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Silva 2.2 alpha Released

Publication date: 18.November.2008, 13:57

18 november 2008 – Infrae is pleased to announce the alpha release of Silva 2.2. This release adds a slew of new features for developers and system administrators, and is a quantum leap with Zope 2.11 and Five/Grok technology. Also the Sphinx-driven docs.infrae.com has gone online.

New features, of interest to developers

  • Silva has been ‘eggified’. Buildout scripts can now retrieve eggs from https://dist.infrae.com/ and the Python Package Index (formerly the Cheese Shop).
  • Five/Grok views are supported. This lets you define Zope 3 Views to render content.
  • All Silva content types and services now use five.grok for configuration and registration.
  • Content types are now created and edited using the z3c forms component.
  • Generic Formlib and z3c forms support have been added to the SMI.
  • The mechanism for previewing public pages has been refactored. No additional ZCML and view definitions are needed. Importantly, a Five namespace is used so that the author stays in preview mode even when navigating.
  • Publications can now become a subsite, meaning that they have local services that change their local configuration.
  • A separate metadata set to mark publications as virtual hosts is not needed. Now to get virtual hosts working you just have to configure Apache.
  • Filesystem-based layout has been refactored: it’s now much easier to define a layout and extend it. You can use Zope 3 views, content providers and viewlets.
  • Skin templates on the file system can be easily customized, via a customization service that duplicates the template in the ZODB. Customization can apply only to selected content with the help of customization markers, or to all content implementing one given interface (for instance all documents, or all containers). Manager users can then edit at will and make changes in a live server without restart. This is not a replacement for more robust development methods, but can be a great way to make small adjustments to parts of a site.

New features, of interest to system administrators

  • BLOB support has been implemented. This provides the Zope 2.11 option to use BLOBs for storing binary objects. The existing ExtFile implementation is still fully supported. Out-of-the-box, binaries are still stored in the ZODB.
  • A user interface for conversion between ZODB binary storage, ExtFile binary storage and BLOB binary storage has been created. Migrate, or revert, with a button click.

New features, of interest to users

  • Changes have been made in SilvaLayout with skin-based components added, such as viewlets, viewlets managers, and content providers.
  • When previewing, an author can now navigate throughout the site, staying in preview mode. This holds not only for content but for all links in a template.

Check out docs.infrae.com

Silva 2.2 code has been used to generate developer documentation using Sphinx.  See http://docs.infrae.com/. This is also an alpha.

What is Silva?

Silva is a powerful CMS for organizations that manage multiple or complex websites. Content is stored in clean and futureproof XML, independent of layout and presentation. Features include versioning, workflow system, integral visual editor (Kupu), content reuse, sophisticated access control, multi-site management, extensive import/export facilities, fine-grained templating, and hi-res image storage and manipulation.

For more complete information, see the Silva Product Pages at https://infrae.com/products/silva.

Install

As this is a developer release it’s only available using buildout:
https://svn.infrae.com/buildout/silva/tag/Silva-2.2a1/
or using Paster by selecting the development distribution. 

Contact

FMI contact Sylvain Viollon, sylvain at infrae com, +31 10 243 7051.