slate blog

For the last few months we’ve been working with the appropriate groups at the University to work out if we can really open source slate and, if so, what license we’d release it under. Yesterday we got official word that we can go forward. Yay!

The License: WVU Open Source License
I’ve just done a post for this so you can review the license yourselves. As I note in the post (for those to lazy to click the link) our license is based on the Illinois Open Source License which seems to be a derivative of the MIT License. I know it seems a little odd at first but review it and you’ll see it’s what most Rails folks are used to.

The Plan for Open Sourcing slate
Ok, I’m being a bit of tease by not providing a date but we’re in a bit of flux in the department at the moment so it’s tough for me to pick a date and be positive we can deliver. Stay tuned for a more exact release announcement in that vein. Much sooner rather than later though.

The version we’ll be releasing will be most likely be v0.5.1. This assumes we put the new release on our hardware first, find some bugs and fix them before releasing it into the wild. We’ll do an announcement on here for a release candidate of v0.5.1 and then go wild with a marketing blitz for the final edition.

v0.5.0 is a complete rewrite of slate based on all the stuff we’ve learned. The big fixes Chris has covered are making sure their are ways for folks to customize necessary parts (e.g. account authorization) and to create plugins to add their own functionality. It won’t be exactly like what you’ve seen in the screenshots so far.

Some Tech Details
Just in case folks want to check out some of the tech we’re using in the next release of slate.

• We’re running a self-contained version of Rails so once you download slate you’ll have the correct version within slate to run it. It’s essentially Rails 2.0.2.
• The plugin architecture is based on Rails 2.0’s plugin locator feature
• ImageScience for image manipulation
• jQuery as our JavaScript library
• RSpec for testing
• css_dryer for dynamic stylesheets
• attachment_fu for uploads
• slightly hacked implementation of jamis buck’s routing tricks

Conclusion
You’ll be hearing a lot more from us over the next few weeks as we put in place the infrastructure to support the open sourcing, get documentation online, and actually make the big announcement. We promise not to completely disappear again :)