Samizdat 0.5.4, the IMC release

[Dmitry Borodaenko]

Samizdat 0.5.4, the IMC release
-------------------------------

In this version, front page layout was changed to the more familiar
vertial split with the main column featuring focuses and right column
running recent updates in the open publishing wire. New moderation
facility allows to take over messages, displace their contents
completely, and block member accounts. More new features: alternative
CSS theme Indy is added and now is selectable from the Settings page;
Belarussian translation is added; database connection is now
configurable and allows to run multiple Samizdat instances on a single
server; oversize titles and descriptions are now truncated.

Deeper look into the new features of Samizdat 0.5.4:

- front page: the old horizontal split between focuses table and recent
  updates is replaced with the vertical split; recent updates are
  displayed unchanged in the right column, while the mail column shows
  most popular focuses with each featuring description of the most
  recent message and titles of other recent messages in the focus

- moderation: moderators specified in config.yaml are able to take over
  messages (current version of such message can still be viewed through
  history of changes), displace messages (the displaced version of a
  message cannot be restored), and block member accounts (blocked
  account can be unblocked by any other moderator); all moderator
  actions are logged in an append-only table

- theme selection: any user can now select preferred CSS theme on the
  Settings page; the new Indy scheme follows the style and color scheme
  of the global Indymedia site 

- new translation: site interface is translated to Belarussian

- multi-site hosting: database connection is no longer hard-coded into
  Samizdat RDF storage module and can be changed in config.yaml; with
  some clever Apache configuration, it is even possible to run many
  sites from the single code base, differing only in config.yaml and
  content/ (and optionally css/) directory

- string truncation: titles and short contents of messages are now
  truncated to the limits specified in config.yaml, ellipsis is appended
  to truncated strings

Download:

http://docs.indymedia.org/twiki/pub/Devel/SamizdatEngine/samizdat-0.5.4.tar.gz

-- 
Dmitry Borodaenko