Pelican Development Blog

Pelican 3.2 released

Today we are pleased to announce the release of Pelican 3.2. Highlights of the improvements contained in this release follow below.

For those who are new to Pelican, please refer to the Getting Started Guide. There is also a Tutorials page available, which currently includes a link to a Pelican installation screencast.

Highlights

Python 3 support

As noted in Pelican's Unified Codebase, this new version of Pelican includes support for Python 3. All tests currently pass on Python 3.2, and we expect the same for Python 3.3 in the near future. (Pelican interacts with a number of third-party components that have not yet been fully updated for Python 3.3 compatibility.)

Override page save-to location from meta-data

Instead of blog or a site with dated articles, some people want to use Pelican to publish sites with non-chronological content. Pelican 3.2 enables this by providing a way to override the save-to location from within a page's meta-data, so for example, you can have a pages/index.md file that will replace your site root's index.html.

Time period archives

For folks who use date-based URL schemes such as /2013/04/23/my-post/, you can now create per-year and per-month archives that will appear at /2013/ and /2013/04/, respectively.

Posterous blog import

With Posterous shutting down on April 30th, this release offers the timely ability to import an existing Posterous blog. There are only a few days remaining, so if you have a Posterous blog and want to import it into a Pelican-powered site, please act quickly!

Separate Pelican plugins repository

Pelican plugins have been moved out of the core Pelican repository and into their own repository. This allows us to focus on the Pelican core while simultaneously encouraging the community to extend Pelican's functionality in the form of modular plugins.

Refactoring, fixes, and improvements

There have been a large number of improvements under the hood. While not an exhaustive list, the Pelican 3.2 milestone issues should provide a good overview of the many enhancements that are part of this release.

Upgrade notes

While we do everything we can to maximize backwards compatibility and ensure smooth Pelican upgrades, it's possible that you may encounter un-anticipated wrinkles. Following are a few notes that may help:

Add from __future__ import unicode_literals near the top of your settings file.
As noted above, Pelican plugins are now located in their own repository. If you currently use any plugins bundled with Pelican 3.1.1 or earlier, you should follow the instructions located in the Pelican plugins repository to re-enable those plugins.
Document-relative URL generation is now off by default. If you previously relied on this feature and fully understand its potential disadvantages, you can re-enable it by adding RELATIVE_URLS = True to your settings file.
The CSS class generated by the reST and Markdown processors was unified into a single highlight class. If you find that your code syntax highlighting has disappeared after upgrading, ensure that any instances of codehilite in your CSS are replaced with highlight.

We will keep the above list updated with any additional items as we find them.

Special thanks

As evidenced by our growing THANKS file, there were many people who contributed to this release. A few folks deserve special mention for the many hours they put into this new version of Pelican:

Dirk Makowski added support for Python 3, including provisional ports for third-party components such as Typogrify and SmartyPants.

W. Trevor King has undertaken a significant refactoring of the Pelican core, improving a wide swath of the codebase that will continue to surface in future versions of Pelican.

Deniz Turgut (Avaris) contributed so many features and fixes to this release that it would be silly to even try to list them. He's put so much work into Pelican that one of the maintainers insisted that he set up a Gittip profile (which Deniz did under much duress), to which an anonymous donor has already made a sizeable contribution. If you want to thank Deniz for his hard work, please consider doing the same. It would be great to see him on the "Top Receivers" list next week!

Staying in touch

2013 has been a busy year so far, as evidenced by both the number of commits to Pelican as well as the lack of updates here on the Pelican blog. (^_^) We'll do our best to post more frequently in the months to come, both here on the blog and also via the @getpelican Twitter account.

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