Just a quick note to let you all know about this weeks release, which went live a few minutes ago.

Spam Protection

The last few weeks has seen more and more traffic and usage of Codaset, by more and more people. Because of this, the site has been receiving a fair amount of comment and ticket spam. Spam protection has been on the cards from day one, but wasn't going to be implemented until a later date. But I got fed up of deleting spam comments, so I expedited the inclusion of spam protection.

As of now, every single project on Codaset includes full; support for Akismet spam protection. Every comment for your blog and tickets, as well as every single ticket is now checked for spam using the Akismet service. Comment and tickets flagged as spam will not be viewable, but can be accessed via your project's admin. From there, you can permanetly delete the spam, or if an item has been incorrectly marked as spam, you can make it as ham, which will tell Akismet that they got it wrong, and will place the item back into public viewing in your project.

You can also manually mark any comment or ticket as spam. as long as you have the correct permissions to do so.

Improved Project Permissions

Which leads me on to the next item in this weeks release. Right from the start, Codaset has provided you with the ability to control exactly what can be accessed and taken action upon within your projects. The roles and permissions system was inspired by Trac's own system, as I always enjoyed how much flexibility it provided. However, it seems I missed a few important aspects of permissions in Codaset.

All projects are assigned an anonymous role; which lets you control what users can or cannot do within your project if they are not a member of it. However, there has been no way to control what registered Codaset users could do. Up until now, an anonymous user basically included all registered and non-registered users. Which is obviously not the best situation. I wanted to be able to allow registered Codaset users to create tickets, but not non-registered; or anonymous users.

So all projects now have an extra default role to go alongside the owner and anonymous roles, called "registered". This means you can control exactly what anonymous and registered users can do within your project.

Pages and Jekyll

A few weeks ago, I added a new feature to Codaset called Pages. Shamelessly ripped from an idea in use by Github; user and project pages are an easy and simple way of creating a static site or homepage, without having to leave the comfort of Codaset. You can read more about Pages at pages.codaset.com.

Today's release now adds support for Jekyll, a static site generator, also in use by Github. Jekyll allows you to quickly and easily create a static HTML based site, which is generated every time your git push to your Pages branch or repository on Codaset. You can see it in action on my very own user pages project at joelmoss.codaset.com, or at DevelopingwithStyle.com

I will be blogging more about Jekyll at a later date, but for now, you can check out or fork the source.

I plan on adding some cool new features to Jekyll on Codaset. For example, it would be great to be able to include your project's blog posts within your project's pages, or to be able to include info on your hosted projects directly on your user pages.

If you have any ideas for new features for Codaset Pages, or for any other part of Codaset, please let me know.

So that's it for another week. Next Monday should see the release of searching within the site, and within your projects.