Subtext Submarine Logo It is with great pleasure and relief that I announce the release of Subtext 1.9.5. Between you and me, I’m just happy to get this release out before the kid is born.

As with most point releases, this is primarily a bug fix release, but we found time to introduce a few nice new features - most notably support for tagging and Identicons.

New Features

  • Content Tagging and Tag Cloud - for more details, refere to this post. 
  • Identicon Support - Uses the Identicon Handler project on CodePlex.
  • MyBrand Feedburner Support - Updated our FeedBurner implementation to support custom feedburner URLs
  • Upgrade toLightBox 2.0
    • If you referenced the default lightbox skin in your custom skin, please reference this post by Simone to understand how to update the skin.
  • Author CSS Class - The CSS class of “author” is added to comments left by the owner of a blog (must be logged in when leaving comment for this to work). This allows custom skin authors to highlight comments by authors.
  • Credits Page - In the Admin section, we give credit where credit is due, displaying a list of the open source products we make use of in building Subtext.
  • Implemented ASP.NET AJAX - We replaced MagicAjax panel with ASP.NET Ajax libraries. Keep in mind that this requires a bit of new Web.config configuration sections. So be careful when merging your Web.config changes.

Bug Fixes

Clean Installation

A clean install of Subtext is relatively painless. Essentially copy all the files to your webserver, create a database if you don’t already have one, update web.config to point to your database, and you’re all set. For more details on the setup instructions, read the Clean Installation Instructions

Upgrading

Upgrading from a previous 1.9 version is relatively straightforward. For the safest approach, follow the upgrade instructions here.

I’ve written a command line tool for upgrading Subtext, but it isn’t production ready yet. Our goal is to make the upgrade process as seamless as possible in future versions. If you’d like to help with that, we’d love to have your contributions!

Download

As always, you can download the latest release here. The install file contains just the files you need to deploy to your webserver. The source file contains full source code.

Thanks!

As always, many thanks go out to the many Subtext contributors and community members who helped make this latest release possible. Subtext keeps on getting better because of the community involvement. Just take a look at the improvements to our Continous Integration and Build Server as an example.

If you’d like to contribute, we’re always looking for help. Great positions are open!

What’s Next?

I’m wrapping up a project for a client in which I was able to implement multiple authors per blog. Hopefully, this means that Subtext 2.0 won’t take as long to release as 1.9.5 did.

We are constantly improving our development process and refactoring the code. The big push for 2.0 is to get the Plugin Model and custom MembershipProvider rock solid and to refactor and clean up the code heavily.