Pelican 3.3 released

By Pelican Contributors

In news.

Today we are pleased to announce the release of Pelican 3.3. 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 3.3 support

Following up on the last release's support for Python 3.2, this new version of Pelican now supports Python 3.3. In order to do so, support for Python 3.2 unfortunately had to be dropped.

Cross-platform automation via Fabric

Pelican has traditionally included a make-based workflow that works well enough for POSIX-based systems but at the expense of Windows users. In order to improve cross-platform publishing automation, Pelican 3.3 includes support for Fabric, a Python-based automation framework.

Retain certain files in output

Some folks apply version control to their output directories, the metadata for which is obliterated when using the DELETE_OUTPUT_DIRECTORY directive. Pelican 3.3 includes a new OUTPUT_RETENTION setting which allows you to define arbitrary files/folders that should be retained during the aforementioned output cleaning process (e.g., .hg, .git, et cetera).

Tumblr import

Tumblr posts can now be imported into Pelican sites.

Refactoring, fixes, and improvements

Pelican 3.3 includes a significant number of other improvements, as indicated by the long list of items in the changelog and the Pelican 3.3 milestone issues list.

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:

  • The FILES_TO_COPY setting has been deprecated, so replace it with the STATIC_PATHS and EXTRA_PATH_METADATA settings. Refer to the corresponding entries in the Settings section of the docs for more information.
  • Due to minor changes to the plugin API, some plugins may not function properly if they are not updated accordingly. Most (if not all) of the plugins in the official Pelican Plugins Repository have already been updated, but externally-hosted plugins may not be. If you are heavily dependent on such a plugin, consider holding off on upgrading to Pelican 3.3 until you are certain that your desired plugins will function correctly.
  • PDF generation has been moved out of core and into a separate plugin. If you previously relied on this feature, please be sure to retrieve, install, and configure the new plugin from the Pelican Plugins Repository.
  • There is a new warning for <img> tags without alt="" attributes, which are important for accessibility reasons. Please consider adding these attributes to your <img> tags in order to improve accessibility (and eliminate the warnings).
  • The syntax for linking to source content has been changed in order to ensure compatibility with Markdown and reST extensions. For example, the new syntax for Markdown: [a link relative to content root]({filename}/article1.md) The previous |filename|/article1.md syntax will continue to be supported for backwards compatibility.

We will keep the above list updated with any additional items as we find them, so please let us know if we missed anything.

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