Noosfero, version 0.22.0

First of all, we would to thank Associação Software Livre.Org and Safernet Brasil for supporting this release. They have demanded nice features from us, as you'll see below. Below we detail the features added grouped by the interested public. Enjoy!

For users

• The new slideshow block (#1357, #1358). You can now have blocks that display your pictures, and you can choose to display them in fixed or random order, and to display or not nice navigation buttons (previous/pause/next).
• Navigation in image galleries (#1367). Now, you can navigate between the images of a gallery by means of convenient "previous" and "next" buttons, even outside the fullscreen slideshow mode.
• Invitation to join communities (#1275). Community administrators can now invite their friends to join a community by e-mail. Like the previously existing "invite friends" feature, you both either type manually the e-mail addresses or import the contacts from major webmail systems. To invite, you only need to clcik in the new icon on community members part, or in the "Control Panel" -> "Manage Members".
• Private profiles (#1273). Now, private profiles (users or communities) will be displayed in search results and everywhere else. When someone tries to view the pages of that profile without being a member (or being a friend, in case of private user profiles), a nice message is displayed so that the visitor can ask to join the community (or add the user with private profile as friend).
• Enhanced profile page. Now the profile of users and communities is displayed in a much better style and with more useful information.
• Online documentation (#1359, #1360). Noosfero now has the infra-structure to display its own online documentation. Users can browse to mynoosferonetwork/doc in Noosfero and read the provided documentation in their native language. For now there is documentation for the following features:
  • Content Management: Posting on blog, Adding pictures to gallery, Write an advanced article (inserting images and links), Managing your content, Creating a blog, Writing an article
  • User features: Leaving the system, Removing friends, Sending messages, Removing comments, Accepting friends, Editing user settings, Commenting articles, Adding friends, Registering a new user, Joining a community, Login into the system,
  • Enterprise features: Disabling an enterprise, Activating your enterprise, Managing and adding members to an enterprise, Editing enterprise settings.
  • Navigation: Searching on the system, Finding people, Finding products and services, Finding enterprises, Finding communities, Advanced search. If you feel like writing documentation for the Noosfero online documentation, please feel free to contact us.
• Then German translation was updated, thanks again to Ronny Kursawe from the Faculty of Computer Science at Technische Universität Dresden
• The Portuguese translation was updated.
• There were also a lot of small usability enhancements, e.g. the dialog for adding new blocks and the login/logout dialogs.

For developers

• It was added support for testing specific themes in development mode. If you pass a theme parameter via the URL, Noosfero will display the given theme instead of the current one. For example, http://localhost:3000/?theme=mytheme will display Noosfero's homepage using the "mytheme" theme instead of the one currently set in the environment.
• The rake test task now also runs the selenium tests under xvfb. This way our continuous integration server will always run all available tests.
• Perhaps the most important feature for developers is the new default theme. Based on the Software Livre Brasil theme, it provides a much better out of the box experience. Actually there are two new themes: The "base" theme defines formatting for the entire system, and the "noosfero" theme just inherits all the formatting from "base" and just added the "Noosfero" logo in the top bar. Developers can use a similar same approach to develop for their own new themes: we recommend to just re-use most of the size and positioning from the base theme and only change colors, images and backgrounds in their themes. This way the work of creating a new theme is largely reduced and there is less risk that a theme does not provide style that's needed by Noosfero's user interface. Check out the code of the Noosfero theme for how to do it.
• New quick start script for Debian. Debian users now have a simple script that automatically installs everything in the right place for you to run a development instance of Noosfero. Just download the code, run ./script/quick-start-debian and browse to http://localhost:3000 to start testing Noosfero! This utility is provided to Debian users because we use Debian at Colivre. We encourage the community contribute similar scripts to help people using other systems to start contributing to Noosfero.

Bug fixes

• #1382: 'Environment Administrator' option is appearing while changing role