CrispCreations

My thoughts today are with the families and friends of the 96 Liverpool fans who lost their lives at Hillsborough on April 15, 1989.

Gone, but never forgotten, they'll never walk alone.

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Xaraya Weekly Community Meeting Announcement

7pm (GMT) Sunday 22nd November 2009

Meetings will be held in the #PMC channel on IRC. Everyone is welcome.

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It's with great pleasure that the PMC announce the introduction of a
weekly Xaraya community meeting.

The first meeting will be held this coming weekend, and all members of
the community are invited along to share their views, ask questions, and find
out more about what is happening within the project.

If, for whatever reason, you cannot make the meeting, the logs are always
available on the website at the following url.

http://www.xaraya.com/index.php/xarpages/community/irclogs/pmc

The #pmc channel is open 24/7, and you're welcome to drop in any time
if you have something you'd like to discuss but couldn't make the meeting.

Please note: The community meeting is not intended as a venue to discuss
support issues, if you need help with Xaraya, please use the #support channel,
bugzilla, or the forums.

I hope I can counton my fellow Xarayans to turn out, and join in the discussion, see you there Sunday :)

It's with great pleasure that I finally announce a public release of crispBB.

With it comes the launch of the official crispBB.com website. Many thanks to Robert Town (Godboko) for his kind contribution of the domain name and hosting.

The latest download (currently 0.6.1) can always be found at

http://www.crispbb.com/forums/crispbb-releases/t3?action=lastreply

(there's a handy Check for Updates link in the admin config of the module too)

Any bug reports should be directed at http://bugs.xaraya.com

You can follow, and participate in development over at the new site, I look forward to seeing you there.

An announcement that the first beta version of Xaraya 2.0.0 (Jamaica) has been released has just been posted over at xaraya.com.

The latest version is available from Sourceforge at http://sourceforge.net/projects/xaraya/

Quote...

This release represents a major step forward for Xaraya, involving a substantial rewrite of the codebase and numerous bugfixes and enhancements. An overview of these changes can be found in the release notes.

I'd like to echo the sentiments of the original announcement and offer thanks to all involved for their efforts in making a release possible.

After harping on about it, for what seems like an eternity, finally, crispBB, the forum module for Xaraya I've been working on for the last 12 months or so, is at a stage where I'm happy to let people loose with it.

Beta testing of the latest version is on-going at the moment. There are now only a couple of minor embellishments to add, and, barring any show-stopping bugs in the latest update, a push to the repositories will be quickly followed by an official release.

I deride the BBC often, as a contributor to their wealth (by way of our TV license fee), I feel I have every right to. Every once in a while they do something good though, and today's one of those days for me.

I'm a big fan of their website, with all it's shiny widgets and iGoogle-like interface, it's my idea of how a user configurable UI should work. Anyway, it seems the JS they use is an in-house concoction, something I was aware of. What I didn't know, is they open-sourced it under an Apache 2.0 license.

A cursory glance suggests it's very jQuery like in make-up, a not altogether bad thing. What attracts me to it more though, is the involvement of the BBC, and their browser support standards. The library is compliant with those standards, and, as it's the BBC, it always will be. No bad thing with so many issues from on browser to the next to have some level of assurance that your library will behave well.

Anyway, more info can be found at the libraries dedicated website

http://www.bbc.co.uk/glow/

I'll let you know how I got on if I get around to giving it a run. Please let me know how it goes, if you try it yourself.

Not managed to get around to blogging for quite a while, a couple of holidays and other minor issues have kept me away.

Anyway, I'm back now, and armed with a completely re-written version of crispBB. It's been a long time coming but I finally have a version I'm happy to release. It's still in beta testing at the moment, whilst I iron out any remaining wrinkles in the code (mainly the odd typo), and add in the final pieces of functionality.

Watch this space for a release announcement...

My thoughts today have been with the families of all those who lost their lives on that fateful day.

96 people that went to watch a game of football and never came back.

You'll never walk alone.

R.I.P.

Xaraya has adopted a new manta logo, and a new theme for xaraya.com. The new theme brings with it some improvements and additions to the site, and this is only the beginning.

I'd like to say a big thanks to Marty (Dracos) for the work he's put in on the theme, logos and buttons, without which the site would still be living in 2004.

The logo and theme announcement can be found here http://www.xaraya.com/index.php/news/861

New buttons and banners can be found here http://xaraya.com/index.php/xarpages/about/buttons

Like it says, I haven't posted to my blog for a while, mainly because it's been a busy period. As some of you will know, I was voted on to the Xaraya PMC (thank you to all those who took part). This has taken up a fair chunk of my time, but I've also been busy with both work, and code.

Anyway, I expect to be a little more active around here as things begin to settle down and I find my feet. In the meantime, work continues apace on finalising the code for CrispBB beta. The Twitter module I began is almost ready to go too. There's other stuff also in the pipeline, but I'll blog more about that later. I also started a discussion about BBCode, feel free to jump in with any thoughts you have there.

Just a final note, although I am a member of the Xaraya PMC now, please direct all PMC matters to the Project Management & Operations forum at the Xaraya website. Or to the #pmc channel on IRC, thanks :)