I'd like to announce our greatest release yet, TangoCMS 2.3.0 "Dolphin", which is now available for download. This major update brings many new features, polish to the interface/work flow and bug fixes, which has been the result of over 6 months hard (and I mean hard!) work. We highly recommend users upgrade to this release.
Improvements/Changes
The Roadmap for 2.3.0 shows a complete list of (logged) changes that have been made, and in total 12 major features have been implemented. Below is an overview of some of the features.
Features
One of the changes/features of 2.3 that will have the most impact for many users is the introduction of a WYSIWYG editor, instead of the old MediaWiki formatting (which is still available) by default. This feature alone will make it significantly easier for people to create their content (such as Pages and Articles), which has often been a requested feature from our users.
Content Layout can now be fine tuned per URL (using regex to match against, if you wish), meaning custom unique layouts per url/page is now perfectly possible and very easy to do so. This feature will help those who need to build complex websites with different content, which will hopefully open TangoCMS up to a new market of users.
A new 'comments' module is now implemented, which replaces the old and featureless comments library. This brings a much more robust and powerful comments system, bringing common features such as moderation. While we still don't support some of the more advanced features such as trackbacks within comments, we will aim to introduce these over the next few versions.
The start of a 'tags' module has been created, which will allow you to tag content such as Articles and Pages, search for all content tagged with a certain keyword and of course, a Tag Cloud!
Page Load Time
For 2.3.x we have been working hard on reducing the amount of time your browser spends requesting certain elements, such as JavaScript and CSS files, images etc. As a result of this, we now have JavaScript Aggregation which merges all needed JavaScript files into one, meaning your browser only needs to make one HTTP Request for JavaScript. All of our JavaScript files are now compressed by the Yahoo! YUI Compressor which has significantly reduced file size, and therefore the amount of time needed to download. We've also made sure JavaScript files are only loaded when needed, so no longer will jQuery load on every page.
The CSS for our 2 default themes, Cappuccino and Innocent, have been completely rewritten to be much more efficient, smaller and less of them. This again has meant your browser needs to make less HTTP Request, and from tests pages render much faster than before.
Security
To increase the security of your site even more, the session module can now restrict logins after so many failed attempts. By default the user attempting the login will be blocked for 10 minutes if after 5 failed attempts (note, this does not lock the user account that was attempted). This feature stops people (or automated scripts) from using a brute force attack against a user account, which is what caused the infamous Twitter Hack and compromise of user accounts.
SSL/HTTPS support is now implemented in the Session module for logins, so that users credentials can be sent over a secure connection (this is disabled by default, though can be turned on in the Session config). A new E-Mail configuration setting lets you choose the type of encryption to use for SMTP, options being 'None' (default), 'TLS' or 'SSL'.
General
As well as the bigger features shown above, many smaller and important features have been added. For details on these, please view the implemented 2.3.0 Feature List.
Future Versions
Taking effect immediately, we will be changing our release schedules for upcoming versions. There will no longer be many months between major release, such as the 6-7 month development of 2.3.0, instead we will aim to have 1 or 2 months between versions. We are doing this because we believe it will help reduce bugs and regressions caused inbetween major release, since there will be less changes to cause them, and it also allows us to push out features quicker which can get tested.
While development of TangoCMS 2.4.0 "Hedgehog" wont start for a few months yet, it will implement a small but helpful feature set, as can be seen by the 2.4.0 Roadmap.
Lastly, thank you to everyone who has made this release possible!
1 Comment for "2.3.0 "Dolphin" Released"
NO, thank YOU! :D
Congrats on the release!