Older versions of the earthli WebCore were more clearly delineated release packages and were hosted at SourceForge and offered for download on this site. Much time has passed and there have always been incremental upgrades made for the maintenance of earthli.com, but no more official releases.

A little while ago, the earthli WebCore’s source was moved from a private, firewalled Perforce server to an externally available Mercurial server. The structure has changed somewhat since the 2.7.0 release and documentation updates are still pending. Many of the principles still apply, though.

PHP4.x support has been deprecated and will no longer be supported. earthli.com itself is still currently using it, but will migrate to PHP5 within the month. The last, stable PHP4-only build is available from the source server, of course, as the snappily named changeset “0b644125e4a7”. Again, once all changes have settled down, this version will be made available in a more convenient manner.

Once PHP5-development has delivered a stable version, the WebCore documentation and instructions will be updated accordingly. One thing at a time. The sources for the earthli web-site itself are currently hidden, but select pieces will be made available as configuration samples at some point, as well.

Though still not officially available, earthli.com has migrated to the latest and greatest version of the earthli WebCore. Look for a downloadable release within the next week or so. In the meantime, you can cruise around earthli and see some of the improvements for yourself. As with most WebCore releases, the differences are mainly non-cosmetic and of benefit to developers working with the library. However, there are noticeable improvements to the toolbars, menus and other UI elements.

The first service pack is available at the WebCore home page. This release includes some smaller bug fixes and some usability improvements. There are also release notes and a change log to read.

The earthli applications have also been updated and have their own change logs: Albums, News, Projects and Recipes.

After over a year in development and a skipped internal release (2.5.0), the latest and greatest in PHP web site development technology is once again available to a clamoring public.

You should probably Download it now.

New features in 2.6.0 (since 2.4.0) are:

• File uploading fully integrated and worry-free
• Image manipulation
• Generalized form rendering
• Previewing supported in almost all forms
• Fully HTML 4.01 valid templates
• Massively improved the “munger”; HTML and plain text support much more powerful formatting
• Added icon and theme management (users and folders can have unique icons or avatars)
• Generalized attachments suport (comments/entries/folders)
• General support for “locations” so that a text block can refer to content without specifying exactly where it needs to be (e.g. to refer to a nested attachment)
• More advanced searching (search on any and all fields)
• Compressed files support
• EXIF extraction support
• Much more sophisticated subscriber options
• Improved email generation (publishing generates table of contents for longer mails)
• Draft mode supported in all applications
• Much improved hierarchy for data objects (much easier to create non-application objects and reuse code)
• Improved logging and developer tools for debugging/profiling
• Template files are now easily overridable
• Individual classes and renderers are also easily overridable (for plugins)
• Integration into non-WebCore pages as easy as dropping in WebCore objects (location is automatically detected and adjusted)
• Toolbars for objects are now in CSS-only drop-down menus (cleaner look)
• Simplified configuration and customization
• Drastically improved security and permissions granularity and application-specific customizability
• Error handling and reporting much improved (including ‘retry’ and ‘debug’ modes)
• Improved and extended platform-independent file and url handling
• …and probably much, much more that I can’t remember right now…

The application have also improved, inheriting all the features listed above and adding:

• Albums has much improved album options
• Albums has a batch upload feature (extracting images from a ZIP file and automatically creating thumbnails and assigning dates)
• Albums can now upload pictures/extract EXIF date/etc.
• Projects supports testing and release dates and sorts intelligently to show the most important jobs first
• Projects has a release wizard now to show exactly what will happen when a release is shipped
• … and again, much, much more…

Did I mention that all this is available for Download?