If you want to play with the latest Pier, you can head to the download section and get the latest distribution.

• setup Pier for a minimal web site, and
• configure persistency.

Getting started with Pier from Laurent Laffont on Vimeo.

It uses the latest Pier and it includes two new addons:

• latest Citezen (extended recently by Oscar Nierstrasz) to manage publications
• a UML generator that takes a specification written in the MSE format and generates a UML diagram

Here is the original announcement:

After the first announcement at ESUG 2009, we are proud to present the release of the free online book

Dynamic Web Development with Seaside
http://book.seaside.st/

The book is written in the Pier content management system using the Pier book publishing engine. This allows us to collaboratively edit the contents and generate different output formats automatically. We will soon offer a PDF and a printed version, but first we have to iron out some of the remaining issues.

Over the past years the book got reviewed and revised several times. We want to thank all the persons who helped us: Torsten Bergmann, Damien Cassou, Tom Krisch, Philippe Marshall, Ruben Schempp, Roger Whitney, Julian Fitzell, and Michael Davies carefully reviewed the book and provided valuable feedback. Martin J. Laubach for his Sudoku code. Ramon Leon for letting us using his blog ideas and SandStoneDB, Chris Muller for Magma. Jeff Dorst provided generous financial support for supporting student text reading. Markus Gaelli for brainstorming on the book title. Samuel Morello for designing the cover.

Michael Davies is currently helping us getting things ready for print. And you can help us too by writing down your findings at the bottom of each page. Also, if you want to contribute a missing chapter or support the translation of the book please get in touch with us.

We wish to thank the European Smalltalk User Group (ESUG) and inceptive.be for sponsoring this book. We are looking for additional sponsors. If you are interested, please contact us. If you are a publisher and interested in publishing this material, please let us know.

Please distribute this message widely.

Cheers, Stef & Lukas & David & Rick

About the authors:

• Stéphane Ducasse is the author of a couple of books on Smalltalk.
• Lukas Renggli is core developer of Seaside and Smalltalk consultant.
• David C. Shaffer is Seaside consultant and CS teacher.
• Rick Zaccone is CS teacher.

What’s new:

• Mature value links (see Pier syntax for more details)
• No _s or _k cruft in the url
• Remembered last login
• Smaller javascript code for faster page loading
• Better default CSS (including a style for events)
• Halos for enhanced editing
• Pharo 0.1-10374 inside

Enjoy and let us know what you think.

We focused on closing the open issues from our tracker. Among others we:

• fixed the default CSS
• solved the exception raised when removing the CSS completely
• removed the Pier dialogs prompting for creating the default application
• fixed an error related to displaying grouped lists on browsers other than Safari

As a result, we are now down to 10 open issues out of which none are defects.

We also worked on producing a script to load a complete Pier distribution into a Pharo core image. You can find the script in the Frequently Asked Questions section.

Thus, we are ready for a new release. Stay tuned :).

Yesterday, Lukas and me sprinted intensively through Pier.

It was quite exciting. We manage to tackle several things that were on our to do list for a long time.

The most thrilling result is a prototype towards a new direction for editing Pier. We call it the edit mode. When you toggle the edit mode on, you get access to all structures that are embedded in the current one via a mouse sensitive interface. By clicking on it you get an editor for that specific structure.

But, better watch it in action.

Another step forward was to clean the Settings and Edit commands. Now, changing the parameters of a component is performed via the Edit command, and not via Settings. This unifies the meaning of Edit throughout the various structure. In the process, we also added an edit pane when editing a text file.

We also retired the PRMenuWidget and replaced it with a simple parameter that is attached to an embedded page. The goal of the PRMenuWidget is to highlight the most specific link that points to the current page or to any of its parents. Now, you can tell any page that you want to embed to highlight the most specific link via: +thepagetoembed+|menu.

We also fixed a couple of smaller issues, one being the return of proper error codes when trying to access an unknown page (404) or a forbidden one (403). This is particularly useful for getting Google Webmaster tools to work with a Pier instance.

All in all, we had great fun.

• Magritte-Model
• Pier-Model
• Pier-Seaside
• Pier-Documents
• Pier-EditorEnh

This means that you can now remove the SULibrary from the libraries list of your Pier Seaside configuration. To do this you have to go to /seaside/config, edit the configuration of the pier application and remove the item from the list.

This alone will bring a speedup factor of 2 to your Pier.