P'unk Avenue Window

We have labored long and hard to prepare for the 1.0 release of Apostrophe. As we said before, it has been stable and in use for a long time now, but we wanted to mark a moment in time with an official release.

Probably the easiest way to get a feel for Apostrophe is to go to our demo site and login. The user name is “admin” and the password is “demo”. Keep in mind that the content resets itself every hour on the hour.

If you want to get your bearings before you you do that, head over to the newly revamped Apostrophe site. For the very interested, you should consider checking out our extensive README which includes an Installation section, an Editor’s guide, a Designer’s guide and a Developer’s guide.

Now for some of the highlights.

Slots!

There are rich text, image, slideshow, video, button, PDF, Raw HTML, and other slots built in. If you have used Apostrophe before, you know that you can add a slot on a page, choose what you want to place and then reorder it. New custom slots can also be made for any project.

Slot Options

For some time we have wanted to be able to give you more fine control of a specific slot. For instance, what if you wanted to make the background color of a some text slots yellow, and some white? In the past that would have required two slots. Now, it can just be an option of the same text slot. In this screenshot, you can see that we allow you to switch between different types of slideshows. Make sure you try that out in the demo. It is probably our favorite new feature. We really sweated the details on making sure the option control was contextual. We hope you appreciate the effort.

There are many other new features and highlights, but for the moment I will leave you to find them in the demo (remember: user is “admin” and password is “demo”) or in the documentation. (We promise to highlight these in future posts.)

So, what does this mean to you?

Well, it depends. If you are a PHP developer with Symfony skills you can get started today. From our README:

Right now Apostrophe is best suited to PHP developers who want to make an intuitive content management system available to their clients. Apostrophe is very easy for your clients to edit, administer and maintain once it is set up. Right now, though, Apostrophe installations does call for some command line skills and a willingness to learn about Symfony. We are working to reduce the learning curve.

If you are a front-end developer and want to get started using Apostrophe, talk to us. We are in the process of working out a package where we set up a staging server with Symfony and Apostrophe running on it. We would train you on templating in Apostrophe and you should be up in running in a day or two.

If you don’t want to go that route, here is what we suggest:

Front-end developers who do not yet have PHP and Symfony skills but wish to set up an Apostrophe site by themselves should consider tackling the Symfony tutorial to get up to speed. It’s not necessary to complete the entire tutorial, but it helps to have at least a passing familiarity with Symfony.

If you just think Apostrophe is rad and you want one… like now, just drop us a line. We would be happy to design and implement an Apostrophe site for you. You would be joining some good company if you do.

Surprise!

We (more accurately Tom) decided to build an extra slot last night as a gift for making you wait an extra day. Isn’t that nice of us (him)?

If you are observant you may have noticed an extra slot in the screenshot above. So without further ado, we present the Feed Slot (commonly referred to as the RSS Feed slot, but it will take Atom feeds as well). Use this to bring in your Twitter updates or maybe our Apostrophe SVN code commit feed.

Feel free to thank us anytime. (We like expensive beer.)

This is really just the beginning. We hope you have an opportunity to check out Apostrophe. We would love to hear from you if you do. Comments below would be much appreciated (and read), as well.
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Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter for on-going updates: @apostrophenow

If you are a developer, the Apostrophe Trac is the home of the open source community. On that site you can open support tickets, browse and contribute to the Wiki, and access and potentially contribute to the source code via svn (you’ll need to contact us if you want write access).

Also, please join the Apostrophe Google Group if you want to tap into the community of people using Apostrophe to get support and help.

We have decided to push back the release of Apostrophe 1.0 until tomorrow.

We are truly in the home stretch. Just hitting a few bugs, finishing up documentation and adding some instructional content to the demo site. To tide you over, we are publishing this screencast of how you add video to a project by searching YouTube from within Apostrophe. Note how we bring in associated metadata (url, title, etc). For the record, you can add video by pasting in embed codes from countless other services like Viddler and Vimeo.

Please tune back in tomorrow.

P.S. We are not blaming the snow for the delay, but did want to note that we are certainly under a deep white blanket here in Philadelphia.

Not to toot our horn or nothin, but we’ve just launched a new site for ourselves. At 6:05pm on the last business day of the year we’ve cobbled our children some new shoes. It was a lot of fun making Apostrophe flex a little to suit our own needs. We figured it was time to drink our own koolaid. And it’s almost fully debugged (degrades gracefully) in IE.

So go check out our shiny new site!

To Geoff, Alex, John, Tom, (and if you didn’t know we’ve recently expanded to include) Dan, and Jake:

Cheers bros! It’s been a wonderful year.

When I led the PNG working group and edited the first ten drafts of the PNG file format specification, I hoped that PNG image files would swiftly replace GIFs.

I was wrong about that. Netscape, which had offered nary a word of input during the specification process, came out with animated GIF support just as PNG was being finalized as a still image format. Doh!

All the same, PNGs are everywhere. They are all over the web (though still not as common as GIFs). And they are “under the hood” in many products, including Microsoft Office.

A lot of people don’t quite get what PNG is good for, and what it isn’t good for. 8-bit PNG (“png8″) is a great replacement for non-animated GIFs, and png24 is a great format for lossless storage of truecolor, high-resolution originals. But for web distribution of a truecolor, photorealistic image, you almost certainly want a lossy-but-tiny JPEG file.

Many people also don’t realize that PNGs are supported in Internet Explorer 6, with certain caveats, and fully and beautifully supported in later versions of Internet Explorer… and of course the rest of the “good” browsers. Apart from the specialized niche of really cheesy animation, it really is possible to “burn all GIFs” and move on.

PNG hasn’t quite reached the finish line yet. But true believers like Stoyan have kept the home fires burning with great how-to articles like Give PNG a Chance… which features a browser-generated music video. Excuse me, something in my eye…

You can read about the history of the PNG format here.

We make heavy use of Google Calendar here at work. Unfortunately I rarely remember to look at it unless an alert has specifically been set up to get my attention.

This morning I set up my Mac to open Google Calendar in my web browser every day at 10:15am.

How do you do that? Turns out it’s not hard.

You can open a URL at the terminal command line—

“Whoa! Did you just say ‘terminal command line?’ I thought you said this wasn’t hard?”

Well, it isn’t! All you really need to know about the terminal application is this:

1. It’s not hard.
2. Go to the Finder, click “Applications” (at lower left), open up “Utilities” in the pane at right, and then double-click “Terminal.” Now you have a terminal window to type commands in.
3. After each terminal command, one generally presses the Enter (return) key. So if I say nothing to the contrary, assume you’re meant to do that after each command.

You can open a URL in your web browser from the terminal command line by typing a command like this. Just copy and paste your Google Calendar’s URL from the address bar:

open 'https://www.google.com/calendar/hosted/punkave.com/render?tab=mc'

(Note that if your URL actually contains the ' character you’ll need to escape it with a \ in front.)

OK, you’ve opened a web page from the command line. Now, how do you schedule that to happen every day?

Luckily the Mac, like any good Unix box, offers a utility called cron which does things for you at scheduled times. To set that up, all you have to do is edit your cron jobs with the crontab command…

But this part is a little bit of a PITA: by default, the crontab command opens your cron jobs file with vi, an old-school Unix text editor. I’m happy with it, but you don’t need to be. So I’m going to first walk you through how to switch things around so that crontab opens things in good old TextEdit.

I’ll also show you how to set up a convenient command you can use in the terminal window to edit any file with TextEdit from the command line.

We’ll start by editing your ~/.profile file. This file contains commands that the terminal window runs when you first start it up.

First, use the touch command to ensure the file exists. TextEdit doesn’t like being asked to edit files that don’t yet exist:

touch ~/.profile

Now try this command (hint: don’t suffer, copy and paste it into terminal):

/Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit ~/.profile

Your .profile file is open in TextEdit. This file contains Unix shell commands that should be run every time a new shell window opens for you. At first it will probably be empty.

Add these lines at the end of the file (which might be empty to start):

# Use TextEdit for crontab and similar commands
# that want to use your default editor
export VISUAL=/Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit
# Use TextEdit when you type: edit filename
alias edit='/Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit'

The lines that begin with # are comments and the command shell will ignore them. I provide them so you can remember why you did this stuff later.

A word of warning: when launched this way, TextEdit tends to open behind the terminal window. You might have to apple-tab around a bit to find it.

Finally, close your terminal window and open a new one. This ensures that the commands in ~/.profile have been run. Alternatively you can use this command to run the commands in ~/.profile in your current terminal window:

source ~/.profile

Now we're ready to edit your cron jobs... in TextEdit, not vi. At the terminal prompt, type:

crontab -e

And paste in this line (but substitute your Google Calendar URL of course, copied and pasted from your browser):

15 10 * * * open 'http://your.url.here/'

Then save your work and quit TextEdit. The crontab command can't continue until you quit TextEdit.
Now the URL you've pasted in will open every day at 10:15am. If Firefox is your default browser, it will open in a new tab. I haven't tried this with Safari as the default browser. Freel free to enlighten me as to how that works out.
What are those numbers and stars about? They represent minutes, hours, days of the month, months, and days of the week. We are only concerned with the first two: we want the job to run at 10:15am. If you want to run the job in the afternoon, be sure to use 24-hour time (for instance, set the second number to 13 for 1pm).
cron can do quite a bit more. If you want to know more about scheduling cron jobs, try this command:

man 5 crontab