Samizdat News
=============

2012-05-12: Samizdat 0.7.0 is released.

    This version features massive improvements both in the user interface and
    under the hood. Posts by registered members are now organized into blogs,
    publishing a message with several pictures and other multimedia parts can
    now be done in a single step, sub-tags provide even finer control over site
    structure, while translations have been promoted from special-class comments
    into its own kind of a message part. Other changes include short message cut
    mark, support for comments with empty titles, Lock Comments moderation
    action, and public moderators list.

    Samizdat Storage, Cache, and Sanitize modules were split out into their own
    sub-projects called Graffiti, SynCache, and Whitewash. Since Samizdat 0.6.2,
    Graffiti has grown the ability to handle transitive properties and negative
    sub-queries, and migrated from Ruby/DBI to Sequel as a backend interface to
    relational databases. Whitewash moved away from reliance on HTMLTidy and
    REXML, both cleanup and parsing of HTML is now handled by Nokogiri.

    Samizdat itself has migrated from cgi.rb to Rack as its interface with the
    Web server, examples in the documentation show the new recommended way to
    setup Samizdat using Thin Ruby application server and Varnish cache behind
    Nginx front-end web server. Mahoro file type detection library was replaced
    with Magic FFI bindings, while FastGettext is now preferred over
    Ruby/GetText for i18n.

    As usual, see release notes [0] for details and upgrade instructions.

    [0] http://samizdat.nongnu.org/release-notes/samizdat-0.7.0.html

2009-02-12: Samizdat 0.6.2 is released.

    The most important part of this release is the long list of security
    improvements in various parts of Samizdat engine. Password encryption is now
    as strong as it gets, HTTPS now gets the emphasis it deserves, cross-site
    scripting protection has been tightened, and in general the engine is even
    more paranoid about user-submitted data than before.

    End users will be most interested in the integration with Flowplayer free
    Flash video player and the thumbnailing capabilities of the new image
    plugin. Both features are enabled by the new plugin mechanism, which, in
    addition to handling different content types, allows to add fancy member
    profile parameters and alternative access control schemes.

    As usual, see release notes [0] for details and upgrade instructions.

    [0] http://samizdat.nongnu.org/release-notes/samizdat-0.6.2.html

2008-03-04: Samizdat 0.6.1 is released.

    Main goal of 0.6.x series is to address the shortcomings that were
    identified in the IMC CMS Survey in November 2006 [0]. This version
    takes care of the most important part: security. New security
    features in Samizdat 0.6.1 include: CSRF protection, Antispam
    module, per-resource moderation logs, moderation requests tracker.

    [0] http://samizdat.nongnu.org/doc/CMSSurveyReportSamizdat.html

    Samizdat's internals have changed beyond recognition since previous
    release. The engine code is refactored into MVC architecture,
    Samizdat Cache now uses a deadlock-proof two-level locking
    algorithm, RDF Storage has undergone a massive overhaul that allowed
    to add support for optional sub-patterns in Squish queries.
    Apache/PostgreSQL combo is no longer the only way to install
    Samizdat: Lighttpd web server and MySQL and SQLite3 databases are
    now supported. The database schema is changed once again, see
    release notes [1] on how to upgrade.

    [1] http://samizdat.nongnu.org/release-notes/samizdat-0.6.1.html

    There's also a lot of small features and usability improvements here
    and there. The tired "next page" link is replaced with proper
    pagination system, file sizes are displayed next to download links,
    replies are sorted by id instead of last edit date, posting comment
    to a multi-page thread redirects to thread's last page, translations
    don't appear in the replies list and can't be replied to, error
    reporting is more detailed and less confusing to users. User
    interface was translated into several more languages, with varying
    degrees of completeness.

    And the "cherry on top" prize goes to RSS import module, with
    special thanks to Boud who evangelized this feature for a long time
    and created the first implementation.

2006-11-29: Samizdat 0.6.0 is released.

    The version increase attributes to the gradual changes in 0.5.x
    series and incorporates almost two years worth of real-world
    deployment. Now that Samizdat has finally become a mature open
    publishing system, the road is cleared for more intrusive changes
    and major new features, such as free exchange and calendaring.

    In the way of major features, this version introduces ubiquitous
    message translations and RSS syndication. Many old tools are now
    more flexible and easier to use: focus management interface is
    simplified, the front page now packs more information in better
    layout and allows to include static headers and footers.

    There are even more changes under the hood: multi-layer caching,
    gzip and ETag support, support for audio and video uploads,
    BitTorrent links, HTML and CSS filtering, flexible access control,
    new moderation features, new UI translations and themes, code
    reorganization, simplified installation, and more.

2004-10-22: Samizdat 0.5.4 is released.

    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.

2004-09-20: Samizdat 0.5.3 is released.

    Starting with this version, Samizdat can send out email: currently,
    it is used to recover lost passwords and to confirm that member
    email address is real. Email addresses are now unique, making it
    more difficult to cheat using throwaway accounts. Other changes
    include new dc:description message property for attaching article
    abstract, thumbnail image, or table of contents to a message, new
    preferences infrastructure allowing to add more server-side member
    settings in the future, and the inevitable database schema change.

2004-07-05: Samizdat 0.5.2 is released.

    This version adds Wiki functionality to Samizdat, allowing to edit
    messages and track history of changes. Messages may use Textile
    format for advanced hypertext markup, editing may be limited to the
    original creator or open for all site members. Other highlights of
    this release are FastCGI support, configurable site logo, multiple
    usability improvements, and the usual bunch of bugfixes. Once again,
    database schema is slightly changed.

2004-03-18: Samizdat 0.5.1 "Paris Commune" release is out.

    This release is dedicated to 133rd anniversary of the Paris Commune.
    Main feature of this version is i18n support, with Russian
    translation already in place. Other improvements include ability to
    work as plain CGI without mod_ruby, support for Windows/Cygwin,
    massive speed increase, and a long list of bugfixes. Database schema
    is changed again, but this time it is trivial to migrate from the
    previous version.

2003-12-01: Samizdat 0.5.0 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.

2003-10-17: samizdat-devel mailing list is created.

    The mailing list is dedicated to development of the Samizdat
    collaboration and open publishing engine. Secondary list topics
    include Samizdat demployment, usage, and other related issues.

2003-09-01: Samizdat 0.0.4 is released.

    This version allows to upload multimedia messages, including images
    and verbatim plain text, and introduces publishing of user-defined
    queries in form of "application/x-squish" messages. When migrating
    from older versions, Samizdat database should be dropped and
    recreated from scratch because of incompatible database schema
    change: content is now stored as a blob. In addition, file upload
    feature relies on StringIO module that is available as part of the
    Ruby 1.8 or can be installed separately from the Ruby Shim library
    for Ruby 1.6.

2003-08-08: Samizdat 0.0.3 is released.

    In this version, query construction UI is added, allowing to compose
    and modify search queries more conveniently and without having to
    manually edit raw Squish. Other major changes include switch to
    Unicode UTF-8 as default encoding, great improvement of browsers
    support in CSS, more code refactoring. Many minor bugs and
    inconsistencies are fixed, UI is enhanced in several places.

2003-07-14: Samizdat 0.0.2 is released.

    This version implements query validation and security limits, making
    execution of user-defined search queries safer. Other changes
    include schema improvements (better integration of Samizdat RDF
    schema with Dublin Core, separate namespace for tags, switch from
    RDF/XML to more readable N3 notation), enhanced search result
    display (resource rendering is separated into a class), UI CSS
    clean-up, documentation updates. Access to utility classes is
    reorganized and simplified.

2003-06-12: Samizdat 0.0.1 is released.

    This is the first version that includes basic RDF search query
    construction UI. Other functionality covered by this version
    includes: registering site members, publishing and replying to
    messages, voting for standard tags on resources.

