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Chyrp v2.0 released (chyrp.net)

36 points by vito ↗ HN
I've been working on this project as a hobby for years, and finally reached a major milestone today. Version 2.0 has been in the making for a very long time, constantly improving and stabilizing. I'm very happy to finally have it out the door. I hope some of you guys will find it useful. :)

26 comments

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vito
Hrm. I had a paragraph of text in that field, is it not showing up because it's a link?

Edit: Here's what it said:

I've been working on this project as a hobby for years, and finally reached a major milestone today. Version 2.0 has been in the making for a very long time, constantly improving and stabilizing. Honestly it took way too long, but I'm very happy to finally have it out the door. I hope some of you guys will find it useful. :)

henning
That will only show up if you don't include an external link afaik.
vito
Ah, ok. Thanks.
henning
It appears you're the main developer behind Chyrp. In that case, grats! LAMP needs Wordpress alternatives.
vito
Yep. :) Thank you.
_giu
congrats on my part, too!

I had a look at the code (http://chyrp.net/code/files/includes/common-php.html) and after I clicked on "Blog" in the navigation on that page I got a 404 (seems like all links in the navigation point to an old version of the page, but the other links work). naturally it's nothing serious, I wanted only to inform you about this one :)

Tiktaalik
You mention in the blog that the changelog for the v2.0 release would be huge and so you didn't provide one.

I'm assuming there are numerous behind the scenes tweaks and improvements, but are there any up front, noticeable features that are new or noteworthy to this release?

vito
Depends on what version you're wanting to compare it with. 1.1.3.2 or 2.0 RC3?

From 1.1.3.2 to 2.0 it's an entirely different system, basically. From 2.0 RC3 it's just the occasional fix here and there, and minor backwards-compatible additions (like `{% url "foo_bar" in Admin %}`.

Sorry I wasn't able to get an actual changelog out, I had the release planned for today and working on a changelog (from 1.x -> 2.x) would easily add another week to the release date.

JeremyChase
This is really well done, and the demo is easy to use. A few comments:

Alternate URL is confusing. What exactly does this do? Can I use my own domain name? (it seems like it will change the Chryp URL, but not sure..

On your blog page the date is shown off the left side of my browser window. My window is 1024px wide....

Looks nice.

vito
There should be a little blue question-mark icon next to the Alternate URL setting that explains it, but essentially it's for letting you have a /chyrp folder with the chyrp internals and stuff, and just have an index.php where you want your site to be.

Sorry about the blog date thing, I'd forgotten to do the blog area until the last minute so the whole thing's kind of rushed. I'm planning on fixing that later.

Edit: Fixed the blog being too wide.

rw
Gorgeous design.

The Extend -> Themes (and others) link doesn't work (404).

vito
Thanks a lot. :)

Those seem to work for me, they just don't have anything in there yet so it's empty.

smokinn
I agree. The site design is truly stunning. I especially like the choice of colours. It's hard to subdue such bright colours but it was pulled off very well.
smokinn
There seems to be a small bug in the navigation.

I clicked on Code and on that page all the navigation links have /old/ in them and 404 if you try to follow them.

The rest of the pages seem fine, it's just the code page that breaks the navigation. I have a feeling it wasn't updated for the 2.0 release?

vito
You're correct. The documentation system we use is NaturalDocs, and I had to modify the source to get it to spit out decent HTML (plus HTML that matched the theme). I haven't updated it to use the new look, but the documentation there is accurate.
mattmcknight
Looks very nice. I wonder why it matters that it is built on PHP and SQL enough to put that in the front of the marketing blurb. Is the audience primarily PHP developers? I'd generally prefer marketing text focused on features rather than technology stack.
vito
It's something I'd want to know if I was looking for a blogging engine. Maybe mentioning SQL doesn't matter as much, though. It originally said MySQL, but it actually supports other databases as well, so I removed the "My". Now it doesn't really bear any importance (PHP+MySQL being a pseudo-category of software), so I'll just remove it.
greyman
SO what is the main differentiating factor between Chyrp and Blogger/Wordpress.com/Tumblr/Posterous?
vito
Blogger:

  - Feathers
  - Self-hosted
  - More flexible templating (though I haven't used Blogger in ages)
  - Extensible
WordPress:

  - Feathers
  - Good code (ok, that's not really a feature, but I think it's worth noting as it's the only self-hosted one listed, despite it being a low blow)
  - Better templating (not just straight PHP, a custom  engine similar to Jinja/Django)
Tumblr:

  - Self-hosted
  - Easier to extend/theme
  - Ability to manage content types (Feathers), not locked down the same 6 or 7
Posterous: Not sure, never used it.

-----------

There are many other differences obviously, but these are the major feature differences I can name off the top of my head. Also, I haven't used either of those in ages aside from making sure importing works so I may be off a bit.

greyman
Thanks. I am somewhat familiar with those systems, so I was mostly curious about how the Chyrp is unique (from those other mentioned).
shard
When the huge color bar appears in the top nav bar, I want to click anywhere in the color bar, but to my annoyance I have to click on the text itself. If you're going to use the color bars as navigation indicators, they should show up only when the mouse pointer is at somewhere where you can actually navigate.
vito
I'm aware of this, a fix will be coming up. I didn't want to postpone release for something so minor though. I've added it to the Chyrp Site tracker.

Note: It's not really completely simple, because what's lighting up is the <li>, which contains both the header link and the nav link. But I'll figure something out, and probably end up having the area under the header clickable for the nav.

callmeed
I used Chyrp in the past and actually really liked it. Looking forward to trying this release out when time permits.

In our industry (photography) its hard to convince people to use something other than WordPress (which I don't mind working in, but often find bloated and unnecessary).

I hope that Chyrp (or something like it) can start catching up to WP in terms of community and market share (for self-hosted blogs). I don't know if WP has too much momentum, though.

Nice work

Jem
Alex - I wanted to use Chyrp as an alternative to WordPress last year (before I went back to my own blog system) but, as you may recall, had problems with stability after importing my 15k+ comments. Is this issue resolved now?
vito
I do remember, but I don't remember what the problem was in particular. If you want to you can send me your export file - I'd be happy to test it out.
Jem
I converted to a custom blog so I'll need to get it into the right format first - will be in touch some time this week. Cheers :)