KompoZer 0.8a3 has introduced a bug in the new site manager and two regressions in the CSS editor, this alpha4 is mainly a bugfix of the alpha3. It’s also the first build I propose on the official website.

Design / Split / Source

Design/Split/Source tabs The most noticeable change is that KompoZer now supports three editing modes:

  • Design: wysiwyg view
  • Split: wysiwyg editor + source dock
  • Source: SeaMonkey-like source view

Many users didn’t find the source dock easily enough, I think these tabs should make it more obvious. The downside is that it takes too much space on small screens, so I’ll probably implement my SmallTabs hack in the next release.

And yes, the “source tab” is back. Or sort of: since I don’t want to patch the core before being done with the site manager, there’s no pseudo syntax highlighting yet. So this is “only” a SeaMonkey-like source tab for the moment: it works in plain text mode, which makes it fast, reliable… and ugly. I’ll add a preference to choose between plain-text or pseudo syntax highlighting later — this is not my priority at the moment.

External text editor support

“External Editor” toolbar button This has been my very first contribution to the Nvu project. KompoZer 0.7 was only a bug-fix version of Nvu 1.0 so I haven’t added any feature in it — but that’s something I wanted to implement for KompoZer 0.8.

It’s plain and simple: since KompoZer 0.8 handles external applications, there’s a button in the main toolbar to edit the current document in a text editor — Geany, Notepad++ and Bluefish come to mind. Of course, KompoZer 0.8 will detect when a document has been modified by an external application:

“Confirm changes” dialog

It only works with local files for the moment, I need to finish working on the FTP support to make it work properly on remote files. I’ve also updated a little extension to let Tidy reformat the HTML source properly, I’ll tell you more about that soon.

Site Manager

KompoZer 0.8a4, Site Manager The work on the site manager has been partially postponed, partly because of the Design / Split / Source tabs, mostly because I’ve been more busy than expected with the localization tools. At the moment, there are two views in the Site Manager but the “Remote” one is disabled. However, thanks to KompoZer’s external application support, you can already launch your FTP client with a right-click in the site manager.

For alpha5 I will focus on the FTP support. I hope this next version will bring a “remote” view in the site manager as well as a decent “Publish” feature.

Localization

Boy, this has taken much more time than expected… but now we’re ready!

Cédric Corazza has done a great job setting up the l10n repository. We’ve also designed some scripts that should ease the creation of KompoZer 0.8 langpacks significantly — both to upgrade KompoZer 0.7 langpacks or to design new ones from scratch (i.e. based on the Mozilla locales).

Localization teams are welcome to contact us, either on the l10n mailing list or on the #kompozer chan.

Bug fixes

Most bugfixes are under the hood:

  • proper versioning and chrome registration (at last!)
  • corollary: the “Help” window is back (arno, thanks for your help!)
  • the XHTML support works better, though it’s not satisfying yet
  • many UI bugs have been fixed in the CSS Editor
  • some security fixes have been applied by Derevko, Debian maintainer. Giuseppe, it’s a pleasure to work with you!

The main benefit is that KompoZer is easier to build: the same source code should now build properly on all platforms without any patch. I can finally publish a source tarball without being ashamed. ;-)

Downloads

You can grab KompoZer 0.8a4 here:

The RPM packages have been contributed by Ismael Olea and Jean-Lucien Baudoin respectively.

Available langpacks:

KompoZer 0.8a4 now uses a different profile folder than the previous versions. This means you don’t need to remove your current KompoZer 0.7 profile any more to test this alpha4.

Contribute

It’s an alpha release. There will be bugs, please report them in the SourceForge tracker or in one of these forums:

If you want to contribute to this project (patches, translation, builds, whatever), feel free to ping us on the #kompozer chan. You may also support the development by making a donation.