Thalassa CMS

Thalassa 0.3.20 released. This time Thalassa itself gets only minor changes:

• the menu facility now supports text labels (texts displayed inside the menu, not being a menu item) and breaks (may be whatever you want, placed between certain menu items to group the items and separate the groups from each other; e.g., an extra whitespace, a rule or a bullet);
• sections that define stand-alone page now recognize a path parameter which overrides the section name for local path (URI) of the page; the parameter is passed through the macroprocessor, so the actual name for the generated file may be set by, e.g., an option, and setting it to some “special” values disables the page.

Besides that, a segfault has been fixed, which happened on an attempt to generate an unknown (unconfigured) stand-alone page from command line.

More significant changes are related to site templates. First of all, a brand new template, named Agenda, is added. The new template mostly provides the same functions as the old good Smoky: pages, feed (either a news strip or a blog, exported to RSS), a guestbook and contact form. Unlike Smoky, Agenda uses a side panel for the main menu, and the panel may be placed at the left side, at the right side, or suppressed (in which case you'll probably have to care about basic navigation on your own). Four prepared color schemes come with Agenda, and generally a color scheme consists of less values to be set, so it made customizable by the site author. Besides that, some sizes and lengths may also be customized; the side panel's width may serve as a good example.

The next notable thing is that both templates now support translations to languages other than English. In the source tarball, translations to Russian are provided, both for koi8-r and utf-8 encodings.

The two templates have a lot of common in their implementations, so they are now stored in a new fashion: under the $thalassa/examples/ directory, there are now three subdirectories related to the templates: Smoky, which contains the stuff specific to the Smoky template, Agenda, containing the Agenda-specific stuff, and Common, where all the common files and parts are found. The (probably) most notable think here is that templates now need to be prepared in order to be used, which may be done issuing the appropriate make command in the $thalassa/examples/ directory. The preparation process includes copying files from both common and specific parts, even concatenating some files, and the language/encoding configuration is choosen by copying the respective version of files containing user-visible texts. The prepared copy is composed in a directory named like _agenda_en, _smoky_ru_utf etc. See the $thalassa/examples/README file for details; prepared copies have their own README files, explaining how to use them.

Migration to Thalassa 0.3.20

Replacing older Thalassa with the new version shouldn't break anything. If, however, you run a Smoky-based site and want to upgrade the template version, please note that customizable files containing user-visible texts, namely srvtexts.ini and cgitexts.ini, in the new version contain a lot of new parameters. If you made any changes to these files, it will be a bit tricky to merge your changes with the new version. What is suggested:

• make a backup copy of your versions of the two files;
• take their original (uncustomized) versions from previous versions' archives, and use the diff program to figure out what particular changes were made;
• replace the base/ subdirectory within your working site source with the new version;
• replace the two files with their new (uncustomized) versions from the archive;
• manually reapply the changes you made to these files.

Besides that, in your config.ini, add to the section [options mainpage] the following line:

  name = index.html