# \[ANN\] Samizdat 0.5.0, the first beta release

**URL:** <https://rubytalk.org/t/ann-samizdat-0-5-0-the-first-beta-release/9136>\
**Category:** ruby-talk\
**Created:** [1 December 2003 14:13 UTC](https://rubytalk.org/t/ann-samizdat-0-5-0-the-first-beta-release/9136 "2003-12-01T14:13:02Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![Dmitry\_Borodaenko](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/dc4da7/32.png) [@Dmitry\_Borodaenko](https://rubytalk.org/u/Dmitry_Borodaenko)\
**Post date:** [1 December 2003 14:13 UTC](https://rubytalk.org/t/ann-samizdat-0-5-0-the-first-beta-release/9136/1 "2003-12-01T14:13:02Z")

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Greetings!

Version 0.5.0 of the Samizdat open publishing engine is released. This  
version introduces basic focus management, completing the minimal set of  
features required for an open publishing part of the engine, and making  
Samizdat ready for public beta testing. Other major changes in this  
release include Pingback support, many user interface improvements,  
another rewrite of multimedia upload, testing framework, and more.

About Samizdat:

Samizdat is a generic RDF-based engine for building collaboration and  
open publishing web sites. Samizdat will let users cooperate and  
coordinate on all kinds of activities, including media activism,  
resource sharing, education and research, advocacy, etc., by allowing  
everyone to publish, view, comment, edit, and aggregate text and  
multimedia resources, vote on ratings and classifications, filter  
resources by flexible sets of criteria (see design-goals.txt). Samizdat  
intends to promote values of freedom, openness, equality, and  
cooperation.

Links:

Home: [http://www.nongnu.org/samizdat/](http://www.nongnu.org/samizdat/)  
Download: [http://savannah.nongnu.org/download/samizdat/samizdat-0.5.0.tar.gz](http://savannah.nongnu.org/download/samizdat/samizdat-0.5.0.tar.gz)  
Demo site: [https://www.cockroachcollective.org/~angdraug/samizdat/](https://www.cockroachcollective.org/~angdraug/samizdat/)  
RDF schema: [http://www.nongnu.org/samizdat/rdf/schema](http://www.nongnu.org/samizdat/rdf/schema)

Major changes in this release:

- basic focus management: voting on relations of resources to focuses  
allows to collaboratively organize information published on a Samizdat  
site, see concepts.txt (“focus” concept was previously called “tag” in  
Samizdat documentation, kudos to Mike McMillan and Anton Andreasson  
for coinage);

- Pingback protocol implemented, see install.txt (requires Ruby CVS  
snapshot as of 2003-11-22 or Ruby 1.8.1-preview3 when it is released);

- user interface improvements in resource rendering and query usability;

- multimedia upload rewritten again, introducing incompatible database  
schema and a separate content directory for uploads, see install.txt;

- testing framework implemented, including unit and functional test  
suites, see install.txt;

- Template class now generates valid XHTML 1.0 Strict;

- API is cleaned up and made ready for RDoc, config.yaml reorganized,  
RDF schema reorganized and published online;

- Session class now provides CGI abstraction layer, error reporting, and  
references to session-dependent instances of RDF and template classes.

Known bugs:

- focus table is not rendered correctly in Internet Explorer due to a  
difficult to work around bug in CSS implementation by Microsoft;

- Pingback doesn’t work with Ruby 1.6.

Enjoy!

> **···**
>
> –  
> Dmitry Borodaenko