Alaveteli 0.6 “fancy admin” released!

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Finally Alaveteli 0.6 is out of the door! Grab it from the github master branch and try it out.  The most obvious new feature is a glossy new administrative interface, based on work started at AlaveteliCon by @wombleton.  If you are upgrading, be sure to read the upgrade notes in CHANGES.md, and the new section in the install docs about upgrading Alaveteli.  Drop a note to the alaveteli-dev mailing list if you need any help with your upgrade.

A full list of changes is on Github.  Interesting features and bugfixes include:

  • Most Ruby dependencies are now handled by Bundler (thanks @mckinneyjames!)
  • Support for invalidating accelerator cache — this makes it much less likely, when using Varnish, that users will be presented with stale content. Fixes issue #436
  • Adding a GA_CODE to general.yml will cause the relevant Google Analytics code to be added to your rendered pages
  • It is now possible to have more than one theme installed. The behaviour of multiple themes is now layered in the reverse order they’re listed in the config file. See the variable THEME_URLS in general.yml-example for an example.
  • A new, experimental theme for the administrative interface. It’s currently packaged as a standalone theme, but will be merged into the core once it’s been tested and iterated in production a few times. Thanks to @wombleton for kicking this off!
  • Alert subscriptions are now referred to as “following” a request (or group of requests) throughout the UI. When a user “follows” a request, updates regarding that request are posted on a new “wall” page. Now they have a wall, users can opt not to receive alerts by email.
  • New features to support fast post-moderation of bad requests: a button for users to report potentially unsuitable requests, and a form control in the administrative interface that hides a request and sends the user an email explaining why.
  • A bug which prevented locales containing underscores (e.g. en_GB) was fixed (issue #503)
  • Error pages are now presented with styling from themes

There are some blog posts about some of the new features here: