I'd
like to take a moment and give everyone an update on the impending
release of Radio 8.1 to the public. There's been a flurry of activity
in the last two days, building beta installers and finalizing code.
With that, we've made some minor changes to our commitments listed in
the Radio Roadmap
News Aggregator
The sort order preference will
remain as a new feature, but we are adding a preference for layout
style. The current format that uses HTML-based tables to format news
content will stay as the default to prevent breakage with existing
users. A version that uses paragraph tags to separate content will be
an option, easily selected within Radio's preference
Themes
The
new default theme is done and in use on steve.userland.com and
houseofwarwick.com. It will be available for download when Radio 8.1 is
released. It's CSS-based and uses an integrated header graphic instead
of files filling table cells. That should give designers more
flexibility and some hints on where we are going with XHTML structure.The promised themes will be release slowly over the next two weeks
as they are not dependent upon Radio code changes. I'm a bit
apprehensive about this part since I'm not a web designer, they won't
be as pretty as I'd hoped. If UserLand runs a theme contest, what would
you want the prize to be?
Scripts and Macros
We
have spent some time fixing some bugs in some of Radio's macros to make
the HTML more standards-compliant. As in most cases with legacy code,
one change begat another. Patience, please as we endeavor to deliver
good code, not code that just works.
Release schedule
Beta
installer goes out this week to the folks on the radio-dev email list.
It will install the new code, preserve the old and give you a chance to
put it back if you don't like it. When all is well, we'll add the
changes to the update servers and let everyone have at it.