I released Vine Type 2.0 recently and it's running most of my client sites now. Version 2 requires .NET Framework 2.0 so v1.5 will be the last version to support .NET 1.1.

Version 2 brings new features, reworking of some existing features, and new design possibilities. The biggest change is reworking the display of search results.

Search Results

Search results are now more like Google and less like WordPress. Version 1 would just display entire articles or article summaries when keywords matched, but you didn't know which terms matched which search result nor did you know how often a term matched an article or what context the term was mentioned.

Now all this information is displayed for you and your site visitors. Version 2 displays the article title as a hypertext-link to the entire aritcle, displays up to three article snippets with highlighted search terms, and provides the search term count for all the search terms along with an aggregate count. The aggregate count is not displayed when there's only one search term.

Ma.gnolia Caching

At the gentle urging of Ma.gnolia, Vine Type version 2 now caches Ma.gnolia lists locally on the web server and updates lists once per hour. I'd like to say that the folks at Ma.gnolia were great to work with and very supportive that Vine Type is integrating Ma.gnolia lists into the product.

Zebra Articles and Comments

In addition to the heavy-hitting changes above, I'm also introducing the ability to alternate the style of articles and comments in Vine Type Powered sites. Most often, the alternating style takes the form of a different background color (for instance white - gray - white - gray) that differentiates each article in a zebra skin style. Vine type allows that and more.

To create a zebra-style pattern specify a Vine Type configuration value of 2. If the value is 2, then the alternating style values for each article or comment as they are displayed would be 1 - 2 - 1 - 2 - 1 - 2 - 1 ...and so on. But Vine Type version 2 supports any alternate value. So if you specify a comment alternating style of 5, then the comment alt values would be 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 - 1 - 2 - 3 ...and so on. I don't have an example to show now but I'll be incorporating it into the Boston template as I find time.