Samizdat 0.5.0, the first beta release

[Dmitry Borodaenko]

Greetings!

Version 0.5.0 of the Samizdat open publishing engine is released. This
version introduces basic focus management, completing the minimal set of
features required for an open publishing part of the engine, and making
Samizdat ready for public beta testing. Other major changes in this
release include Pingback support, many user interface improvements,
another rewrite of multimedia upload, testing framework, and more.


About Samizdat:

Samizdat is a generic RDF-based engine for building collaboration and
open publishing web sites. Samizdat will let users cooperate and
coordinate on all kinds of activities, including media activism,
resource sharing, education and research, advocacy, etc., by allowing
everyone to publish, view, comment, edit, and aggregate text and
multimedia resources, vote on ratings and classifications, filter
resources by flexible sets of criteria (see design-goals.txt). Samizdat
intends to promote values of freedom, openness, equality, and
cooperation.


Links:

Home: http://www.nongnu.org/samizdat/
Download: http://savannah.nongnu.org/download/samizdat/samizdat-0.5.0.tar.gz
Demo site: https://www.cockroachcollective.org/~angdraug/samizdat/
RDF schema: http://www.nongnu.org/samizdat/rdf/schema


Major changes in this release:

- basic focus management: voting on relations of resources to focuses
  allows to collaboratively organize information published on a Samizdat
  site, see concepts.txt ("focus" concept was previously called "tag" in
  Samizdat documentation, kudos to Mike McMillan and Anton Andreasson
  for coinage);

- Pingback protocol implemented, see install.txt (requires Ruby CVS
  snapshot as of 2003-11-22 or Ruby 1.8.1-preview3 when it is released);

- user interface improvements in resource rendering and query usability;

- multimedia upload rewritten again, introducing incompatible database
  schema and a separate content directory for uploads, see install.txt;

- testing framework implemented, including unit and functional test
  suites, see install.txt;

- Template class now generates valid XHTML 1.0 Strict;

- API is cleaned up and made ready for RDoc, config.yaml reorganized,
  RDF schema reorganized and published online;

- Session class now provides CGI abstraction layer, error reporting, and
  references to session-dependent instances of RDF and template classes.


Known bugs:

- focus table is not rendered correctly in Internet Explorer due to a
  difficult to work around bug in CSS implementation by Microsoft;

- Pingback doesn't work with Ruby 1.6.


Enjoy!

-- 
Dmitry Borodaenko