Booktype 1.5.3 released with new Control Centre

Booktype 1.5.3 came out this week with a lot of bug fixes and new features, the most exciting of which is the Booktype Control Centre. This is a new admin interface for Booktype administrators. The Control Centre allows you to customise almost every aspect of Booktype.

• Download the latest version from Github as a zip or tarball.
  Read the Install instructions

Users can now be created and assigned a role which affects what they can and can't do within your Booktype instance. So, for instance, you can make it possible for only administrators to create new users, or only editors to create new books. Plus, it allows you to manage the look and feel of the books you produce. Want to let users only output books as PDF files? Done and done.

One of Booktype's strengths is the openness of the production environment you can create. These changes are designed to allow you to hone Booktype to your organisation or community's needs, making it easier to manage the book workflow and get networks of collaborators writing.

Because of the Booktype Control Center, we needed to develop a new way of managing configuration, more of which you can read up on over on the wiki. 

Only some parts of the code are currently using this new API, but we plan to convert Booktype in its entirety in the next release (1.5.4). Besides us developers, the new API will be very useful to administrators responsible for migrating content or daily Booktype management.

We have also upgraded our default settings.py to work with latest version of Django. Django 1.2 is still the minimal requirement, but now we work out of the box with Django 1.4! No more manual editing of files! This is a feature for new users, everyone else will have to manually update their old settings.py files. If it is too much work for someone (as always, the INSTALL file has information on how to do it) they can always create a new Booktype project and just copy+update it with their existing project.

Booktype 1.5.4 should be out in around two weeks and the plan is to have a release every fortnight from now on. What can you expect in the new release? More API cleaning, new install scripts and couple of secret projects. If you want to be up to date with our development watch our github page  and check my tweets. 

Got an eye for details? Check out the full changelog!