Ariadne 9.0 Released

Its been almost a year since the last major Ariadne release, but we think its been worth the wait. This is the biggest Ariadne release we've done in a long time. The most important new goodies are:

  • The Vedor Editor is Open Source and integrated with Ariadne. Vedor has been building this editor since 2004 and selling it commercially. We've convinced them to create an Open Source version. While this is a 'light' version compared to the full Vedor Editor, it isn't light in any way compared with other editors. It got a complete redesign to give it a modern look, but most importantly to make it work nicely with smartphones and tablets.
    The best part is that this editor is built to be used in Ariadne and making your templates work with it is now so easy, you might not believe it. In fact:

  • Muze has provided 'Muze.cms' a base set of libraries to quickly build responsive, accessible and modern websites. These libraries are also Open Source. The code is built to be re-used, reconfigured and played with. They do all the work to get the most out of the Vedor Editor.
    Muze.cms also comes with an example website that shows how the code works and how you can skin any website made with these libraries.
    If you want to change more of the website design than just colors and fonts, that is now easier as well:

  • Muze.dev is a set of applications built on top of Ariadne that help you develop, debug, test and document your sites and applications. It contains:
    • Helene. A full blown IDE with an updated version of the ACE code editor, including themes, language switch, autocomplete, etc. It also gives you a detailed view of all libraries loaded for a project and allows you to quickly locate any template in these libraries.
    • A template debugger that shows you exactly which templates get called when, what output they generated and which arguments, object data and return values they had. It has never been easier to see what is going on under the hood.
    • Docify. A very simple documentation tool that uses the new Markdown library included with Ariadne 9.0. There is no longer a reason not to document your code.
    • Unity. A basic unit testing framework. The current version is limited in scope, but very easy to use.
    • Health. Just like Unity it is meant to test your projects, but the focus lies on live site monitoring. It is meant to be used by external monitoring tools.
  • Scaffolds. This is a new feature that makes it easy to start a new project. Instead of copying existing projects or creating them entirely from scratch, you can now select a scaffold and the project is preconfigured en filled in for you. Scaffolds are currently limited to projects, but we're planning extending the functionality to all relevant Ariadne objects.

  • Closures. Ariadne now requires at least PHP 5.4, mostly because the PINP templates now support creating and using Closures. This also means that a lot more useful PHP functions are now available in PINP templates. In addition you can use Closures instead of templates with Ariadne's event system, store functions, xml-rpc module and a few other places.

  • The Magic Cache. Caching used to be something to disable while developing. Long cache time settings also meant frustrated editors waiting for their changes to make it to the live site. This is now all gone. You can set a ridiculous long cache time and still be able to see all your changes instantly. Each cached page now knows which objects and which templates were used to generate it. Change any of these and the cache is automatically invalidated. Combine this with the Edge Side Includes feature in Ariadne since version 8.1 and anything can be cached.

  • Markdown, Less and Bootstrap included. Bootstrap is part of the Muze.cms package and can be used from the source files, using less or as a remote CDN css and javascript file. Markdown is used by Docify, in the Muze.dev package.

  • Ariadne is now more secure than ever. It was already immune to SQL injection, XSS (Cross-Site Scripting) and CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery) attacks. Now the CSRF handling has been improved and we've made all session cookies encrypted by default. If you use https the session cookies are now marked as https-only.

There are many more improvements and additions, check the Changelog for a more detailed list. Better yet, download Ariadne and test drive it yourself! 

In the coming weeks we will write about each of the new features in detail, one each week. So keep watching this website, or join us on http://groups.google.com/group/ariadne-cms/.