Anybody out there who's found a bug or is not comfortable with a certain feature of Cuyahoga? Please file a bug report in Jira. We're almost ready for the 1.0 release and this is the opportunity to get things fixed before 1.0.

There is no exact release date for 1.0 yet, but it will be there before the end of the year.

Today, Scott Guthrie announced that VS.NET 2005 will get an alternative project model for web projects. If I understood well, this new model allows developing web applications in class libraries just like it is done in Cuyahoga, but with all the power of the new ASP.NET 2.0 features.

I'm very very happy with this announcement, since I started getting worried about the upgrade path to ASP.NET 2.0 (that is: building the class libraries works fine, but VS.NET in its current state doesn't support ASP.NET development in class libraries at all).

The news doesn't have any direct influence on the core development (since I'm determined to support .NET 1.1/Mono 1.0 for a while), but for module development, it might be very interesting to take advantages of the new ASP.NET 2.0 features.

With the last release (0.9.1) there were some complaints about slow and broken downloads. I guess that's the price to pay for cheap web hosting :).

Anyway, from now the releases are distributed via Sourceforge. Happy downloading!

A new Cuyahoga version is available for download. This is the 0.9.1 version and is the last version with functional changes before the 1.0 release.

Highlights are:

• Module connections
  It's now possible to connect different sections across pages. The modules in these sections have to implement special interfaces to allow this (IActionConsumer and IActionProvider). For an example, check out the UserModule (IActionProvider) and ProfileModule (IActionConsumer) in /Modules/User.
• Sections in templates
  Sections are not exclusively related to a node (page) anymore, but can be created stand-alone. It's possible to attach these sections to templates, so that they appear on every page where a certain template is used. On this site, the login box on the right is an example of a section connected to the template.

The module development guide will be updated soon with these features.

See the release notes for a complete overview of the changes. Downloads are at the usual place. Special thanks to Steen Rabol for fixing a few issues.

Lately, more and more people are starting to use Cuyahoga or are developing modules. Especially for those people, I'd like to make some things clear of where we are heading the coming weeks / months.

First, the next release will be 0.9.1. This release contains two major new features:

• Module connections
  A module can implement two interfaces, one for actions and parameters it provides and another one that describes the actions and parameters a module can consume. It's a loose way of  connecting modules, but it makes it possible to navigate across modules and pages (nodes). For example, think of a search input module connected to a search results module or a profile module that has connections from the articles module and the login module.
• Sections in templates
  In some scenarios it's necessary to have the same content on every page or a on group of pages. Currently, all sections (that contain the content modules) have a fixed position in the site hierarchy. In the next version it's going to be possible to detach sections from the site hierarchy and put those in a 'bag' with detached sections. Now when editing the properties of a template, it's going to be possible to link one ore more detached sections to one or more templates. Possible examples are a footer section, the connected search input module  (see above), a breadcrumbs module or even a custom made navigation module.

Then, for Cuyahoga 1.0, there won't be any new features. Only stabilizing and bugfixing (and I'm sure this will keep us busy enough :).

After 1.0 I'd like to split up core development and module development. The current modules are lacking in several areas and I just haven't got the time to make them better. This is where any help is highly appreciated.
For the core, the focus after 1.0 will be to make Cuyahoga a more powerful CMS. Things like categorization, better search, better syndication and a much improved admin interface.

Finally about ASP.NET 2.0: the runtime doesn't break anything in Cuyahoga but the development environment is so different that  I'm first going to look how other projects migrate before trying anything ;).