Latest posts in GroupServer Announcements: GroupServer.Org

GroupServer 1.0 Alpha From: Michael JasonSmith Date: 2008 Aug 01 03:01 UTC Short link

I have updated the tar-ball of GroupServer 1.0 Alpha to include a fix to some
installation bugs.
  http://www.groupserver.org/downloads/
This release is also a step closer to 1.0 Beta. It also includes the new
invitation code
  http://groupserver.org/r/topic/3S1b2qAO5BX0wOaSvcIiLw
and some (unannounced) changes to how posts are displayed.

GroupServer 1.0 Alpha From: Richard Waid Date: 2008 Jun 16 03:33 UTC Short link

Well. Finally we're announcing the GroupServer 1.0 alpha release: Cream
Freeze at the Beach. If it seems like it's been a long time since the
last release... it has. The previous release was April 10th 2006.

To try it out right away, you can find the buildout here:

   http://www.groupserver.org/downloads/

I'll give a rundown on what's changed, but first I think a bit of
background on why the release has taken us so long is in order.

The previous release was pretty good, but it was quite difficult to
test, and had dependencies on a lot of 'through-the-web' code and
templates (code stored in an object database, for those not familiar
with Zope). This made it tricky to provide an upgrade path, and
customisation for our different clients wasn't the easiest thing either.

So we held back the release till we could get to the stage where
upgrading was possible (because it's in our best interest for people to
be able to upgrade to the latest version as easily as possible), and the
code base allowed us to easily integrate changes from contributors.

Obviously in all this time we've made other changes to the system. The
one word summary of what has changed could be "Everything". Here is a
longer version, in no particular order:

- Much of the system data (but not yet all) is now stored in a
relational database.

- Still using Zope 2, but with extensive work undertaken to shift
towards Zope 3 using the Five bridge.

- The XML/XSLT processing framework has been all but completely removed
from GroupServer. This was an interesting idea that was, for the most
part, somewhat premature.

- Performance has improved at least an order of magnitude in every area,
and in some cases several orders of magnitude.

- Many, many bugfixes and refactorings have occurred -- over 2900
revisions since the last release, including crushing some particularly
annoying unicode bugs.

- Chat feature -- a simple, AJAX based web chat client.

- Skinnable using Zope 3 style skins

- Complete rebuild of the message rendering interface, using search,
AJAX for progressive rendering.

- A huge number of other interface refinements, and many more management
screens

- Replaced the underlying javascript library. Twice. (now using jQuery:
http://www.jquery.com)

- Site and user-configurable timezones with support for Daylight Saving
Time

- Total rewrite of the registration, email verification and user
profiles

- The beginnings of a content management framework -- more of this will
land before the beta release (based on WYMEditor:
http://www.wymeditor.org -- an awesome editor)

- Refined bounce handler

- More extensive logging of user actions

- Group participation statistics

- Rewritten file library, now using search and fully integrating files
with messages

- Completely new search framework

- Keywording of emails to produce automatic email summaries

- More atom feeds

- New redirection framework to allow shorter links to several types of
content

- Buildout based environment, making it easier to get a consistent
development (and production) environment

You can find more information about the direction of GroupServer here:

   http://www.groupserver.org/groupserver/roadmap/

As always, we are open to bribery when it comes to our roadmap -- Beer,
Vodka and Money all work particularly well.

At this stage we want feedback, bugfixes, feedback, documentation and
feedback. Feedback would also be good.

If you'd like to participate in the development process (encouraged!)
we have two groups:

GroupServer Development (discussion about new features, improvements to
existing features, general ideas):

   http://www.groupserver.org/groups/development

GroupServer Team (invitation or by request only, for those with commit
access):

   http://www.groupserver.org/groups/groupserver_team

This release has primarily been supported by:

   Advanced Business Education Limited
   http://www.abel.ac.nz/about/abel

   E-Democracy.org Forums
   http://forums.e-democracy.org/

   Onlinegroups.net
   http://www.onlinegroups.net

An extra special plug for OnlineGroups.net, without whom releasing
GroupServer would not be possible -- Start your free hosted GroupServer
public site today at http://onlinegroups.net/sites/start_a_site/

Trac is open From: Richard Waid Date: 2007 Nov 01 12:21 UTC Short link

We've hit a major milestone for GroupServer -- our long closed Trac
issue tracking system is now open for public submissions and viewing.

Anyone may (without logging in):

- submit an issue
- view the wiki (which doesn't have a lot of content at the moment)
- view the timeline and roadmap
- view open issues

Users with code access may also:

- view the source code
- edit issues

Currently access to the source code repository is still closed, but only
because we think we may still have some client code that hasn't been
tidied up correctly. Once that is done, we will open that as well.

Many, Many, MANY thanks go to Alice, who has done the hard yards in
tidying up the Trac issues, moving out client details. I just flipped
the switch, so really it should be Alice making this announcement :)

We hope this will encourage people to directly submit issues into the
tracker, and thus streamline our bug smashing efforts! As well, we hope
that it will enable people to easily see what we're working on, and what
we have planned in the future.

GroupServer 0.9 - "31 Candles" From: Richard Waid Date: 2006 Apr 10 06:27 UTC Short link

Greetings:

Finally GroupServer 0.9 is out. The release isn't polished. It might not
even install (but we hope it does)!

   http://groupserver.org/news?id=59  (follow for download links)

There are many changes (hundreds probably) in this release, these are
some of the highlights:

Participant Images From: Dan Randow Date: 2005 Sep 29 03:36 UTC Short link

Further to my recent announcement, I gratefully acknowledge Tim Erickson
of http://politalk.org for funding these new participant image features.

This is the way that new features get into GroupServer so that everyone
can use them!

thanks, Tim

Participant Images From: Dan Randow Date: 2005 Sep 27 02:38 UTC Short link

Hi All,

We have just implemented a new feature that displays the image of the
sender of each post (if they have an image). Check this topic online for
an example (but it looks much better in a topic with lots of posts from
people with photos).

You can upload your own image now, too, so if you have one, please do.

We expect that these features will be included in the final stable
release of GroupServer 0.1, which we hope to release soon.

0.1rc6 released From: Richard Waid Date: 2005 Jul 29 22:04 UTC Short link

All:

I've just made a release of GroupServer 0.1rc6. Mostly this fixes a
couple of things overlooked in the previous release, including a change
to the password reminder mechanism.

We should be getting close-ish to making a final release of 0.1, at
which point we will start looking at integrating more of the features
that we have implemented in production, but not in release.

This is also a call for any and all contributions, even (and
especially!) documentation, an area in which we are sorely lacking at
the moment.

0.1rc5 released From: Richard Waid Date: 2005 Jul 26 07:46 UTC Short link

With thanks to Richard Solly of the Melbourne PC Users Group, who turned
up a number of problems with the previous release, a new version of
GroupServer has been released. This release also integrates the fix for
the crasher previously turned up in the libxslt plugin.


Best regards,

Richard Waid
http://iopen.net

New email address From: Richard Waid Date: 2005 Jul 13 03:56 UTC Short link

As part of a well-needed rearrangement of groupserver.org, we've changed
the email addresses of:

   groupserver_team
   groupserver_admin
   groupserver_marketing
   groupserver_announcements

from onlinegroups.co.nz to groupserver.org. So, to email
groupserver_admin, you should now send email to
<email obscured>.

Fix for crasher bug From: Richard Waid Date: 2005 Jun 26 09:17 UTC Short link

A thread-safety issue has been unearthed in the libxml/libxslt library
used beneath the default rendering plugin. A replacement plugin has been
released at:

  http://groupserver.org/downloads/

which fixes the issue by thread-locking the actual page transformation.

Upgrading this file is strongly recommended by anyone currently using
the libxml/libxslt plugin (which is probably pretty much everyone).

subscribe From: Anonymous User Date: 2005 Jun 13 03:20 UTC Short link

GroupServer 0.1rc4 From: Richard Waid Date: 2005 Jun 10 00:31 UTC Short link

GroupServer 0.1rc4 is out. Some fairly major bug fixes have been
integrated into this release, including 2 showstoppers.

Thanks go to Qu Zhang from Bellanet.org for his debugging assistance
with this release.

For more information and to download, please see:

  http://groupserver.org/downloads/

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