Steve Harman just announced the release of Subtext version 1.9.4 Windward Edition. This one comes with a lot of bug fixes, so be sure to upgrade.

Just so you know things work, I add bugs to Subtext, and Steve and the other developers fix the bugs. It’s a rather efficient ecosystem and is working quite well for us. It keeps everyone on their toes.

Steve’s post has the full list of bug fixes and such. The most interesting addition is that we’ve implemented a Google Sitemap, which was submitted as a patch, if I remember correctly.

This release is notable because of the increased number of patch submissions. I greatly appreciate the contributions by all the new contributors along with the stalwarts. Working on Subtext is a joy because of these people.

As for Subtext 2.0, Progress has been slow, but steady. One challenge we’re dealing with is how to cleanly handle the following two multi blog scenarios as summarized by Simo in our mailing list.

​1. The multi blog site is a communiy site: so user registered to a blog, are already registered for all blogs.

​2. The multi blog site is just a host for many different non related blogs: here all users are different, and even if 2 blogs are on the same system, the user shouldn’t know about that.

We pretty much can already handle case 1 which is nice because it means the same user can be the owner of more than one blog, rather than requiring a user account per blog. This is useful for me personally as I host three blogs on a single installation, and right now, the admin is technically three different accounts.

Strictly speaking, this implementation makes implementing the isolation requested in case 2 difficult, because usernames must be unique. So if there’s ever a name conflict between two users attempting to register with the same username, the two blogs will affect each other and not be completely isolated.

However, if we make the user’s email address their login, we can implement case 2 in spirit. First of all, there won’t be two different users using the same email address, so the naming conflict issue is resolved.

Secondly, if you wish to register for blog 2, why should we make you fill in your information again if we already know who you are? We should simply present a message that says, Hey, we know who you are, if you want to register for this site, click here and we’ll auto register you.

That way, the user is in control over who which blogs get to see their registration information, yet they only have one user account in the system. Certainly there are some improvements we can make later, for example, some blogs may want more information than others to register.

But for now, we only ask for the minimal amount of information and will keep things simple and consistent across the board.

In any case, enough blabbing. If you want to download the latest release, you can find it on our SourceForge site or just use this [DOWNLOAD] link.