It’s been a long time coming, but we are finally ready to release Subtext 2.0. As I mentioned in April (was it that long ago!?), this is scaled down a bit from our original 2.0 plans. But even so, we have a lot of new goodness in here. It’s not just a bug fix release, though there are plenty of those too.
Highlights
With this release, Subtext has top notch support for Windows Live Writer thanks to some check-ins from Tim Heuer.
- Enhanced MetaWeblog API implementation to support providing a "slug" URL name for the post. This gives the user the option to use the default URL naming, the "auto-friendly" or now to override that with your own slug name.
- Fixed a bug in the SiteMap handler for blogs not hosted at root domains. Would love people to test this out.
- Added support for WordPress API functions of: newPage, editPage, getPages, newCategory
- Simple modification to the Windows Live Writer manifest to prevent those who think they can future post :-)
- Tag-based RSS syndicator
Other highlights
- New CSS-Based Admin Design That Makes Better Use of Space
- Ability to set a separate skin for mobile devices
- Streamlined Installation Process. I tried to remove unnecessary steps and make this more robust.
- Support for Enclosures (See Simo’s great post on this for more details)
- CSS and JS optimizations (Simo has more interesting details on this).
- Setting a date in the future for publishing posts (again, Simo has more details).
- Login to your blog using OpenID, as well as use your blog as an OpenId Delegate
Notes for new installations
The install package includes a default Subtext2.0.mdf file for SQL 2005. If you plan to run your blog off of SQL Express, installation is as easy as copying the install files to your webroot. If you’re not using SQL Express, but plan to use SQL Server 2005, you can attach to the supplied .mdf file and use it as your database.
Notes for upgrading
In the app_data folder of the install package, feel free to delete the database files there. They only apply to new installs.
We also include a zip file with just the SQL upgrade scripts. This is sometimes useful for those who run into problems with the upgrade procedure.
Full upgrade notes are on the Subtext project website.
So what’s next for Subtext?
The Subtext team is fired up to get their feet wet using ASP.NET MVC, and I can’t blame them. So at this point, we’re starting preliminary planning work for Subtext 3.0, the next major version of Subtext which will be a ground-up rewrite pulling in as much code from 2.0 along the way of course.
But that doesn’t mean we’re abandoning the 2.0 line immediately. I would expect to see several small incremental releases of the 2.* line even as we start on 3.0 with fires lit under our butts. Subtext 3.0 is in the very early stages of planning taking a long term look into the future.
After all, there’s still a lot of infrastructure decisions to be made, as well as requirements gathering. In what ways do we want to be just like Subtext 2.0? In what ways do we want to completely change the architecture?
Some of the decisions we need to make, just as a start:
- Where do we host? Do we stick with SourceForge or go elsewhere?
- What data access layer/ORM tooling should we use?
- What DI framework do we choose?
- What do we use for communication and documentation?
- What should our database design look like?
- Should we change how we handle multi-tenancy?
In any case, it’s been a fun ride so far, and I hope we can keep our momentum going in producing a great blogging platform for ASP.NET.
And before I forget, here’s the download page link.