OpenGuides News Archive

Note: only releases with major improvements are mentioned here. For a full release history, please see the release notes.

Version 0.70 of OpenGuides was released yesterday. The changes include an upgrade to version 0.4 of the Leaflet mapping library; this was done in order to allow use of Pavel Shramov's Leaflet plugins (in particular, the Google satellite view plugin used on the Completists' Guide to Croydon).

The other main changes are to do with formatting and display of node content. External links are now given a class of "external", rather than being formatted with hardcoded square brackets. New elements are allowed in page content: span, dl, dt, and dd. Finally, a new macro has been added — @INDEX_LIST_NO_PREFIX — which gives a list of things in a given category or locale but leaves off the "Category" or "Locale" prefix for any subcategories/sublocales in that list.

Version 0.69 of OpenGuides was released on the weekend, with changes focusing on the administrative "missing metadata" tool. New metadata types have been added to the missing metadata search form, allowing people to search for pages with, for example, no associated image. In addition, these search results can now be viewed on a map as an extra option to the previous "list" view.

Under-the-hood changes made as part of this enhancement will also make it easier in the future for us to allow visualisation of even more types of search result on a map.

Version 0.67 of OpenGuides was released today, with several major changes and bugfixes.

We now use Leaflet as our JavaScript mapping library, with OpenStreetMap and MapQuest tiles as default. JSON output has been added or improved on several types of pages, including index pages and user preferences. A basic stylesheet is now included in the distribution, and a long-standing recent changes bug has been fixed. Finally, it's now possible to index on category and locale at the same time (so you can view e.g. a list or map of all pubs in Holborn).

Version 0.66 of OpenGuides was released yesterday by our new CPAN release manager, Bob Walker. This includes various usability fixes, new CSS hooks, and a switch to Geo::Coordinates::* modules rather than the old Geography::NationalGrid::* ones (which no longer exist on CPAN).

We now require version 2.24 of Template (for its text virtual methods, needed to create the abovementioned CSS hooks).

Version 0.64 of OpenGuides was released this week, with various small bugfixes and improvements including slightly simpler installation, plus metadata discovery, JSON support, an optional admin navbar, and host whitelisting for editing moderated nodes.

We had a hackfest in Oxford, and it was good!

Release manager Dom reports that 22 Trac tickets were closed and 6 were opened during the weekend. We also saw a few new faces, which is excellent.

Apologies for the long delay since the last bit of news here; we were doing things, honest, but because of the way the website was set up, it was a faff to update. This has now been fixed!

In other exciting news, we're having another hackfest! It'll be in Oxford this time, on Saturday 18 October and Sunday 19 October 2008. Many more details can be found on our dev wiki.

We're holding a hackfest in London on 9–10 June, focusing on bug triage and bug fixing.

OpenGuides 0.60 has now been released, with improved stylability of the “edit page” form, increased admin control over the “random page” link in the sidebar, and a new macro for providing a link to a random page in a specific category or locale.

OpenGuides 0.59 has now been released, with a number of bugfixes, plus new stylesheet hooks and template tweaks to give Guide admins more control over the appearance of their sites.

OpenGuides 0.52 has now been released. The major new feature is Google Maps support!

Please welcome the Open Guide to Milton Keynes.

OpenGuides 0.51 has now been released, with quite a number of improvements.

New module for converting OpenGuides RDF back into Perl data structures released.

Please welcome the Open Guide to Southampton.

Please welcome the Cotswolds Guide.

OpenGuides 0.49 released: numerous RDF output refinements and various minor improvements.

OpenGuides::Statistics released to let you produce nice graphs of how many nodes you have, like these ones for London.

OpenGuides 0.47 released with a number of bugfixes.

Release of OpenGuides 0.45, with new support for global geolocation.

We are pleased to announce the opening of the new Open Guide to Chester.

Earle Martin, one of our developers, recently spoke at the NotCon conference in London about OpenGuides. A recording of his talk is now available ("Geolocation" session, 20 minutes in).

OpenGuides 0.35 - to help protect your wiki from spammers, you can now delete individual historical versions of a node.

OpenGuides 0.33 - improved templates and a new search by distance feature.

The Open Guide to London gets mentioned in Business Week.

The Open Guide to London (in its earlier incarnation as "Grubstreet") was mentioned in the Guardian's "Online" section.