Over the last few weeks, I've been working on beefing up the wiki over at gllabs.org with some info regarding Geeklog theme creation. A large portion of that, a tutorial on how to port a theme, involved taking an open-source XHTML/CSS template and converting it step-by-step into a GL theme.

The tutorial is at a point now where I feel the first draft is written, and would like some feedback. Please check it out and post your comments in this forum thread.

The result of that tutorial is a fixed width, 2 column layout theme with left blocks and a main story column called Refresh. All credit for the theme design goes to the original author at www.styleshout.com. It is meant for 1024x768 and higher screen resolutions. I have tested it in Firefox2, and Safari public beta 3. In other browsers, your mileage may vary.

Grab it at gllabs.org or here at geeklog.net.

See it in action at lab.familycorner.us.

The first result from our bounties hunt has now landed in CVS: OpenID support, provided by Choplair. And for those of you who are feeling adventurous and don't want to wait for the next Geeklog release, there is also a patch available for Geeklog 1.4.1.

So what is OpenID again? It provides an identity that you can use to log in to all sites that support OpenID. No need to create new accounts with every new site you want to participate in. But note that two problems that OpenID does not solve are trust and spam.

The official release version of Geeklog 1.4.1 is now available for download. To recap the new features:

• Support for Microsoft SQL Server (in addition to the continued support for MySQL). This feature was single-handedly implemented by Randy Kolenko. We also owe thanks to Mark Evans for his help in testing and debugging it.
• The Geeklog Calendar is now a plugin, so it can easily be disabled or replaced.
• Multi-language support lets you create sites where the content changes when you switch languages. So you can have translated versions of articles and only show those in the visitor's preferred language.
• Better spam protection by including support for SLV and offering hooks for CAPTCHAs.
• Various other improvements, e.g. an option to "mass delete" users, a redesigned account information page, updated version of FCKeditor (now again including a file manager), and more.

With this release, we're also saying goodbye to the year 2006 as well as the Geeklog 1.3.x branch, for which support has now ended. Geeklog 1.4.1 is a recommended upgrade for all users of previous versions.

The first release candidate for Geeklog 1.4.1 is now available for download. This release fixes the remaining issue with MS SQL, improves multi-language support, and fixes a couple of other bugs. There were no database or language file changes, but we did some final tweaks of the Professional theme.

We have also added new API functions for plugins to hook into submission forms (e.g. registration, comments, stories). The new version of Mark Evans' CAPTCHA plugin is the first to make use of those new functions and should be much easier to install now.

While this is not the final 1.4.1 yet, we would like to ask you to download it and try it out to help us track down any remaining issues. Please also keep in mind that once 1.4.1 is out, the support for Geeklog 1.3.11, and therefore for the entire 1.3.x line, will end. So now would be a good time to start planning for an upgrade of your site.

The second beta version of Geeklog 1.4.1 is now available for download. While we still have to sort out some issues (with MS SQL and in a few other places), this release should provide a much more polished experience and preview of the next Geeklog version.

Beta 2 fixes problems with MS SQL, improves multi-language and UTF-8 support, sorts out display problems with the Professional theme, and fixes several other bugs. It also includes updated PEAR packages (specifically PEAR::Mail, which addresses a problem with SMTP). Please see the included changelog for a complete list of changes. There's also a file, docs/changed-files, that lists all the files that changed over beta 1.

After long waiting Garden 1.4 is now available for download!

This theme was developed for french portal www.geeklog.fr where you can see it in action.

Note: This theme is best experienced in Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari and Internet Explorer 7.

A first Beta release of Geeklog 1.4.1 is now available for download. After the various security issues we had this year, we concentrated on code reviews and bugfixes for this release, but there are also some new features, namely

• Support for Microsoft SQL Server. Yes, for the first time in its history, Geeklog will now also run on a database other than MySQL. The MS SQL support was developed by Randy Kolenko who posted more about it here.
• Calendar plugin. Moving the events and the calendar to their own plugin concludes our work on making Geeklog more modular. Don't need a calendar on your site? Now you can simply uninstall the plugin.
• Multi-language support. It's now possible to build multilingual Geeklog sites where not only the navigation but also the content changes when you switch languages.
• Various other changes, e.g. better spam protection, an option to mass-delete users, redesigned account information, and more.

We're labelling this as a beta mainly for three reasons: The new MS SQL support, the mass-delete user option, and the various changes we made in the Professional theme, all of which will probably need some tweaking. So while you're invited to install 1.4.1b1 and try it out, you may not want to run your site off of it just yet.

Last week's security release introduced display problems in the comment preview that we're fixing with the following versions:

• Geeklog 1.4.0sr5-1 is available as a complete tarball, as an upgrade from 1.4.0sr5, and as a combo update from any previous 1.4.0 release.
• Geeklog 1.3.11sr7-1 is available as an upgrade from 1.3.11sr7 and as a combo update from any previous 1.3.11 release.

Please note that when using the 1.4.0 "combo" update, you will also have to remove some files to fix the security issue with FCKeditor's file manager, as explained in the included README file.

Geeklog 1.4.0 is one of the biggest updates in Geeklog's history and introduces the following new features and changes:

• Geeklog now officially works with register_globals = off.
• Ships with FCKeditor (WYSIWYG editor).
• Supports Trackback, Pingback, and pinging weblog directories.
• Remote authentication lets registered users of remote services such as Blogger.com and LiveJournal log into your Geeklog site without having to register.
• New syndication framework that can both read and write feeds in RSS (0.9x and 2.0), RDF, and Atom (0.3 and 1.0) formats.
• The links and polls sections are now plugins and can be disabled, removed, or replaced easily when you don't need them.
• Revamped Admin sections to provide a consistent look and sortable lists.
• New search only returns a specified amount of results per page, thus avoiding the embarrassing timeouts on large databases.
• ... and more.

We're almost there: Geeklog 1.4.0rc2 is the second and final (or so we hope) release candidate for Geeklog 1.4.0.

This release fixes issues with the FCKeditor integration, SQL errors, improves handling of trackbacks and pingbacks, and a few other issues. It also includes updated PEAR packages.

Please help us squash the remaining bugs by installing this release candidate or try it out at the demo site. Bugs can be reported in our bug tracker (now that it's back online) or simply by posting a comment to this story. Thanks!