Site News

Sometime mid-morning on October 5th, ardour.org was either hacked into or suffered some kind of fatal software bit-rot. After many stomach churning hours, the site has been restored, upgraded to Drupal 6.14 and should be working normally. If you notice anything unusual or broken, please comment here.

To minimize the impact of SEO (search engine optimization) spamming, I have turned off the ability to use links in forum posts and comments. I'm not happy about doing this, but from reviewing the forum for the last couple of months, outbound links are not really that common. If you want to post a link to some music you released, or some other cool technology, just type the URL inline and forum readers can get to it with a little bit more action on their part. For example, you should all be familiar with http://ardour.org/ by now ...

Just to clarify something that may bother some people. It turns out that the script used to clean up the disgusting morons who flood this website with search-engine-optimization (SEO) spam is capable of completely deleting forum threads. Its not obvious how or why, but I want to assure people that I have not ad will not censor threads on ardour.org by deleting them. The removal just recently of about 12 hours of forum posts is very unfortunate, and was caused by deleting a spammer.

The bug/issue tracker system has just been upgraded to Mantis 1.2.0a3. This should hopefully fix the irritating problems when using the system via Safari, Konqueror and perhaps a few other web browsers. My apologies for it taking so long to fix these issues.

The ardour.org website has been upgraded and slightly redesigned. Its now using Drupal 6, which provides many useful features, better security and more. The theme has been switched to a cleaner, "whiter" feeling (based on the Zen Classic theme for Drupal), although more tweaking is in the pipeline to get things just right. Visiting the site without authentication takes you to a somewhat slicker front page, as you might already have noticed. Financial information (over there on the upper right hand side) is now live (more or less) - new subscribers, donations and on will show up here automatically, subject to a potential 5 minute delay. There is a new "institutional" subscription, and for maximal flexibility you can create subscriptions now for any monthly amount you wish. You can now see the most heavily sponsored issues from the issue/bug tracker (and so can developers) so feel free to sponsor issues that matter to you - its all based on the honor system, so no payment is needed up front. More features will be coming soon.

Sorry about the slight downtime. I wanted to upgrade to the latest 4.7 drupal release. We should be good to go for now.

After some sustained work by long-time Ardour contributor Tim Mayberry, the manual pages have been reformatted as DocBook XML and then rendered to a new online format. You can see the results in the usual place; I think they look great. Tim and others are still working on fine tuning the CSS file used for online formatting, so expect to see a few more changes. We will also be investigating options for keeping a Wiki-style system for editing. For the time being, the "source code" to the manual lives in subversion, under manual/ at the top level.

If you would like to help, documentation for DocBook is here.

Subscribe to Ardour! A few hundred subscribers at $10/month will do a huge amount to stabilize the funding of Ardour development. Please consider a subscription today. Why you should subscribe. Read more below for information about the system.

You asked for it, you got it. We've revamped the forums so they more closely resemble phpbb and other such software. There's still some tweaking to be done, but enjoy.

Ardour is now using Subversion for revision control. This means that public read-only access is finally available again. Details can be found on the expanded download page.