Croogo 1.3 released!

Posted by Fahad on Mon, Apr 05 2010

After 101 commits, 40 tickets, and many sleepless nights, I am happy to announce the release of Croogo 1.3! This version is surely more secure, usable, faster and sucks less! Migrating to CakePHP 1.3 didn't take that long, but I wanted to take care of a few more things before releasing another beta version.

Download

All downloads have been moved from Google Code to GitHub. Download latest version of Croogo here: http://github.com/croogo/croogo/downloads

The changes

CakePHP 1.3: The CMS now runs on latest CakePHP 1.3 taking advantage of some cool new features.
Theming: Previously, themes had to be placed under two different directories. Now all your theme related files are found under a single directory, much more easier to maintain and distribute.
Plugins and Hooks: Plugin development is more powerful now. The hook system has been improved more so your plugins can integrate with the core more easily. Plugins can have their own bootstraps and routes too.
YAML: Themes and plugins now use YAML file for their basic description/info instead of XML files.
Admin UI: the navigation menu has been moved to top to make more room for content, and it is also more usable.
Security: Now ships with SecurityComponent enabled. Takes care of XSS vulnerabilities and CSRF attacks.
Installer: Replaces security salt and cipher seed with new values when installing (thanks to @AD7six).
Bug fixes: v1.2.1 had bugs with query caching and a few other things, they are fixed now.

Compare v1.2.1 with v1.3 on GitHub. If you find any bugs, you can submit tickets here: http://croogo.lighthouseapp.com.

Community contributed plugins and themes

Now that designing themes and developing plugins is so easy, I expect some contribution in the Croogo community. Let the flow of themes and plugins begin! Need help? Join the mailing list.

Croogo.org

I am not a designer, thats the reason you still don't see Croogo.org set up with a nice design and a beautiful logo. I will try to get that done as soon as possible. As long as it is not done, keep reading the wiki on github as I update it frequently.

Watch this space, I will be releasing a new theme for Croogo (the one currently active on my blog) within a week.

And Happy Easter to everyone reading this post! :)

Posted in Croogo

10 Comments

Andrew said on Apr 05, 2010

Thanks Fahad, this is great news. I will be working on a new theme to release next week.

Veit said on Apr 05, 2010

This looks great so far - thanks Fahad! I think Croogo has a bright future. It's so much more solid and thought-out in its foundation than any other blog system I know.

But I would suggest some easy to implement changes to make it more joyful to use:
- remove the superfish animation from the menu - it dowsn't help anybody but slows things down.
- combine and minify JS and CSS files for better loading performance
- add the option for a different database port. I use 8306 to test locally. Adding "'port' => '8306'" to the database.php did the trick for me - but this should be done in the install process.

Keep up the great work! I'll continue to play around with this thing now... :)

jacmoe said on Apr 05, 2010

Congratulations! :)
Actually, I like your current theme - it was one of the reasons I wanted to check out Croogo: an extremely clean design.
Looking forward to seeing people contributing plugins.

BTW: You need to look into an upgrade routine, in addition to the installer.

Richard McIntyre said on Apr 05, 2010

That is great news, I am keen to start using this when I get a project that could use it! Thanks for the work!

Tom said on Apr 05, 2010

Congrats on the release! Can't wait to dig in with some plugins. Finally wrapped up another side project which will assist in that effort as you wrapped up 1.3...Great timing =)

aylw said on Apr 07, 2010

I just stumbled upon your project while looking at CMS, and I gotta say, yours is very nice and very clean. Keep it up, I think this thing has wings.

Fahad said on Apr 12, 2010

Thanks for the comments everyone!

azzis said on Apr 17, 2010

When i try posting a new comment, i see:
Fatal error: Call to a member function addScript() on a non-object in D:\xampp\htdocs\blog\cake\libs\view\helpers\html.php on line 443

But comment is created!

Fahad said on Apr 17, 2010

There was a bug and it has been taken care of in the repository.

Here is the relevant ticket: http://croogo.lighthouseapp.com/projects/32818/tickets/62-comments-call-to-a-member-function-addscript-on-a-non-object

taka said on Apr 23, 2010

So - as Cake 1.3.x gets updated (i.e. RC4 just came out) - do we just drop-in (overlay) 1.3RC4 into the cake directory within Croogo 1.3?

fahad19