Release of v0.15.0

Posted on | October 2, 2011 | 2 Comments

Here we are again! First weekend of October and time for the launch of 0.15.0. The most prominent new features are Plugins and more validations!

On the 17th of September Mike van Riel gave a talk about DocBlox at pfCongres 2011 (slides) where the big new feature for this release was announced: Plugins.

Plugins offer a whole new way of working with your code’s structure and generated documentation. It enables you to add additional validations, implement specific behaviour for tags (such as linking to another location) and much more that I can’t even think of right now.

Instead of explaining what it can do I would like to refer to the documentation. Currently it is a Work in Progress but I hope to have it finished completely soon.

Features

Right! Before anything else; the highlights for this release:

• Plugins, please see the documentation for a complete explanation
• Sidebar has been replaced, a new sidebar has been introduced which reduces loading times for large projects, adds room for future improvements and more
• Expand all, collapse all and filtering functions for the files, namespaces and packages listing.
• More validations, even more error conditions are checked now thanks to @benmatselby; watch this item as it may grow in the future even more.
• A new report is introduced which tells you where deprecated elements are in your code.
• A new Table of Contents slide-out is added to the file view which can take you to your favourite function, constant or class instantly.
• Several usability improvements and bug fixes

On the downside: Search has been temporarily removed to be revised; a new location needed to be found and the performance was sub-par for the intended audience. It will return in a near future release.

Backwards compatibility break

On other feature was added which will probably not be noticed by many but causes a BC break for those who invoke DocBlox as library (for example Phing). In order to prevent any BC breakages in the future has a Bootstrap class been introduced which sets up the basis for DocBlox. The class can be found in the root of DocBlox and is called DocBlox_Bootstrap.

Please review the initialization of your implementation and replace it with a call to the `initialize` method of DocBlox_Bootstrap.

Next version

With the introduction of Plugins is DocBlox’ design becoming more and more stable and as such a month of time will be taken to improve performance, clean up the code base, increase test percentage and re-arrange functionality into their definitive plugins.

An interesting feature is intended for this period but I am not sure much time will be left for that.

The date for next release will be November 6th.

Conclusion

Good things are coming, at least: I think so.

Have fun and see you with the next release!

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