Announcements

Over the last few weeks, I've been working on beefing up the wiki over at gllabs.org with some info regarding Geeklog theme creation. A large portion of that, a tutorial on how to port a theme, involved taking an open-source XHTML/CSS template and converting it step-by-step into a GL theme.

The tutorial is at a point now where I feel the first draft is written, and would like some feedback. Please check it out and post your comments in this forum thread.

The result of that tutorial is a fixed width, 2 column layout theme with left blocks and a main story column called Refresh. All credit for the theme design goes to the original author at www.styleshout.com. It is meant for 1024x768 and higher screen resolutions. I have tested it in Firefox2, and Safari public beta 3. In other browsers, your mileage may vary.

Grab it at gllabs.org or here at geeklog.net.

See it in action at lab.familycorner.us.

The first result from our bounties hunt has now landed in CVS: OpenID support, provided by Choplair. And for those of you who are feeling adventurous and don't want to wait for the next Geeklog release, there is also a patch available for Geeklog 1.4.1.

So what is OpenID again? It provides an identity that you can use to log in to all sites that support OpenID. No need to create new accounts with every new site you want to participate in. But note that two problems that OpenID does not solve are trust and spam.

The official release version of Geeklog 1.4.1 is now available for download. To recap the new features:

• Support for Microsoft SQL Server (in addition to the continued support for MySQL). This feature was single-handedly implemented by Randy Kolenko. We also owe thanks to Mark Evans for his help in testing and debugging it.
• The Geeklog Calendar is now a plugin, so it can easily be disabled or replaced.
• Multi-language support lets you create sites where the content changes when you switch languages. So you can have translated versions of articles and only show those in the visitor's preferred language.
• Better spam protection by including support for SLV and offering hooks for CAPTCHAs.
• Various other improvements, e.g. an option to "mass delete" users, a redesigned account information page, updated version of FCKeditor (now again including a file manager), and more.

With this release, we're also saying goodbye to the year 2006 as well as the Geeklog 1.3.x branch, for which support has now ended. Geeklog 1.4.1 is a recommended upgrade for all users of previous versions.