I recently decided to spend more time working on shomyu, my little project that I had neglected for too long. After less than a month since I went back to work, shomyu 0.6 is released.

In this release, shomyu was trimmed down by unbundling all the external Javascript APIs it uses, namely TinyMCE, OpenLayers and OpenStreetMap.

I also wanted to rebase shomyu 0.6 on TurboGears 2, but I ended up not doing it for the following reasons:

• that's a lot of work, and I was almost sure I wouldn't have this ready in time for FUDCon.I didn't want to be blocked during the hackfest because of WIP on this point.
• also, some great features are being worked on in TurboGears 2, for example a generic registration module by a GSoC student, which is a planned feature for shomyu.
• another thing is that it is rather complicated to install TurboGears 2 right now, as packages are still pending inclusion in Fedora. I didn't want my users / co-developers (who knows, someone might join me one day :) to have to go through the extra work of setting up a virtual env and installing TurboGears 2 manually.

As a result, this was postponed for a future milestone, probably post 0.8.

Another significant thing happened in this release: TinyMCE was totally dropped. TinyMCE is rather feature-creep comparing to what shomyu needs. I also tried using Xinha instead of TinyMCE (seemed to be more « community friendly » even if as much feature-creep), but I had a lot of trouble with using it while it was not actually bundled in shomyu (DOM manipulation error as the Xinha API is not necessarily on the same domain as shomyu, this would have been a PITA for 0.7+ releases).

Instead, I decided to use the simple wiki markup python module. So for now, the editor area is less pretty, but as much powerful. One could think of this as a regression, but it will allow easier future development. Once milestone 0.7 is released, that APIs are fully working and I'm tackling the « prettyness » of shomyu, rich-text Javascript editors will certainly be reconsidered. :)

So, without further ado, go grab shomyu 0.6. Be sure to pay a visit to the documentation on how to run shomyu as it changed a lot since 0.5.

Report any bug you find, and help improving shomyu!

Now is time to look at the next release, as well as start planning for the shomyu hackfest that will take place at FUDCon in Berlin. If you're interested in shomyu, this would be the perfect place to start contributing!