Perhaps you have seen it on the forums lately: there have been some serious changes in Cuyahoga development. Originally, we planned to build a complete new admin interface for Cuyahoga 2.0 with ASP.NET MVC and an Alpha version was even released. Unfortunately, I did not have enough time to proceed full speed and the new interface caused some mixed reactions.

Luckily John Lynch (Constructor) stood up and has 'cooked' his own 2.0 version that was a mixture of the old Cuyahoga 2.0 core, but with a very much improved admin interface. It soon became clear to me that his version was the way to go especially because it caused so many positive reactions.

So now we have it. A new Cuyahoga 2.0 Alpha version! Get it here and read the official announcement here.

At the same time I'd like to officially announce that John is now the Lead Developer of Cuyahoga and my role will be more in the background where I'm going support the project with QA and release management.

As you already may have noticed, the Cuyahoga site has a new look. Big thanks go out to Mayur Upadhyaya and the team at Glow Labs for creating this wonderful template.

We also have a new logo that is created by John Lynch. It is based on the old logo, but it has a nice 3d effect added to it.

This week, we moved the Cuyahoga source code to GitHub (http://github.com/cuyahogaproject/cuyahoga). This is done for the following reasons:

• Git makes collaboration much easier;
• During the latest release cycle, the slow SourceForge SVN service was a major source of irritation.

Check out the following resources for a nice GitHub introduction:

• Newbie guide for GitHub users on Windows
• Screencast of Rob Conery that shows how collaboration works with GitHub

With the release of Cuyahoga 2.0 Alpha, we have the foundation in place to make Cuyahoga a better CMS in the future. This is also the time for a request: we really need some help to make the 2.0 version complete. If you like, you can help with one or more of the following items:

• File and image browser/uploader for the HTML editors. It should be easy to use it as plugin in both TinyMCE and FCKeditor;
• Design layout of the pages: currently we have a way of designing the page layout but I'm not entirely happy with how it works. It needs to be improved;
• Database scripts for MySQL en PostgreSQL (install and upgrade);
• Localization files for the admin (manager and module admin pages);

If you want to do something, please leave a message at the dev mailing list and we can discuss it.

Finally, after a long time, the first version of Cuyahoga 2.0 is released. This is the Alpha version, which means that it isn't suitable for production environments yet. Also note that at this moment, we only support SQL Server as a database.

What's new:

• Completely rewritten site admin (manager);
• Content abstraction: content handling is much more generic now;
• Support for medium trust;
• File manager;
• Separate directories per site for user files, templates and full-text indexes;
• Much more...

Visit the Sourceforge site to get the source and binary distributions.

Everybody is encouraged to give this version a testdrive. Any feedback is welcome. There is a dedicated forum for all 2.0-related questions. Please check the installation instructions in the package before installing.

In the coming weeks, there will be more posts describing some of the new features and what we have planned for the final 2.0 release.

Special thanks go to Maximilian Gaerber who designed and contributed the content abstraction part.