[ANN] TurboGears 1.1 final released

[Christopher Arndt]

On behalf of the TurboGears Team, I am pleased to announce that
TurboGears 1.1 final is available for download at

    http://turbogears.org/

and the Python package index

    http://pypi.python.org/pypi/TurboGears

TurboGears 1.1 is the first stable release of the TurboGears 1.1
branch, which is the evolution of the TurboGears 1 codebase. The 1.1
branch now uses SQLAlchemy as the default database layer and Genshi as
the standard templating engine but is 100 percent compatible with
applications built on TurboGears 1.0.

During its long beta period, versions of TurboGears 1.1 have been in
use in real, high-demand production environments for over a year now,
so we believe this release is rock-stable.


What is TurboGears?
-------------------

TurboGears is a rapid development, "front-to-back", open source web
meta-framework. Its aim is to simplify and speed up the development of
modern web applications written in the Python programming language.

TurboGears is designed around the model-view-controller architecture,
much like Struts or Ruby on Rails, and takes the best Python web
components available (hence "meta-framework") and combines them into one
easy-to-install, documented whole.


What's new?
-----------

Apart from the change of defaults to SLQAlchemy and Genshi, TurboGears
1.1 has a new testing framework built on WebTest, a new quickstart
design (backported from TurboGears 2) and many, many bigger and smaller
fixes and improvements over version 1.0 in its internals.

We made a few more important changes after the 1.1rc release candidate,
in particular some fixes in the Genshi support and the templating
plugin support in general.

For a comprehensive list of changes, as always, see the changelog in
our Trac at

    http://trac.turbogears.org/wiki/ChangeLog


How to install?
---------------

The easiest way to install TurboGears 1.1rc1 is via setuptools:

    [sudo] easy_install [-f http://turbogears.org/download/] TurboGears

We recommend that you install TurboGears into its own virtual
environment using the virtualenv tool:

    [sudo] easy_install virtualenv
    virtualenv --no-site-packages /path/to/tgenv
    source /path/to/tgenv/bin/activate
    easy_install [-f http://turbogears.org/download/] TurboGears


How is it related to TurboGears 2?
----------------------------------

TurboGears 1.1 is based on the original TurboGears 1.0 codebase and
still uses CherryPy 2.3 as the underlying web application server. It
is 100 percent compatible with existing TurboGears 1.0 applications and
porting an application using SQLObject and Kid to use SQLAlchemy and
Genshi is easily achieved.

TurboGears 2 has almost the same API as TurboGears 1.x but builds on
Pylons as the underlying web engine. Most new development for TurboGears
now happens in version 2, but the 1.1 branch will be continued to be
supported and maybe even developed further for the foreseeable future.


The Future
----------

We plan to issue a maintenance release for the TurboGears 1.0 branch,
which would be version 1.0.9, within the next two weeks.

Further development on the TurboGears 1.1 branch depends on community
feedback, which we plan to collect by conducting an online survey
amongst TurboGears users. You may expect a separate announcement for
this very soon!


Share & enjoy!

-- 
Christopher Arndt <sysadmin at turbogears.org>
TurboGears Systems Administrator
http://www.turbogears.org/