finally were able to resume coding: in the last two weeks, almost 50 tickets were closed, several underneath changes were introduced that will allow the next version to be easier to code with, whether you are a plugin or a theme developer, and we even managed to introduce new features under the hood while lowering the processing and memory footprint!

The whole team is now hard at work to bring the next version to life. Should you decide to try it, nightly builds are available. Several technical changes may be problematic to some plugins, so don't use those build in a production environment (I do and feel fine, though.)

Stay connected, we have more in the pipeline.

Those of you who use Dotaddict, our themes and plugins repository, may have noticed that the server went down a few days ago.

Alas, it was not a hip-cup but a severe hardware problem. Please bear with us, as we are in the process of getting the things up and running on a new server.

Dotclear 2 was, until now, not compatible with the latest version of PHP, numbered 5.3 and released this summer. Although most of the work was done, we decided not to include it in Dotclear 2.1.6, as it needed a review of pretty much all the code and it would have been too big a chance to break something for the users.

So we released the 2.16, then switched development to the 2.2 branch, where we included all the necessary PHP 5.3 patches. That's this version you will find in our nightly builds. It is of course, as far as we know, compatible not only with PHP's last version but also with the preceding ones.

Several other changes were implemented, none of them should trigger a bigger reaction than a It wasn't quite like that last time... With one notable exception:

We redesigned the internal settings system: whereas we already used namespaces for it, they were used for setting the value but not for retrieving them. The new design deals with that shortcoming: you'll have to use $settings->namespace->value rather than $settings->value. The old system is still supported, but as it is deprecated, it will raise a notice. Do not forget to deactivate PHP notices in anything close to a production environment (well, you should anyway.)

So go grab it, test it, use it, abuse it, and feel free to ask any question on the forum.

Here comes Dotclear 2.1.6. This new version brings a whole bunch of bugfixes. You will find nearly no new functionality but many little thing should work more smoothly here and there.

While I'm here, I would like to apologise for that long silence. Dotclear was all but dead during our "intermission". As a matter of fact, it was a very busy time and several things happened for the project and we have important news.

The main piece of news is that, a few months ago, our friend Olivier decided to leave the project leadership. It was a bit of a shock as he was the creator of Dotclear and its main coder for six years. At first we thought of tying it down to his chair to enslave him but finally decided to acknowledge the fact and let him enjoy his new found freedom.

We quickly decided to carry on anyway, and it is with his blessing that I took the leadership of the team he created years ago to help him on the project. Everything Dotclear related was up until now under Olivier's name. Not being the creator, I did not want to carry on this way and in the last few months, we worked on the creation of a separate legal entity: the Dotclear Association (as in Association Loi 1901, the French legal structure for non-profit organisations.)

At the same time, we started to work on Dotclear itself. The 2.1.6 release is our first one, with nearly no new functionality but we planned it that way to make our teeth, and we did: several dozens of tickets were closed.

For the near future, we planned to be compatible with PHP 5.3, and we will try to rethink the interface to enhance its ergonomics: we recently launched a big user survey for that purpose in our French speaking community.

That brings us to our last point: as refining the whole project after Olivier's departure was all but an easy task, we choose a few months ago to concentrate on the important matters: planning the future, creating the structure, trying to be as familiar with the code that the guy who created it... That is why we were not as communicative that we could have been, and our few communication efforts were mostly directed to our French speaking community, hence our silence here. Be assured that such a long time without any news will not happen any more and that we plan to include you, non French speaking users of Dotclear, involved in the project's life.

Without further ado, here is the new version :

• Dotclear 2.1.6 download
• Dotclear 2 installation
• Dotclear 2 update

Please note that internal changes were made that could disturb some of your plugins (we updated JQuery to the 1.3 version and support for jquery 1.1 obsolete selectors were removed in this version^[1]. A discussion on the forum gives more details on the changes and the attached plugin to ease the transition.)

Thanks for your support!

Dotclear 2.1.5 has just been released to bring two necessary fixes.

A security problem (XSS) in the administration interface is now fixed. Thank you Julien for noticing.

A recent change on Youtube was preventing video insertion from working properly. This new version also fixes this problem.

• Download Dotclear 2.1.5
• Install Dotclear 2
• Upgrading Dotclear 2

For those who know how to use them, a patch is also available to upgrapde from 2.1.4 to 2.1.5.

The upgrade is recommended for all users and works as automatic upgrade, so most of you will only have to say "yes" to upgrade.