Radio UserLand Notes

Radio UserLand 8.1b1

Beta: Radio UserLand 8.1: "We're working on a new Radio UserLand 8.1 release, and we'd like your help testing the recent changes. This beta-release includes several bug fixes and improvements. Some new features are a new linkToStyleSheet macro and in the news aggregator: Atom feed support and a new sort order preference."

Lawrence has been working behind the scenes tying several of the final pieces together to get this release in the hands of the folks on the Radio developer's mailing list. Grab a copy and help us test things out.

New to UserLand distributions is a simplistic installer. Run it and it copies your existing parts that will be affected to a safe place, just in case you need to reinstall or repair. Before applying the test, update Radio.root (From the File menu in Radio, choose "Update Radio.root...")

When this becomes final, we'll distribute it via the root update servers and rebuild the installers on the UserLand download site. Please, if you haven't renewed your Radio subscription in awhile, do so now--the October release will be worth it.

News Aggregator changes:

The company is not called UserLand for nothing--the news aggregator redesign was thrown out. The closer we got to the release, the less I liked the idea. I loved the HTML simplicity of paragraph tags, but the layout was awful. I put in a preference to switch back and forth between old layout and new and guess what? I stayed in the old more often because it was more pleasing to the eye.

Sure, it's nested tables, but since it didn't offer our customer (the user in UserLand) anything of value, it was scrapped. The sort order function stayed, though and I hope you like it.

The Future?

We are planning features for an October update. At this point, it looks like these will be all UserTalk code changes again--things that will clean up some HTML generation internal and external alike. Changes to the comment system infrastructure are in private testing at this point with outstanding results. You've asked for comment moderation and faster page/comment loading. If all goes well, you'll get it much sooner than I had ever dreamed.