SemanticScuttle 0.98

After 5 months of development, I released SemanticScuttle version 0.98.0 yesterday evening. Your own self-hosted online bookmark manager got a bunch of new features added, as well as some nagging bugs fixed.

New features

Private keys for RSS feeds

It's possible now to get protected and private bookmarks in an RSS feed by using a private key. As soon you enable it in your profile, all pages with a feed will have a second - private - feed linked.

While private feeds were possible before with HTTP basic auth (user:pass@host/...), private keys are not related to your password and can be changed with the click of a button.

Thanks to Mark Pemberton for implementing it!

Configurable default privacy

In previous versions, bookmarks were public by default unless you changed the setting manually when adding a new bookmark. When importing bookmarks, all were made public automatically.

Now it's possible to change the default privacy setting in your configuration file. All users will get the new privacy setting by default (but still can change it on a case-by-case basis when adding bookmarks).

Brett Dee deserves thanks for adding this feature!

Themes

SemanticScuttle is skinnable now. You can change the look of your installation by installing new themes.

Since this is a new feature, nobody has yet designed any, but since it's documented it should not take long for the first to appear.

URL security

To prevent XSS, SemanticScuttle does not allow javascript: URLs to be added anymore. config.default.php contains an array of whitelisted protocols $allowedProtocols which you may adapt to your special needs.

Mass hosting support

Sharing the code of a SemanticScuttle installation for multiple - differently configured - hosts was not possible without manual changes to the sources.

To make it easy to share the code, you may use per-host configuration files now.

The admin just installs the PEAR package, and all users on the server can have their own differently configured SemanticScuttle installation.

Your bytecode cache will love it, and your admin, too - because only one package needs to be updated, and all installations benefit.

Changes to the base

SemanticScuttle uses jQuery and jQueryUi now, and we got rid of the old Dojo library. The benefit is that SemanticScuttle can be used with all features offline now, which helps development. Also, jQueryUi is themeable which eases changing the look of your installation.

HTTPS connections are fully supported now, even when no $root is configured.

Database changes from one version to the next are in single .sql files now, which should make it easier to apply the changes when upgrading. We also store the current schema version in the database - which lays the foundations for automatic database updates in the future.

Last but not least, the website has documentation now.

See the full ChangeLog if you want all the details.

Written by Christian Weiske.

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