Release 0.9.0

Welcome Zotonic 0.9.0, released on December 17, 2012. These notes list the most important changes for this new feature release.

New core features

The ability was added to aid and promote “mobile first” development using automatic user agent classification. Amongst others, the template selection mechanism is now based on the detected user agent class.

All base HTML has moved to use the Twitter Bootstrap CSS framework instead of Atatonic. This includes the admin interface (which got a new design) and the base templates for the skeleton sites. All Atatonic CSS files have been removed from Zotonic. Cufon is also no longer included.

While editing resources it is now possible for editors to add different “blocks” of content to the page. Blocks can be custom defined and have their own templates.

Modules can now implement their own URL dispatch mechanisms through #dispatch{} notifications. They are triggered when the regular dispatch rules do not match.

A new major mode for Emacs has been developed, called zotonic-tpl-mode. See documentation at zotonic.com for details on how to install it.

Zotonic’s core routines which serve a greater purpose, like date and string manipulation and HTML sanitization, has been moved out of the main repository into a new subproject called z_stdlib.

New documentation

The documentation of everything Zotonic has been completely revamped. We now use Sphinx (http://sphinx-doc.org/) to generate HTML documentation. Other output forms (PDF, epub) are in the planning as well.

Source code for the documentation is in the main repository under doc/, so that it can be kept better in sync with new features in the code base.

The new documentation is up at http://zotonic.com/docs/

New tags/changed tags

{% javascript %}…{% endjavascript %} Adds javascript that will be run after jQuery has been initialized. In dynamic content it will run after the DOM has been updated with the template where the JavaScript was defined.

{% image %} new attribute: mediaclass. Image classes can be defined using property files in the template directory. Which image class definition is chosen depends on the user agent classification.

New and updated modules

mod_geomap
New module: Provides mapping and geocoding.
mod_comment
Added the possibility to have comments be moderated before submitting.
mod_survey
mod_survey has been largely rewritten. Now uses the new ‘blocks’ structure for adding questions to the survey. Many new question types have been added, like file uploads and category selection. Also supports mailing the survey results and custom handlers.
mod_ssl
New module: adds SSL support to sites. Previously only a single certificate could be used per Zotonic server. With this module each site can have its own HTTPS listeners and certificates. When you don’t supply a certificate then a self-signed certificate and private key will be generated using the openssl utility.
mod_backup
Adds basic revision control for editing resources in the admin interface. Every time a resource is saved, a backup version is made. Using a GUI you can inspect differences between versions and perform a rollback.
mod_rest
A new module to interact with Zotonic’s data model using a RESTful interface.

New filters

menu_subtree:
Finds the menu below a particular resource id. Usage: m.rsc.main_menu.menu|menu_subtree:id
escape_link:
Escapes a text, inserts <br/> tags, and makes anchor elements of all links in the text. The anchor elements have the ‘nofollow’ attribute.
sort:
Sorts a list of resource ids based on their properties.

New custom tags

geomap_static

Makes the HTML for a static map of a location. Uses the OpenStreetMaps tileset. Example usage:

{% geomap_static id=id n=3 %}

Show the location of the resource ‘id’ in a grid of 3x3 tiles.

Translations

Translations were added and updated for Dutch, German, Polish, Turkish.

Contributors

The following people were involved in this release:

Ahmed Al-Saadi, Alain O’Dea, Andreas Stenius, Arjan Scherpenisse, Artur Wilniewczyc, Barco You, François Cardinaux, Grzegorz Junka, Hans-Christian Espérer, Ivette Mrova, Joost Faber, Kunthar Daman, Maas-Maarten Zeeman, Marc Worrell, Motiejus Jakštys, Piotr Meyer and Tom Bradley.

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