Call for Participation and Release Preview

07/08/2008
Users of GeSHi, it's bright days for you with tons of new features and a much improved and streamlined code base: You'll get prettier code faster.

But we (BenBE and milian) are only two core developers hacking on GeSHi in our spare time. It's simply not possible that every single language of the 100+ supported ones is as shining and feature-rich as those we two use regularly. Often we don't even know the slightest of some of the languages we have support for. This is why we need your help:

• Send us example code!
  During the 1.0.8 developing process we decided to start a code repository with snippets of various languages to test GeSHi on - yeah, that one I already mentioned here earlier. It served us well and we could spot various errors in some of the languages we would not have tested otherwise. So if you have a nice example of some language, send it to us. To check which languages are already covered, take a look at https://geshi.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/geshi/branches/MISC_STUFF/coderepo/
• Make your favourite language shine!
  Starting with 1.0.8 we added quite some features which your language might not yet use (but should!). Take the new number highlighting for example, it supports various formats of floats, hex, binary and octal numbers. But we cannot know the required setup for all of the 100+ languages! So it's your turn to send us some patches. Or write us an email saying: "Language Foo supports Bar, Asdf, and Zark style numbers."
  Maybe add a codesnippet as well (see above). This will help us for future releases.
• If you are not able to fix your language by yourself, but spot an issue with GeSHi - please help by submitting a bugreport with code example and expected behaviour description. That way we can work something out. And don't forget to include some contact details so we can contact you in case of questions.

Other NEW features you might like:

• Comment Regexps and Strict Block Regexp delimiters
  You already noticed the limitations of some tstuff simply not showing up correctly as it's too complex for simple find and replace? This is your chance!
• Support for multiple styles for strings
  Your language supports different ways of enclosing literal data? You want them to show up differently depending of the type of delimiters? No problem with GeSHi 1.0.8! You just specify styles for different string delimiters and get what you want.
• Multiple styles for numbers
  What goes for strings is possible for numbers too! Many languages have standard ways to define integers, floats or even octal or binary and hexadecimal values. Coming with the next release you can select what types of numbers your language supports and how to style them.
• PARSE_CONTROL madness
  We give much more control to language files, which makes it possible to set per-keyword-group DISALLOWED_BEFORE/AFTER and more.
  
  You can now also explicitly disable given features of GeSHi if you don't need it, take a look at the text.php language file for an example.

And this are only some of the various improvements! Overall there's speed improvement all over the place! Fell free to test it out yourself!

Also there are - as always - some security fixes, including one somewhat critical that might be used to produce heavy load on your server. More details on this as soon as the final release is out.

As always we like to hear your oppinion. So feel free to use the usual contact mechanisms to send in your feedback.

Regards,
BenBE and milian