All releases of Samizdat
Release Notes: Password encryption is now as strong as it gets, HTTPS now gets the emphasis it deserves, cross-site scripting protection has been tightened, and in general the engine is more paranoid about user-submitted data. End users will be most interested in the integration with the Flowplayer Flash video player and the thumbnailing capabilities of the new image plugin. Both features are enabled by the new plugin mechanism, which also allows you to add fancy member profile parameters and alternative access control schemes.
Release Notes: The most interesting part of this release is its new security features: CSRF protection, an antispam module, per-resource moderation logs, and a moderation request tracker. An RSS import module allows you to syndicate content from other sites on the front page. Massive changes were made in the engine internals (MVC, deadlock-proof cache, optional RDF query patterns, support for Lighttpd, MySQL, SQLite3). Many minor enhancements were made, like a new pagination system, file size display, cleaner handling of replies and message translations, better error reporting, and more UI translations.
Release Notes: This version incorporates two years worth of real-world deployment. Apart from ubiquitous message translations management and RSS syndication, many old tools were made more flexible and easier to use. The focus management interface is simplified, and the front page packs more information into a better layout and allows you to include static headers and footers. Even more changes are under the hood: multi-layer caching, gzip and ETag, audio and video uploads, BitTorrent links, HTML and CSS filtering, flexible access control, new moderation features, new languages and themes, simplified installation, and more.
Release Notes: The front page layout has been changed to the more familiar vertical split with the main column featuring focuses and the right column running recent updates in the open publishing wire. A new moderation facility allows you to take over messages, displace their contents completely, and block member accounts. This release adds an alternative CSS theme, "Indy" (selectable from the Settings page), and a Belorussian translation. The database connection is now configurable and allows you to run multiple Samizdat instances on a single server. Oversize titles and descriptions are now truncated.
Release Notes: Samizdat can now send out email: this is used to recover lost passwords and to confirm that a member email address is real. Email addresses are now unique, making it more difficult to cheat using throwaway accounts. The dc:description message property was added for attaching an article abstract, a thumbnail image, or a table of contents to a message. A preferences infrastructure was added, allowing the addition of more server-side member settings in the future. The inevitable database schema change was made.
Release Notes: This version adds Wiki functionality to Samizdat, allowing you to edit messages and track the history of changes. Messages may use the Textile format for advanced hypertext markup, and editing may be limited to the original creator or open for all site members. Other highlights of this release are FastCGI support, configurable site logo, multiple usability improvements, and the usual bunch of bugfixes. Once again, the database schema is slightly changed.
Release Notes: The main feature of this version is i18n support, with Russian translation already in place. Other improvements include the ability to work as a plain CGI without mod_ruby, support for Windows/Cygwin, a massive speed increase, and a long list of bugfixes. The database schema is changed again, but this time it is trivial to migrate from the previous version.
Release Notes: This version introduces basic focus management, completing the minimal set of features required for an open publishing part of the engine, and making Samizdat ready for public beta testing. Other major changes in this release include Pingback support, many user interface improvements, another rewrite of multimedia upload, a testing framework, and more.
Release Notes: This version allows you to upload multimedia messages, including images and verbatim plain text, and introduces publishing of user-defined queries in the form of "application/x-squish" messages. When migrating from older versions, you have to drop and recreate your database from scratch because of an incompatible database schema change (content is now stored as a BLOB). In addition, the file upload feature uses the StringIO module, which is available as part of Ruby 1.8 or can be installed separately from the Ruby Shim library for Ruby 1.6.
Release Notes: In this version, a query construction UI is added, allowing you to compose and modify search queries more conveniently and without having to manually edit raw Squish. Other major changes include a switch to Unicode UTF-8 as the default encoding, great improvement of browser support in CSS, and more code refactoring. Many minor bugs and inconsistencies are fixed, and the UI is enhanced in several places.
