anomey 2.1 now available

We finally released our first real public version of anomey. This version isn't yet feature complete at all - but we decided to release it in the sense of open source (release early, release often). After releasing our beta version we didn't get as much response as hopped. So this is actually also a try to get more people's attention and especially more feedback.

Please keep in mind that anomey might still contains bugs - but we'd like you to find them and report them to the issue tracker in Google Code.

Since our beta release we mainly improved the admin panel - so you can now create and edit designs with the admin panel. The news module has now an Atom feed and there is a new module called "Join" to redirect to external pages from the site navigation. A new module called "People" lets you display all from anomey. This is useful for member lists or contact pages.

Along with the new version we've also pushed out a small update to our website anomey.ch. We added a few more informations and made the design a bit shinier. In the code section you can now find out how to checkout the latest source from anomey.

anomey 2.1 can be downloaded on our website: anomey.ch/download.

anomey API documentation

To improve the usability of anomey we'd like to provide an API documentation for all classes. After evaluating some documentation generators like PHPDocumentor, Doxygen and Natural Docs, we realized that none of them really fits our needs.

In general the tool we need should be flexible, PHP oriented, easy to use and generate XHTML valid output. PHPDocumentor was proprably the best solution but the static way it's build annoyed us. After some research we found a dynamic and fast way to generate an API documentation with PHP: The PHP Reflection API. It provides you the ability to build an class documentation on the fly and read documentation comments from the code with the method getDocComment().

The result of the first prototype was stunning so we launched a new project called Darter. The program is licensed under the LGPL and can be used by every PHP developer: simply add the source files of your project to the folder "src" and Darter will generate an API documentation on the fly!

anomey 2.1 beta 1 released

Good news everyone! The first public beta of anomey has just been released. It's dedicated to all developers who would like to take a first look at the architecture of anomey. This release doesn't come with a lot of features so we strongly discourage you from using it in any productive way.

To install anomey on your server download the file, extract and upload it to your server. Make sure PHP has writing permission to the folder anomey and open the anomey directory over your web browser (e.g. http://examle.org/anomey/). Login with the username "root" and the password", go then to the admin (which is linked at the end of the page you just opened) and change the username and the password of the user root.

Requirements: You need an Apache HTTP Server and at least PHP 5.1.3. Really! Believe me, it doesn't work properly with older version of PHP.

At the moment only the original root user can access the admin interface because you can't give admin permissions to other users. This will be fixed in the next version (see issue #7). If you find any bugs inside anomey, please report them in our issue tracker.

Update 2006-11-13
There's a small update to fix a bug on windows systems and provide compatibility with PHP 5.2.0. We also made some changes to the file .htaccess to avoid HTTP Error 500 on some Apache servers.

Update 2006-11-20
There was something wrong with the beta 1.2 durring a while. The new beta 1.3 should solve it.

• Link to download removed - new version available
  
• Issue tracker
• Discussion group

1. Milestone report

Last Friday the 20th of October the anomey team met to take a look at the progress according to the 1st milestone of anomey. We were able to see some improvements which had been done over the last weeks and discussed some problems (especially with SimpleXML). In general we're good in time and our public beta release date (11th November 2006) is still realistic.

Out roadmap is accessible in the Google Group Wiki: anomey Roadmap. As you might notice some points have been moved from the 2nd to the 3rd milestone. That's mainly because we wan't to make the first beta as stable as possible. The beta might includes less modules but the included modules should be runnable without as less failures as possible.

So stay tuned for the beta release...

Status update

I'd like to inform you about the current status of anomey and our plans for the future. On our last meeting on the 11th September we defined two milestones for anomey:

Milestone 1
The first milestone is set to the 22th October 2006. This one is an internal milestone so we won't release any version of anomey at this date. Instead we appointed a meeting so we can discuss the progress and the framework changes. We specified the following tasks for this milestone:

1. Finish Admin and Text module (fabian)
2. Implement Gallery module with support for picasa web albums (adi)
3. Create basis for statistics in Tardo (gaba)
4. Write tutorial about creating a simple guestbook module in anomey (fabian)

Milestone 2

The second milestone (which is probably the more interesting) is set to the 11th November 2006. On this date we will release the first public beta version of anomey. It won't have a lot of special features but it will show you how anomey is built up and it will be usable for simple websites. You'll also be able to develop you own modules and extensions with the help of the tutorial I'll write and discover how easy it is to work with anomey.

We already set a few tasks which need to be done until the second milestone and will probably complete them after the meeting of the first milestone:

1. Add an administration interface for the Gallery module. (adi)
2. Integrate Tardo into anomey. (gaba)
3. Migrate our official website to the new version of anomey. (fabian)
4. Write a tutorial about creating an admininstration interface for a module. (fabian)
5. Testing and bug fixing. (fabian)

Based on the feedback of the second milestone we will plan the further roadmap of anomey. In general I think anomey 2.1 (the first stable public release) will be published in the first quarter of 2007.

- fabian, head developer

PS: A hint to everyone who wants to take a look at anomey before the second milestone: you can check out the current developer version from our public read-only subversion repository (but please keep in mind, that we might change some important interfaces till the second milestone).

2 new subprojects: Chameleon and Tardo

We've just created 2 new subprojects for anomey: Chameleon and Tardo. Both are independent projects designed to test new planned features outside anomey. So they give you a small idea about what you can expect in the future versions of anomey.

Chameleon

Chameleon is a project to test the new extension system. The ground idea comes from the OSGi framework, on which the Eclipse plugin architecture builds.

Tardo

Tardo is a statistic module for anomey. The goal of this module is to make a statistic of every module in anomey without special adaptations. At the moment we are working on the specification of the module, so it would be very nice if you send your request for Tardo. But we see that we need the Chameleon implementation to get what we want, so the full functionality of Tardo will be available with the version 3 of anomey. Tardo is certainly fundamentally implemented in anomey 2.0

New "remember me" feature

I'm currently developing a enhanced function for the login system of anomey which allows you to let anomey remember your login information so you don't need to enter your username and your password each time you visit the site.

For security reasons that password of the user doesn't get saved on the client - instead if a user logs in and wants anomey to remember him, anomey creates a random token and saves this token with the current date and the user id into a xml file. This token gets saved on the client along with the users id in a cookie.

The next time the user visits the site, the cookie information gets sent along and anomey looks up the token in its xml file and checks the date of the token. If the token is not older than a month, the user will be logged in automatically.

To provide even more security, the user needs to enter his password if he wants to access high security pages like the admin if he got authenticated over cookies.