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Refinery CMS 3.0.0 Released [2012 April Fools' joke]

4 minutes and 5 seconds read.

Note 2: September 19, 2015 - Refinery CMS version 3.0.0 is now released on Rubygems and now it's not an April Fools' joke!

Note: this was an April Fools' joke from 2012 as version 2.0.0 had only just been released.

The Refinery CMS Core team is proud to announce the release of the next major version of Refinery — Refinery CMS 3. It's the most amazing, most technically advanced Refinery CMS ever released and we think you'll just love it.

Refinery 3 comes hot on the heels of Refinery 2, and reflects some of the big technological leaps forward that have occurred in the past four weeks:

  • Refinery 3 lets you change the back-end mount path (no more /refinery! Yay!)
  • Refinery 3 no longer has English as its default translation, ushering in a new golden age of lolcats.
  • Refinery 3 now includes the Blog, Search, and News engines automatically.
  • Refinery 3 has now doubled the default width of the site to accommodate the growing trend of high-density PPSI screens (we recommend viewing on 1920 x 1080).
  • Refinery 3 will detect links to Facebook and will turn them into Google+ links for you automatically.
  • Refinery 3 will email every contact in your address book (with your permission, of course) upon every successful production deployment of your website with a handy link to see what's new.
  • Refinery 3 comes with a built in web browser based on vim. This should reduce overall development time as you won't need to design your website at all for it to look great.
  • Refinery 3 has a different distribution model and is now available exclusively on the Mac App Store.

This is just a short highlight of the new features we've added.  You're an extremely intelligent bunch of people so we are sure you'll discover the rest of the features by yourselves in the coming days.

Refinery 3 is incompatible with Refinery 2 and Refinery 1, and the upgrade process is extremely difficult. We recommend you completely redevelop your sites from scratch.

On a totally unrelated note, the Core Team is available for hire.

Refinery's Journey

It's been three years since David Jones changed Refinery CMS from being a closed source project at Resolve Digital to an open source project for us all to enjoy. A year ago, Refinery 1.0 was released, and since then, many sites have been built upon those steady foundations.

The intervening year has seen some change in Refinery’s codebase and core team. A few stats: Refinery has now exceeded 50 followers, and is rapidly approaching 10 forks. We have 8 contributors, all of whom have made a huge difference. Thanks, Uģis, Steven, Joe, Phil, Rob, Garrett, Amanda, and Josef! We couldn't have done it without you.

We're proud to announce the addition of David Heinemeier Hansson to the Core Team. DHH is famous for being the only Danish programmer living in the United States, and he's known for his discerning wit and inclusiveness to newcomers. We think DHH is the perfect addition to Refinery to help move us forward. We hear he has also written at least one reasonably successful framework in his time and is notoriously good looking.

Beyond Refinery 3

As we have adopted a major version release schedule that would make Mozilla blush, we expect to release a new major version in the coming weeks. Here are a few features you can expect to find in Refinery 3G:

  • Further refactored menu code.
  • Refinery will finally add first-class support for IE5.
  • Entirely re-written in Node.JS; we hear it's webscale.
  • Cool/deep song lyrics displayed in a popup each time you log in.
  • A new "Cat of the day" background every time you log in.
  • In addition to emailing we plan to tweet for every production deployment.

Finally, we'd like to again thank every contributor to Refinery 3. We're very proud of the project and how far it has come.

– The Refinery CMS Core Team