Announcements
2.0.0 Beta1 Released
Published Sun May 11 15:57:47, 2008 by, AlexC in Announcements
The first Beta release of the upcoming TangoCMS 2.0 has been released for immediate download. A lot of improvements have been made during the time between the release of Alpha1 and now, filling in the missing features and adding quite a few smaller ones.
Feature Freeze
We have now entered the feature freeze of are loose release cycle, meaning that no new main features will be allowed to enter the current code base. All of the time spent between now and the final release (roughly 3 weeks) will be bug hunting and finishing off existing features.
Improved User/Group Management
One of the biggest features missing in the 1.0x series of TangoCMS was a proper way to manage Users and Groups. This was due to the way ACL permissions work within the old code base, and it was just not feasible at the time to implement proper Group management.
2.0 fills this gap perfectly, and due to a completely new ACL library that allows for Group inheritance and other specific ACL rules - a new module called 'Groups' allows you to easily Add, Edit and Delete existing groups, and due to permission inheritance, you wont need to go around every single item and change the permissions for a newly added group.
TangoCMS 2.0 "Chipmunk" will aim to be the most polished and stable release yet, with no rough edges that the 1.0.6/1.0.8 release had. However, as mentioned before, Changes to our Release Cycle means that not all of the planned features for 2.0 will make it in.
Release Model Changes
Published Tue May 6 16:19:26, 2008 by, AlexC in Announcements
Some of you may have noticed that TangoCMS 2.0-alpha2 has not been released on the scheduled date, this is not because of delays, but is due to a change in our release model.
Previously it was decided that a new version of TangoCMS would be released roughly every 6-8 months, with much bigger updates between. However, due to time becoming a much more important factor I am unable to devote as much time as I have been any more, this means that there will be many smaller updates over time instead of a big update every 6-8 months.
How will this effect the TangoCMS Project?
The change to our release model which actually greatly benefit the TangoCMS Project, it means that overall TangoCMS will become a lot more stable and secure as time goes on, since there will be no big-impacting changes to the code base.
TangoCMS will still continue to be actively developed, it is not stopping or slowing down.
So when will 2.0 be released?
As there is no set schedule for future releases of TangoCMS (only rough ones), we can't say for certain when 2.0 will be out. At a rough guess, it will be sometime this month (May 2008) or early June. Due to the shortened time, there will obviously not be all of the planned features for 2.0 included, these will however be included in later releases (such as 2.1, 2.2 etc).
2.0-Alpha1 Released
Published Mon Mar 31 17:16:25, 2008 by, AlexC in Announcements
We are pleased to announce the availability of the first alpha release of TangoCMS 2.0, which can be now be Downloaded for you to test out. However, please do note this is an alpha release and therefore it should not be used for production use, or anything that needs to be stable.
Major Cleanups
The majority of the work that has been done towards TangoCMS 2.0 so far, has been major cleanups to the previous code base. Nearly every library has been cleaned up, and in some cases - even re-written, such as with the improved ACL (Access Control Level/Lists) library, providing a much more flexible library for managing user and group permissions.
Just like the libraries, the majority of the TangoCMS Modules have also been heavily cleaned up and optimized. However due to restricted time not all modules have been cleaned up and so some of them are not functioning correct, or even not working at all - as the case would be with the Media module.
Features
Alpha1 does not yet contain any more functionality than the existing 1.0x series - in fact, it probably contains less functionality at this point in time (due to not all modules being fully cleaned up and converted to work with the altered framework). However, as can be seen by the 2.0-chimpunk Blueprints we have a lot planned for the 2.0 series.
Chipmunk (The codename for 2.0) will fill a lot of the gaps that the 1.0x series had, focusing a lot more on features for community based/driven websites (such as RSS feeds, increased spam protection with the comments, article/media ratings etc). Some other features that we have in mind is Image Management, so that images (or other media items) can easily be inserted into pages, articles etc.