Penguin Greetings News
June 06, 2005
It's official! There were no issues
with Penguin Greetings 0.9.9, so that
is now the 1.0.0 release. Nothing has
been changed but the version numbers.
Penguin Greetings is now considered
stable for production use.
May 09, 2005
Penguin Greetings 0.9.9 is released.
This is a release candidate for the 1.0
release. The most important enhancement
is support for the embedded Perl
environment HTML::Mason
in addition to Embperl.
Other enhancements include:
Localization using Perl's
Locale::Maketext, a collection of
general use templates to simplify site
building, and scheduling when card
categories are displayed during the
calendar year.
The older ecard sites have received a
face-lift, as has the Penguin Greetings
information website. To demonstrate the
Penguin Greetings Mason environment, a
new secondary ecard site has been
created:
Savoring the sights of
Seattle. The total number of
cards in the collection is now 240.
April 10, 2004
Just in time for Easter, the default
(main) ecard site for Penguin Greetings
has been updated on
<canebas.org> in
preparation for the official 1.0
release of this software. This is work
in progress, but it appears to be
stable and perfectly usable as of
now.
Unfortunately, since there is no
mirror site of Penguin Greetings
running the actual 0.9.8 release, there
is no place to see what Penguin
Greetings looks like "out of the box."
So unless some nice person offers to
provide a new mirror site for Penguin
Greetings, the only way to see the
existing look of Penguin Greetings is
to install it or wait for the 1.0
release when the new look will become
the default.
March 30, 2004
Penguin Greetings 0.9.8 is
released. This update features a
new secondary ecard site
The Penguin Greetings Four Seasons
Collection which demonstrates the
power of Embperl
for developing elaborate ecard sites on
top of the existing Penguin Greetings
ecard engine. The 24 new images in the
Four Seasons site can be placed
in customizable card templates where
type-style, frame, color, and other
properties can be changed by the card
site user. No changes where necessary
to the Penguin Greetings ecard engine
to implement the Four Seasons
site.
One modest but useful enhancement was
added to Penguin Greetings error
handling. There is now an error 40
defined in case a user tries to access
a card removed from the site. In
addition to the totally new Four
Seasons site, There are 8 new cards
and 9 other revised cards in the
general collection. All the holy image
cards have been reworked to appear more
natural and human. There are even two
new Easter cards for the season.
March 13, 2004
Unfortunately, I have been unable to
contact the folks running the Penguin
Greetings mirror site to have them
update to the newest version. So until
further notice, the only place to see
the current version of Penguin
Greetings is the development site:
canebas.org. See the demonstration
pages for more details.
March 06, 2004
Penguin Greetings 0.9.7 is
released. This major update
includes support object-oriented ecard
sites via Embperl::Object. A new
demonstration web site using this
technology has been provided in English
and French:
The Penguin Greetings California Poppy
Collection. Other important
changes include:
- Caching of all configuration file
information for greatly improved
performance for the SpeedyCGI version
of pgreet.pl.(s)cgi.
Configuration files are now
periodically reloaded and can be
reloaded via SIGHUP for both the
SpeedyCGI application and the
daemon.
- Application daemon now handles
purging of ecards older than a
user-specified number of days.
Daemon has been streamlined to
improve responsiveness and simplify
configuration. All database
files are now backed up daily.
- Added a new database maintenance
tool PgreetDButil.
- Application daemon log file
format has been cleaned up to greatly
improve readability.
- Updated PgTemplateTest
to test object-oriented templates and
purge old test files via a -x
option.
- Replaced all of the early cards
which were not based on photos of
some sort with far more artistic
equivalents.
Included are nine new or updated cards
including new cards for Saint Patrick's
day!
Note that there was no public release
of Penguin Greetings 0.9.6, only of the
Perl module Pgreet
and it had a minor but annoying bug
which was fixed in Pgreet
0.9.7.
January 15, 2004
Penguin Greetings 0.9.5 is released.
This release adds support for
Localization/Internationalization by
interpreting the browser
HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE environment
variable. Two example secondary sites
have been translated into French to
demonstrate this capability: The Holy
ecard site -
PgSaint and a (now dated) Christmas
card site -
PgXmas.
In addition to the usual updates, the
Love and Romance card section
has been expanded for for Valentine's
day.
December 18, 2003
Christmas ecard secondary sites have
been added in English and French to the
Penguin Greetings demonstration site
area.. These sites are part of the
development for multiple language
support that is under way for the
Penguin Greetings software. However,
they are fully functional now (you
simply must "manually" select your
preferred language at this time.) The
Christmas card site in English is:
http://www.canebas.org/pgreet.scgi?site=PgXmas!en-us
and the French site (cartes de voeux
de Noël) is:
http://www.canebas.org/pgreet.scgi?site=PgXmas!fr-fr
. . . Happy
Holidays!
December 14, 2003
Penguin Greetings 0.9.4 is released.
This is an interim release to provide
the remainder of the Christmas cards
for the 2003 holiday season and New
Year cards for 2004. There are no
substantive changes to the
software.
November 26, 2003
The mirror demonstration site is now
back up and running but at a new
location (same server - different
virtual domain.) You can access Penguin
Greetings at http://www.toca.me.uk/pgreet.pl.cgi.
Unfortunately, the server ran into some
connectivity problems - like a broken
ethernet driver!!
November 18, 2003
Penguin Greetings 0.9.3 is released.
This release is a code cleanup and
minor bug fix release. There are no new
features in the application itself and
upgrading from previous versions is
straightforward if you have the
installer.cache file from the previous
release.
There are 14 new cards bringing the
total in the collection to over 120.
This release includes cards for
Thanksgiving and the Christmas Holiday
Season.
October 2, 2003:
There is now a new mirror site for
seeing a demonstration of Penguin
Greetings courtesy of the nice folks at
www.linuxbox.co.uk.
Their server has much better
connectivity than
canebas.org, and it will
always run the current release (while
canebas.org has the
development release.) See the demonstration
page for more details or head over
to try out the demo at:
http://www.linuxbox.co.uk/~pgreet/cgi-bin/pgreet.pl.cgi
September 29, 2003:
Penguin Greetings 0.9.2 is released.
It provides a new framework to allow
developers to implement "back" buttons
using CGI, instead of JavaScript. It
also corrects entries in the email
header to reduce the risk of a Penguin
Greeting ecard being incorrectly
identified as SPAM. Three new ecards
for Halloween have been added to the
collection.
August 31, 2003:
Penguin Greetings 0.9.1 is released.
It includes a new testing framework for
application configuration variables and
a new application to test the main
configuration file:
PgreetConfTest. It also
fixes a bug that caused the
pgreet UID and GID to be
installed as a string instead of a
number. This caused the Penguin
Greetings daemon pgreetd
to send cards out as root instead of
user pgreet.
Also included are 6 new ecards for
Grandparents in general and Grandparents
Day in particular.
August 25, 2003:
Penguin Greetings 0.9.0 is released.
At last, the installation procedure is
MUCH improved!! The installer
Install.PL now takes over
the task of: installing the required
Perl modules, localizing the
application and configuration files,
and copying everything where it
belongs. You still need to create a
pgreet user and make some
directories, but the installer takes
care of the rest.
The core of the application remains
the same as 0.8.8 (as promised,) but
there are some bug fixes and code
cleanups. There are also over 15 new
cards bringing the total in the default
collection to over 100!!
July 22, 2003:
Penguin Greetings 0.8.8 is released.
This release candidate for the 0.9.x
series is an extensive rewrite of core
functionality and includes Perl modules
for shared code and support for an
unlimited number of secondary ecard
sites running the same server and same
CGI-Application/daemon pair.
Other important changes include: SMTP
client service, so that ecard can be
sent via another SMTP gateway than the
local computer, improvements to
PgTemplateTest (formerly
TemplateTest,) a new Database
initialization tool:
PgreetDBinit, Email
messages with the user's own subject
lines, 2 secondary demonstration ecard
sites (one featuring camels - the other
saints,) and 20 new cards all quite
varied!
Perl fans who take the camel as the
Perl mascot will especially enjoy the
secondary ecard site:
Penguin Greetings - Camel
Collection. Send your Camel card
today!
June 17, 2003:
OOPS! I learned the hard way
not to add a file to a SourceForge
release before it has finished
uploading from your local server. Both
the .gz and
.bz2 archives in the 0.8.3
were cut short and therefore useless. I
have replaced the files in the release
and they uncompress just fine now.
So if you tried to get hold of Penguin
Greetings 0.8.3 before today, please
accept my apologies and hop on over to
the download
page and get the complete
McCoy!
June 15, 2003:
Penguin Greetings 0.8.3 is released.
This release features user-interface
improvements to the default web-site
that "ships" with Penguin Greetings, a
new Standby mode, and a greatly
enhanced template tool:
TemplateTest.pl
There are (count'em) 18 new cards for
this release including new cards in the
birthday, love and romance, sympathy
and encouragement, religious, and
general interest categories. Of course
there are additional cards for the
American Independence Day! You can see
all the new cards in the "recently
added cards" on the Demonstration
page.
June 08, 2003:
I've added a new card category:
"recently added cards". This will
contain the cards in development for
the next release and when a release
happens will contain a list of all the
new cards from the previous release.
I've added 5 new cards in preparation
for the 0.8.3 release. You may preview
them on the Demonstration
page.
May 29, 2003:
Penguin Greetings 0.8.2 is released.
Penguin Greetings supports a persistent
Perl interpreter via the SpeedyCGI
utility. This greatly improves the
response of Penguin Greetings while
reducing the load it places on the
server hardware. All of the SpeedyCGI
performance parameters that can be
changed during runtime have been added
to the Penguin Greetings configuration
file.
There are now over 45 ecards included
in the distribution including cards for
Fathers' day, Thank you cards, and
Patriotic cards.
Apr 28, 2003:
Penguin Greetings 0.8.1 is released.
Penguin Greetings now does all error
handling via HTML templates. So all
error messages are completely
customizable and the system can be
translated into any language that can
be represented in HTML. The CGI
application does no direct interaction
with the user that in not mediated by
the HTML template system.
There are now over 30 ecards included
in the distribution including cards for
Mothers' day, Cards for
solace/sympathy, and religious
cards.
Apr 27, 2003:
A Penguin Greetings users email list
has been created. It exists for users,
administrators, and content developers
to post questions, make suggestions,
and share ideas on how to make more
interesting Penguin Greetings ecard
sites. The list is called
pgreet-users and you can
subscribe to it or access the archives
from the following link:
http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=72964
Apr 10, 2003:
Penguin Greetings information web site
(this web site!) is now converted to
use Embperl::Object. What was up for
the April 8th release was a "faked"
object-oriented Embperl website. I
didn't want to delay the release of
Penguin Greetings with Easter fast
approaching. This is now the real
object-oriented McCoy!
Apr 08, 2003:
Penguin Greetings 0.8.0 is released.
Penguin Greetings is now two products
wrapped into one. Penguin Greetings is
engine for handling web "ecards." It is
also a collection of 20+ cards that can
be installed into any server for an
immediate ecards solution. Major
enhancements have been made in the way
that cards are stored in configuration
files and in the DBM databases which
make card content much easier to
develop - especially using Embperl.
Both the demonstration site and
information website have been
completely overhauled. Penguin
Greetings has matured into a very
suitable tool for everything from
serious content developers to the UNIX
hobbyist who simply wants to add ecards
to his/her server.
Mar 23, 2003:
Penguin Greetings 0.7.8 is
released. This is basically a
release candidate for version 0.8.0 and
includes the most important enhancement
needed for the 1.0.0 release: HTML
templates that use Embperl
to embed the Perl variables.
There may be some minor adjustments to
the formatting of templates, but now
content designers have a solid and
stable foundation from which to work
on. Assuming no serious bugs are
found, the 0.8.0 release will contain
mostly documentation upgrades and
revised content to demonstrate the new
enhancements. Bug reports and/or
comments on this release are especially
appreciated.
Mar 09, 2003:
Penguin Greetings 0.7.1 is released.
After struggling with the
existing Perl options to install
Penguin Greetings I found that there
simply aren't any standard ways to
install scripts (in contrast with Perl
modules.) I knew I was trouble
when I posted my problem to the
Module::Build and the only answer I
got was someone saying: "You know,
that's why I signed up to this email
list too - have you had any luck?!?!!"
So, after wasting far more time
than it was worth, I just wrote my own
installer. This release sports
the new installer. It is a little
fancier than necessary and is robustly
designed. Comments and
suggestions are as always welcome!
Feb 18, 2003:
Sorry for the delay in updates.
I was a victim of the latest
respiratory bug that is going around.
I'm looking into the two main
deficiencies in Penguin Greetings.
The current plan is to use the
new Perl module
Module::Build to use as the
installer. According to the
Module::Build article on O'Rielly's
Perl.com by Dave Roisky, Module::Build
is being considered to replace the old
ExtUtils::MakeMaker module in Perl
5.10. It seems to have the
additional flexibility that will make
it possible for me to drop the files
for Penguin Greetings in the right
places without undue pain.
I'm more or less decided to replace
the existing ad-hoc system for
incorporating Perl variables in the
HTML templates with one based on EmbPerl.
While I like features of Mason, it
still doesn't work with Apache 2 while
EmbPerl has already made the
transition. I also like the
syntax of EmbPerl a little better than
that of Mason. The use of square
brackets [ ] I think is less prone to
error than reusing angle brackets
again.
Feb 6, 2003:
Penguin Greetings 0.7.0 released to
the world! Download your own copy
and give it a whirl!
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