Apostrophe 1.5 released

At long last, Apostrophe 1.5 has been released. It was worth the wait.

Apostrophe, for those who don't know, is an open-source content management system built on Symfony 1.4. You can start with our sandbox project or add it as a plugin to an existing Symfony project. Apostrophe extends familiar Symfony concepts rather than inventing new idioms, and is focused on creating a safe and friendly editing experience for your clients without compromising flexibility. Apostrophe has been through several stable releases and is in use on many production sites such as:

• http://cgi.unc.edu (a 1.5 site)
• http://fandm.edu
• http://www.aapss.org
• http://www.sunrunhome.com/ (a great non-P'unk-avenue Apostrophe site)

You can learn more here:

• Demo site
• Apostrophe Now
• Apostrophe open source project

Here’s a summary of major new features. There are many more, and you can find a more complete list here.

Major New Features in Apostrophe 1.5

• Manual cropping, with constraints. Users can crop images to meet the needs of a particular content slot without damaging your design

• Big improvements in performance, including built-in CSS and JavaScript minifiers

• Page permissions completely reworked to easily support thousands of users with editing and viewing privileges in specific places

• Audio slot for hosted MP3 playback

• Built-in support for the LESS CSS compiler

• Media repository now accommodates Microsoft Office files, can be extended to allow other new downloadable filetypes

• iPhone and other cameras that save orientation hints in JPEGs are now fully compatible, Apostrophe auto-rotates these images

• Vimeo, Viddler, SlideShare and YouTube are all native, with integrated search and the ability to link accounts and automatically sync content. There is an open API to create additional integrated service plugins

• New “Smart Slideshow” slot brings in images automatically via categories or tags

• Major usability improvements throughout

• Search has been enhanced. You can now search on specific fields (title, slug, tags, categories, body) and appropriate fields are given extra weight in ordinary search results. Search is tightly integrated into the blog and events plugin

• Search engine improvements

• New import-site task accepts XML files and loads a full-fledged Apostrophe site, including conversion of HTML blocks with embedded images into a series of rich text and image slots in an area

• Better i18n support "under the hood" (updated XLIFF files coming shortly)

• Based on the new sfDoctrineGuardPlugin: full names and email addresses are now part of the user management system, not just usernames

• Apostrophe’s events feature is integrated with Google Calendar, Outlook and iCal among others thanks to the vCalendar standard. Fully tested for Outlook compatibility back to 2003

• Completely revamped the "blog posts" and "events" slots with excellent typeahead search for picking individual posts, easy selection of tags and categories for automatic selection of relevant content

• Separate public pages can display separate categories of blog content using custom templates as appropriate

• Improved RSS feed slot has built-in support for Twitter @names, automatic detection of RSS feeds associated with ordinary web page URLs ("cnn.com" just works)

• Better outgoing RSS feeds from the blog plugin

We’d also like to acknowledge numerous thoughtful tickets and helpful patches from the apostrophenow Google group. Your contributions make Apostrophe a better and more stable content management system for everyone.

What about Apostrophe 2.0 and Symfony 2.0?

Apostrophe 1.5 is most likely the last major Apostrophe release before Apostrophe 2.0, which will be based on Symfony 2.0. We have begun our design process for Apostrophe 2.0 and anticipate a release sometime late in 2011. In the meantime, like the Symfony 2.0 download page says, use Symfony 1.4 (and Apostrophe 1.5) for your projects.

Apostrophe is built by P'unk Avenue.

Thanks to Fabien for the opportunity to share the news with the wider Symfony community!