Release of v0.9.0

Posted on | April 2, 2011 | No Comments

On February 1st I had announced this project to the world and DocBlox was at version 0.7.1 at that time.

Since that time this website has been created; the project is now followed by more than 100 people on Github, we have had dozens of commits and released version 0.8.3. Another milestone that we have reached in the mean time is that both Aura Framework (successor to Solar) and PPI Framework have chosen to adopt DocBlox as the tool to generate their API documentation with.

Now, I am proud to say that the Beta version 0.9.0 has been released on Github and on PEAR. A lot has changed; a lot of issues resolved and new features were built since version 0.8.3.
A complete list of changes, fixes and additions can be found in the CHANGELOG file located in the docs folder but I will try to summarize the things that stand out the most:

1. A new template; I have received quite a bit of feedback on the template which you are used to in versions prior to this one and could only conclude that a complete overhaul was necessary.
2. DocBlox is PEAR compliant and has its own PEAR channel.
3. PDF support has been added; your documentation can be converted into PDF using the wkhtmltopdf project / library.
   Note: Please see their website for installation instructions when you are running windows. For Linux a binary has been provided; all you need to provide are the right X11 libraries. PDF support is optional and these dependencies are not required by default.
4. Separated themes into themes and templates; templates can mash up different (parts of) themes and help in the creation of additional content as is seen with the class diagram and PDF export.
5. Improved detection of erroneous DocBlocks; when the number of function arguments or one of the names of the arguments does not match with the DocBlock a warning is thrown.
6. Class Diagram has been improved; it now shows more accurately the hierarchy of your project and you can click on each class to be taken directly to the documentation page.
7. Long descriptions (the body of a DocBlock) now supports Markdown notation out of the box.
8. Improved handling of configuration files; inspired by PHPUnit does DocBlox scan the current working directory for a docblox.xml or docblox.dist.xml and automatically loads the configuration found in that file.
9. Implemented a task based system in the CLI; try to invoke docblox project:list and see the options that are available.
10. As probably one of the first DGA’s DocBlox recognizes the array notation (Class[]) and multiple type notation (Class|Class2). This means that you can tell DocBlox what type is inside of an array and/or provide multiple types in your @param or @var annotation.
11. And much more!

A word of thanks

This release could never have been what it is now without the aid of those who have contributed their time, code, ideas and annoyances to this project. It is to them that I would like to say: Thank you.

The future

Development on DocBlox will not stop for quite some time; there are just too many great features waiting to be implemented. Alas, now has come the time to take a step back from the development and give some much needed love to the documentation on this site.

In the next month I will be focussing on fixing as much of the issues which might be reported and on creating documentation.

If the documentation has reached a sufficient level and no blocking bugs are left then DocBlox will push it’s first stable version, version 1.0, on April 30th!

Please follow us on twitter @DocBlox to get the latest news and if you have an idea, found a bug or want to share anything else with me you visit the channel #docblox on Freenode and I’d love to have a chat!

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