[ANN] TurboGears 1.1rc1 released

[Christopher Arndt]

On behalf of the TurboGears Team, I am pleased to announce that
TurboGears 1.1rc1 is available for download at

    http://turbogears.org/

and the Python package index

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

TurboGears 1.1rc1 is the first release candidate for the upcoming 1.1
release, 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.

We encourage you to test this release with your existing TurboGears 1.0
applications and by building new ones. If no major problems are
reported, this release will become 1.1final in about two weeks. Beta
versions of TurboGears 1.1 have been in use in 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. For a
comprehensive list of changes 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 easiliy 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
----------

TurboGears 1.1 final is slated to be released in about two weeks.
Afterwards we plan to issue a maintenance release for the TurboGears 1.0
branch, which would be version 1.0.9.

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/