I'm not going to ramble on and on about the changes in 0.3.6 since I just did that, plus you can read all about it in the CHANGELOG. There's a link to the tarball in the "download" section over there on the sidebar, or you can just click this download bashblogger.
I'm moving this weekend so, if you have problems and I don't immediately respond to your email, don't panic. I'll get to it as quickly as possible. We'll be losing internet the first of next week, but should be back on-line the middle to the end of next week.
A few quick notes on upgrading.
If you're trying to upgrade from 0.3.5, just export your site to RSS, archive your existing setup ($HOME/.bashblogger $HOME/.bblog.conf) and move it someplace safe (just in case), then wipe out your current install (you'll want to remove your existing bblog script as well) and use the bblog_setup in the tarball.
Once you've installed and configured the new version, use the importRSS feature to roll in your old bashblogger entries to the new setup. If you have any stand-alone pages in your old setup, there's not currently a way to archive them and roll them into the new site. The Page format has altered slightly, so you can't just move those page bits into the new setup. Sadly, the only way to add them to the new site is to re-add them by hand. I'll work on getting those into the exportRSS feed in the next release.
The difference between templates and themes
There's already been a bit of confusion on what constitutes a template and what constitutes a theme and why can't we just roll them together. Good questions, hopefully this will be a good answer.
One of the big selling points for CSS is that it separates markup from presentation. With CSS, you can keep the existing markup, and change your presentation to make your site look completely different without modifying the underlying (x)html. If you haven't been to cssZenGarden, gander over there and take a look. Each contributor to cssZenGarden can contribute their own "themes", but cannot alter the underlying (x)html in any way. These different "themes" are what bashblogger's "themes" are based upon. You can package a different "theme" that doesn't change the underlying (x)html, but will alter the presentation of the site.
The templates are the (x)html guts. They are the underlying markup that is not changed by the "themes". The templates are what determines what kind of (x)html skeleton your site will have and will determine how your site validates. By default, the new version of bashblogger will ship with HTML5 templates. In a few days, I will post three more template sets, XHTML 1.0 Transitional, XHTML 1.1 and HTML 4.01. If you don't want to wait till I get the time to do it, the templates are located in $HOME/.bashblogger/templates. You may want to start with Main.tpl as it has the header where you can declare your doctype. Every bit of (x)html, except for a scant few bits in the sidebar, is available in the templates directory and the bits in the sidebar will work with HTML 4.01 XHTML 1.0 Transitional and XHTML 1.1 so you should be set.
What I'm working on next
I'm currently working on moblogging support. I have a simple 20 line external script that can be called via procmail that will post text-only posts with just one category. I think we'll also want to be able to delete posts via email, as well as include pictures and possibly multimedia. One thing at a time though. Posting via email is not 100% yet, we'll worry about posting reliably all the time before we start trying to delete things all willy-nilly and uudecode attachments, move 'em around the file system and embed multimedia in web pages.
The script currently uses a secret-word on the subject line to trigger procmail to run the email through bblog-procmail. I think it should probably also look for a specific email address, but I'm open to suggestions. The secret word can be guessed and the email can be spoofed, so, everything can be worked around, but I'd like some reasonable security attached to this.
If anybody would like to look at bblog-procmail, drop me a line. I can send you the bblog-procmail script and a bblog diff (or just a new script, it's just 64k) with the switch changes to accept an unattended post.
I don't use CVS. I probably should, but I don't. Even if I did, I'd be constantly defending which source control system I'd decided to use, CVS, Subversion, Monotone (which I've used and really like) or Git. If I decided to start offering "anonymous CVS-like" access to the current code, what would most of you prefer? Again, I'm partial to monotone, but we'll go with whatever most people use. Let me know.
Posted by Phil McClure in Project Release on July 27, 2007