Geeklog

Ever since its inception, Geeklog has been using CVS as the source control system. We have discussed moving to a more "modern" system (e.g. Subversion) on more than one occasion, but the benefits always seemed minimal. And so we kept on using CVS.

Fast-forward a few years and a new class of version control systems has arrived: Distributed version control (DVCS). These systems come with support for easy branching and merging built in, which allows for parallel and experimental development that can still be merged back easily into the main development line. And a checkout is a self-contained repository that can even be used offline (and changes can be merged back later).

After the successful test run with Mercurial during this year's Summer of Code, we have now made the switch: From now on, the Geeklog repository is powered by Mercurial.

Geeklog Themes support the ability to define a different template for different blocks. So your "What's New" block can render differently to your Login block etc. This is done by populating an array called

$_BLOCK_TEMPLATE

in a theme's functions.php file. This array is populated with the identifiers for blocks and can set specific block header and footer templates used to format specific blocks to give them a unique look and feel.

The Professional theme that ships with Geeklog prior to 1.5.1 provides logic within functions.php to alter the template for blocks without a specific template assigned to be the left or right block template depending on which side the block has been placed by the site administrator. This changes with Geeklog 1.5.1

Just a quick reminder: Geeklog will have a booth at this year's FrOSCon, an open source conference to be held in Sankt Augustin, Germany, on August 23 + 24, 2008. If you have a chance, drop by and say Hi!

Some of the FrOSCon presentations will also be streamed live, including the keynotes by Andrew Tanenbaum (on Saturday) and Rasmus Lerdorf, the inventor of PHP (on Sunday). For Dirk's presentation about the Atom Publishing Protocol, you'll have to be there in person (or wait for the recording to be made available after the conference).

See you at FrOSCon!