ANNOUNCE: Conglomerate 0.5.1

[David Malcolm <david davemalcolm demon co uk>]

Conglomerate 0.5.1 is now available for download from this address:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=82766

The main website is at http://www.conglomerate.org 

This is an UNSTABLE release: it will crash from time to time, along with
numerous other problems.  However it should do this in a stylish way. 

WHAT IS IT? 
Conglomerate is a free user-friendly XML editor.  It attempts to hide the
gory details of XML from the end-user.  It can support any XML file format,
but so far we have been concentrating on DocBook support.  

A goal of the project is to create a free DocBook editor that Word users
can easily learn.  

It's currently fairly usable for viewing XML files.  Unfortunately, there
are numerous bugs, so it tends to crash when you start editing things.  We
will be fixing these problems in a forthcoming release. 

WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE? 
You can see some screenshots at http://www.conglomerate.org/shots.php

WHAT DOES IT RUN ON? 
Conglomerate should run on any recent free operating system, such as
GNU/Linux.  Internally it uses the GNOME 2 libraries for historical reasons
- it ought to run fine under KDE.  If you have any interoperability
problems, please let us know! 

WHAT'S NEW IN THIS VERSION? 
The previous version was released over three years ago, and languished
unmaintained (but fondly remembered) on CVS.  It has now been almost
entirely rewritten, component by component.  Some of the changes: 
- ported from GTK 1 to GNOME 2 
- uses libxml2 rather than Flux for its XML handling 
- now uses Pango to support i18n 
- uses gettext for i18n support 
- Spanish and Russian translations 
- attempts to comply with the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines 
- has a new-look, cleaner UI 
- now uses a Model-View architecture internally 
- the beginnings of a plugin architecture. 
- and many more features! 

We'll now move over to a more regular, frequent release schedule. 

HOW DO I REPORT BUGS? 
The current editor control is highly unstable, and will be rewritten soon,
so please don't report bugs with editing for now. 

For other bugs, we are using the Bug Tracking Database provided by the nice
folk at the GNOME project.  Please have a look at the "conglomerate"
component at http://bugzilla.gnome.org, and see if the bug you've found is
already there.  If not, please add a bug report! 

HOW DO I GET INVOLVED? 
We need translators, people to write plugins, documentation, user interface
designers etc etc.  If you're interested in getting involved, have a look
at http://www.conglomerate.org/contact.php

Hope you find Conglomerate useful! 

Many thanks to everyone who's helped me breathe life back into the project:

- Hans Petter Jansson (wrote the original version of Conglomerate and
provided lots of help) 
- Joakim Ziegler (visual design, web wrangling, and much advice) 
- Steiner Bang (numerous useful suggestions) 
- Geert Stappers (lots of little things) 
- Brent Hendricks (UI improvements) 
- Doug Daniels (improvements to UI and to DTD support) 
- Dmitry Mastrukov (Russian translations, and help with i18n) 
- Quique (Spanish translations) 
Sorry if I missed anybody. 

David Malcolm, on behalf of the Conglomerate Project 

GNOME Software Map entry
========================

http://www.gnome.org/softwaremap/projects/conge