Oct 2006

Blocks 2.1.4

bright-blocks
Blocks 2.1.4 is out. It corrects two small bugs that were introduced in Blocks 2.1.
  • Page blocks containing photo album pages now correctly style the large-sized photo pages.
  • If a Page Block is not connected to any specific page it will no longer cause RapidWeaver to throw an exception while exporting or publishing.
I suspect the photo album fix is probably a bit more important than some of the other bug fixes, so this is a recommended upgrade for pretty much everyone.

Go get your download Blocks 2.1.4
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Beta Testers

Picture 10
I think I'm just about ready to let my new app blast off, but I'd like to broaden the beta test a bit more. If you're interested in testing a little app for me (and I mean little -- it'll take all of 2 minutes to test) let me know. I need people...

(1) ...who have a newish machine with a non-crappy video card.
Old TiBooks are very cool. I loved mine. But they don't have the video memory to run accelerated 2D graphics. If you think your refresh rate is up to it, you're in. I'll let you be the judge.

(2) ...who really like to give me feedback.
And I don't mean "this is great" I want to know what you thought and why.

If you feel like you fit the bill, then go check out the forum. I'll start a thread about the beta test. Maybe we can let others read along and experience the trials and tribulations of being an unpaid beta tester.
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Blocks 2.1.2

Another casualty of the changes we made for PostcardViewer was the the Blocks page block. This one required that you actually had to publish your site -- so it took a couple days before people noticed.

Blocks 2.1.2 fixes this problem and nothing else. But all are recommended to download it since without it Page blocks with blog content simply won't publish.

Go get your download.
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One Correction

I've made a small (but important) bugfix to Blocks. You may want to grab yourself a copy of version 2.1.1 -- especially if you are having trouble previewing your blocks pages.
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Blocks Version 2.1

Blocks 2.1 is here and has a couple new features that you might like.

Go get your download!

It started off a simple addition. Just support the new PostcardViewer plugin as one of the page types that can be used with the Page block. Simple enough. But there were two little bug fixes that I wanted to get in.

Well, adding Postcard Viewer has led to a significant change in the way Page blocks are handled, there is now more hierarchy to keep them from overlapping content. This is especially noticeable when you add more than one of the same type of plugin (no it does not mean you can add more than one SlideShow).

That was a really big change, so I figured I should go for broke and add a couple more real features and call it 2.1.

1. Independant Image Formats You can now choose an image format for each block in your layout. That way some blocks can be PNG images with transparency and others can be nice and small JPEGs. This is primarily for image blocks, but really it works with just about all block types.

For example: You can have all your text blocks render their images as JPEG except for that one with the animated GIF that you would like to leave alone.

Look in the Block Info window under the Content tab. I'll be updating the documentation over the next week — you'll have to experiment until then.

2. No More Margin-al Images Some themes add margins, padding, background colors and borders to all the images on your site. We all like that. It's great for making the images that you drop in your blog look really cool. But in Blocks it just messes up the layout. That's no good. So I've added an inline style to strip these CSS properties from just the images in Blocks (but not inline images -- those will still look like your blog, of course). This is totally automatic and turned on by default, no need to set anything. But for those rare occasions when you DO want the style to stick around, you can do that to. You can find the setting in the Advanced area of the Block Info Window under the Settings tab.

What turned out to be a small point release turned into some solid features that definitely make this download worth all $0 I'll be charging for the update. Enjoy.
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