Radio 8.1 Beta Update
I'd like to take a moment and give everyone an update on the impending release of Radio 8.1 to the public. There's been a flurry of activity in the last two days, building beta installers and finalizing code. With that, we've made some minor changes to our commitments listed in the Radio Roadmap
News Aggregator
The sort order preference will remain as a new feature, but we are adding a preference for layout style. The current format that uses HTML-based tables to format news content will stay as the default to prevent breakage with existing users. A version that uses paragraph tags to separate content will be an option, easily selected within Radio's preferences
Themes
The new default theme is done and in use on steve.userland.com and houseofwarwick.com. It will be available for download when Radio 8.1 is released. It's CSS-based and uses an integrated header graphic instead of files filling table cells. That should give designers more flexibility and some hints on where we are going with XHTML structure.
The promised themes will be release slowly over the next two weeks as they are not dependent upon Radio code changes. I'm a bit apprehensive about this part since I'm not a web designer, they won't be as pretty as I'd hoped. If UserLand runs a theme contest, what would you want the prize to be?
Scripts and Macros
We have spent some time fixing some bugs in some of Radio's macros to make the HTML more standards-compliant. As in most cases with legacy code, one change begat another. Patience, please as we endeavor to deliver good code, not code that just works.
Release schedule
Beta installer goes out this week to the folks on the radio-dev email list. It will install the new code, preserve the old and give you a chance to put it back if you don't like it. When all is well, we'll add the changes to the update servers and let everyone have at it.
- Posted by Steve Kirks - 9:39:54 PM - comments [] -
