[Zope-Annce] Kupu 1.1 beta 1 released

[Philipp von Weitershausen]

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Kupu 1.1 beta 1 released
========================

22 May 2004

The Kupu Team is pround to announce the first beta release of Kupu 1.1. 
After the 1.0.3 release, which was the first one to carry the new name 
and license, the new version brings new, long-awaited features.

What is Kupu?
-------------

Kupu is a client-side JavaScript What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) 
editor. It works in both Mozilla and Internet Explorer based browsers 
(including Netscape 7) and produces well-formed XHTML. Kupu is object 
oriented and designed to be customizable and extensible.

Where to download
-----------------

You can find the release tarball at
   http://kupu.oscom.org/download/

What is new in Kupu 1.1?
------------------------

o Templates for different systems are now generated using an
   XML/XSLT-based templating system. The system is completely
   extendable and customizable, thus allowing third-party developers to
   integrate Kupu in their application even easier.

o Configuration of the editor instance is now done using embedded XML,
   instead of non-standard attributes on the iframe element. This makes
   it not-only standard-compliant, it is also much easier to extend the
   set of configuration directives.

o Some core functionality is now covered by unit tests, based on the
   JavaScript testing framework ECMAUnit. This has helped to improve
   the code quality in JavaScript environments tremendously.

o A new way of inserting images and linking to documents were
   implemented: library drawers. Drawers are windows that open up
   inside the browser without invoking a browser popup. Library drawers
   load information about linkable/insertable objects from the server
   via standardized XML. That makes them indepentend of any target
   platform.

o Stateful buttons now indicate when the cursor is inside text that is
   bold, underlined, etc.

o Apart from ordered and unordered lists, Kupu also now supports
   adding HTML definition lists.

o A cross-browser selection API was implemented to allow manipulation
   of a document's arbitrary elements using selections and cursors.

o Access key functionality was added.

o The Silva integration has been improved a lot. This is the first
   release with complete Silva support.

o Integration into Plone has been completely rewritten. It now
   features a complete server-side implementation of the drawers while
   providing basic support for the WYSIWYG editor API.

What to expect from Kupu in the future?
---------------------------------------

For the final 1.1 release, we hope to mainly improve some of the UI 
aspects. For the more distant future, we hope to make our editor 
compliant with ATAG, the W3C's standard for editor accessability. On the 
technical side of things, we are working on completing editor 
configuration and initialization through XML as well as the 
cross-browser selection API. We hope to make more and more components 
available as separate packages, such as ECMAUnit by Guido Wesdorp or the 
great Sarissa cross-browser library by Manos Batsis.

Special thanks to
-----------------

- Felicia Wong for the new shiny Kupu logo
- Holger Krekel and Codespeak for the invaluable support
- Manos Batsis for Sarissa
- Jan Smith for testing and finding bugs
- ETH for support and inspiration
- OSCOM for support and resources
- Infrae for support

On behalf of the Kupu Team,

Philipp von Weitershausen