Gregarius – Devlog

Starting from development version 0.5.5.1479, we have dropped the awkward label-file based localization system, and adopted a much more versatile localization process, based on GNU gettext.

To get Gregarius to speak to you in your mother tongue, all you have to do is configure your browser and instruct it to download pages in your preferred language. At the time of writing, 16 languages are supported, and more are being added every week.

What if yours isn’t supported yet? Well, the best solution is to write a translation yourself:

1. Register for a Launchpad.net account.
2. Select the language(s) you would like to translate Gregarius into
3. The selected language(s) should now be available in the Gregarius translations page
4. Translate Gregarius into your language, either online on the Launchpad.net website, or offline, using a tool like poedit (Win32, Mac OS X) or KBabel (Linux)
5. Get in touch with me and ask me to import your languages into the development version of Gregarius

Note: a more in-depth (and slightly more technical) description of this process is available on the Wiki.

Either way, if you’re interested in the internationalization and localization processes of Gregarius, please join the gregarius-i18n mailing list.

If you are using a recent development version of Gregarius from the Subversion repository, you should upgrade to the most recent revision. This problem only exists in recent development versions; Gregarius 0.54 is not vulnerable. The hole was introduced in changeset 1499 and was fixed in changeset 1517. This covers a period from June 15 to July 22.

More information can be found on the Gregarius forums.

Last month, Gregarius 0.5.4 was released. Unfortunately, the development team was so busy working on improving Gregarius even further, we never got around to announcing 0.5.4 here!

In order to rectify this oversight for you, our loyal readers, read on to learn about a number of the new features in Gregarius 0.5.4.
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(Reposting Sameer’s email to the greg-dev mailing list.)

Gregarius 0.5.4 Release candidate 2 is now available for thy testing pleasure. You can svn check it out using svn via the command

svn co http://svn.gregarius.net/svn/release-branches/0.5.4/gregarius/

If you prefer to download a compressed archive, a nightly is available in the nightly bin.

0.5.4 has some great new features and has lots of bug fixes and security fixes and its faster than 0.5.2.

Here is a run down of what’s new and exciting.

• Support for podcasts. (Check out the cool podcast player plugin)

• Built in password protection for your admin section. (No more rss_extra.php or messing with .htaccess files)

• A Dashboard section so that you can keep tabs on what is happenning in the world of gregarius

• Updating your feeds in parallel with Ajax

• Plugins now have config options and you can check to see if there are new versions directly from your admin section.

• Themes are supercool now. They can have different colour/layout schemes (css files), mobile versions, config options and other crazy things.

• Support for mobile devices

• Better handling of feeds which provide unique identifiers for their items. (Less duplicates!!)

• Deciding on a per-feed basis whether you want modified items to show up as unread

• A tiny smidgen of extra (experimental patch) ATOM 1.0 support

We would appreciate any help with testing. The best way is to install the release candidate and report any funny business :)

Marco has kindly allowed me to post on this devlog about the slider plugin and a Lilina-like compact theme that I recently put on the repositories.

I wanted a way to control the amount of each item that was displayed so I wrote the slider plugin. You can shrink all the displayed items down to their titles, or you expand them all out fully or you can set it so that only a few lines are displayed. The nice thing is that this setting is stored in a cookie and Gregarius remembers the setting when you move to another page or if you visit the site later using the same browser. You can also expand out a single item by simply hovering over it with your mouse for around 1 second. You would need to use a recent subversion snapshot or one of the nightlies to use this plugin. It is possible to use it with version 0.5.2 if you apply this one line patch.

The lilina theme is to attempt to mimic the interface of the Lilina aggregator. It is quite compact and allows you to scan a large number of feed titles and expand out (by clicking on the titles) only those items you are interested in reading. It also allows you to collapse the sidemenu so that you do not waste precious browser space. I am still working on this theme, so suggestions, ideas and comments are welcome.

Gregarius is easily extensible via plugins and themes and follows the wordpress model quite closely. The theme engine is quite powerful and will let you create almost any interface you would want to. A good starting point is the Plugin Authoring and the Theme Authoring documents on the wiki. If you get stuck, help is always available on the forums or on the dev-mailing list. Good luck!!