[pmwiki-announce] PmWiki 2.0.beta55 released

[Patrick R. Michaud]

I've just released 2.0.beta55.  I was really hoping that the next
release would be 2.0.0, but it hasn't worked out that way.  Really
all that needs to be done now is to finish cleaning up the
documentation and a few other minor cleanups.

This release has a number of important changes and bugfixes.  First,
the 'value=' wikistyle is working again, having been broken in an
earlier release.  Wikistyles now also accept dots and parens in values, 
so that things like "1.5em" and "rgb(255,255,255)" work.  There's a
new "%cframe%" wikistyle, which centers content in a 200-pixel frame
(this can be adjusted with a "width=" parameter in the wikistyle).

The (:include:) directive now allows a list of pages to be searched
for inclusion; the first existing page is selected.  Thus the markup

    (:include Page1 Page2 Page3:)

includes the contents of the first available of Page1, Page2, or Page3.

The [@...@] markup is now the "preformatted text" markup.  It can be
used instead of the space+[=...=] markup to generate blocks of
preformatted and escaped text.  It's also fairly smart about handling 
extra newlines inside the [@...@], so that there isn't a lot of
unwanted vertical space displayed in the output.

And speaking of unwanted vertical space, PmWiki's handling of "blank lines"
in the markup text has been changed somewhat.  In previous versions 
of PmWiki, some directives (e.g., (:comment:), (:keyword:), (:noleft:),
(:if:)) often resulted in blank lines in the markup text, which then
generated vertical space on the output.  In this release, only those
lines that are blank in the original source markup (before processing)
end up generating vertical space in the output.

This change may have some ramifications for selected recipe authors.  
If a custom markup rule produces other wiki markup to be processed by
PmWiki, and the output wiki markup contains blank lines that is intended
to generate vertical space in the page output, then the custom markup rule
needs to either generate '<:vspace>' tags for the blank lines or call
the PVS() function to convert blank lines into vertical space tags.
(For more details or assistance, query the mailing list.)

Some may have noticed that pmwiki.org now has a new skin; this new skin
is expected to become the standard skin in the next release.  The current
2.0.beta skin will be made available in the Cookbook for sites that need
to continue with the existing skin.

Comments, questions, suggestions welcome as always on the pmwiki-users
mailing list.

Pm