Now that LifeType 1.1 is feature complete, it is time to allow
users to
test the
development version of LifeType 1.1.
UPDATE: nightly builds working
again.
The development snapshots will be updated every night (00:00 GMT+2) and the
newest snapshot will always be marked as lifetype-devel-latest.zip.
At this point no more new features will be implemented in LifeType 1.1, even
though there will still be some changes here and there in the core (specially in
the performance area) and of course all bugs found during this testing round
will be fixed.
There is a more detailed list including all new features in
LifeType 1.1 in the wiki, but the most important ones include a disk-based
data cache for speeding up database operations, a reduction of the memory usage
(now a normal blog will only require between 4 and 6 Mb of memory to run),
paging of items in the public area of the blog and TinyMCE as the HTML editor
(with support for Safari!) These are just a few of the new features so be sure
to check the complete list.
Speaking of features, all the most important features that were in scope for
the 1.1 release have already been implemented, even though at least an
interesting one has been dropped and rescheduled for 1.2. Therefore, the
development team would like to encourage users to download the development
snapshots of LifeType 1.1 and give them a try. We are looking for end-user
feedback as well as bug reports so please use the forums for feedback
and our bug-tracking system for reporting
bugs. When reporting a bug related to one of these development snapshots, please
also include the version number that you can see in your version.php file, in
the root LifeType folder.
In order to install this release, please use wizard.php as with any
release so far. If upgrading from LifeType 1.0.x to LifeType 1.1, wizard.php
will also take care of adding all new tables as well as of making changes to
currently existing tables. In order to upgrade from an older development
snapshot of 1.1 to a newer one, just upload the newest files to the server and
overwrite the old ones except your own version of the configuration file
(config/config.properties.php)
Regarding templates, they should work out of the box in LifeType 1.1 even
though they need to be modified in order to use some of the new features such as
paging. There is a page
keeping track of which template sets have been already updated by the
development team. However, we would like to encourage users who have previously
submitted template sets to the development team to take care of upgrading these
templates themselves. Please check "Porting
Templates" in the wiki, as it will contain useful information related to
updating templates to make use of all new features in 1.1, and use Mantis to submit the upgraded version of the
template.
With regards to plugins, there have been extensive changes to the core API
during the development cycle and therefore the amount of work needed to update
all the plugins is quite big. The development team has already started working
on this and the status of which
plugins have already been updated to work with LifeType 1.1 can also be tracked
in the wiki. Please keep an eye on the "Porting Plugins"
page in the wiki as it will be used to describe how to upgrade older plugins
(LifeType 1.0.x) to the new framework in LifeType 1.1.
There will be no development snapshots of templates and plugins yet, so the
only way to get them will be from the project's
Subversion repository.
Last but not least, it is a good time to start evaluating all the changes
that will be required to migrate your customized sites from LifeType 1.0.x. to
LifeType 1.1. The development team is aware that some of our users have put a
lot of effort into customizing LifeType to suit their needs and this migration
could take some time. The development team is also working on several new
sections in the wiki that will describe all changes in the API and how to
migrate code to the new release. Documentation embedded in the code is already
available (just run Doxygen) in the class/
folder) even though it will keep getting better as the development team keeps
improving the comments.