Persévérance

This is the nickname I have chosen to refer to this Retraceur second major version, the PHP software that helps individuals like me build and fully control a personal hub for their online publications.

In fact, the most spectacular change compared to the Retraceur initial version is about our publications. We can fully enjoy a theme feature, now very sophisticated, to format and highlight them : Post Formats.

Formatting tailored to our posts specific nature

This Post Formats feature is completely in line with Retraceur‘s ambition. It makes it possible for our personal Website to display our short thoughts, photos, interesting links, quotes we likes, code, chat transcripts, our videos, our songs, etc., with a dedicated layout for each format.

Post Formats that, if scattered across the Web, could have been shared thanks to different social media platforms according to their specialty. Indeed, Retraceur‘s whole point is precisely to be the official and primary source for our publications on the Internet. These posts could then be distributed on social media platforms thanks to a plugin, which could also gather feedbacks from the connections we’ve made there.

“Formatting” echoes the theme

In Retraceur, the theme brings together all the templates responsible for organizing the display of your Website. A template is structured using a clever combination of blocks that we can reshape at will using the site editor.

Since this theme controls the visual rendering of Post Formats, it also dictates how this feature should be enabled. That is why Retraceur refers to it as a theme feature.

Theme designers must inform the software of any support for the feature and specify the list of supported formats. To learn more about how to do this, these artists can refer to this documentation. As a bonus, they will discover a unique block to help them display portions of block combination inside generic templates based on the post format(s) of their choice.

“Point” supports 4 Post Formats

Point, Retraceur‘s default theme, has been enhanced with new templates, and the block combinations of some of the existing templates have been carefully reviewed to apply different layouts to the 4 Post Formats it supports: links, short thoughts, quotes, and images.

Theme designers can use this as inspiration to create their own block combinations tailored to each supported Post Format, and most importantly, we as writers can start using these Post Formats to diversify our posts. In fact, if you browse through all my posts, you will see that the one preceding this post is an external link to a page that introduced Retraceur‘s “ethic by design” concern in a great way.

Managing post formats

When a theme supports Post Formats, our Dashboard Posts administration area is supplemented by an administration screen to manage these formats, as you can see below.

NB: It’s not possible to add or remove Post Formats because this formats list is standardized. This way template artists can be sure that all formats their themes might support are always available.

As explained in the documentation: from this Administration Screen we can completely customize the Post Format names, their descriptions, and even their URL slugs. For example, this Website uses the term “Signet” instead of the name of the « link » Post Format, it provides a description that, thanks to the Point theme, is displayed on the page listing all published links, and has replaced the “link” URL slug with “signets”.

Thanks to Retraceur‘s Post Formats, we keep control, primacy, and ownership of all our publications, regardless of their specific nature.

Update Retraceur core with just one click!

This is the second significant improvement in Retraceur 2.0.0: we can now upgrade the software to its latest version with a single click from our Dashboard Upgrade Administration Screen.

As soon as a new Retraceur minor or major version is released and made available from the software’s GitHub repository, Alert badges will notify us about it in our top Administration toolbar as well as right after our Website Administration Upgrade menu.

From there, once we click on this badge, the Upgrade Administration Screen will give us three choices: update with one click, perform this update manually using the link to get the Retraceur Zip archive, or hide this update. For more information on this topic, please refer to this documentation.

Choose a software that puts ethics first

Remember: choosing Retraceur is a demanding choice that requires us to position ourselves directly as contributors to the open-source project. Only click the buttons below if you are ready to participate in software maintenance and development!

Perseverance!

I am particularly proud I persevered to complete this development cycle. Although the main goal of this software is to satisfy a personal need to control my online presence, coding “solo” is very different from what I had experienced until now as a BuddyPress Lead Developer. What I miss most is the contradiction: the key element that makes us smarter when we work together.

I took this path in mid-January 2025 to build a more virtuous software than the one Retraceur is a fork of. This second major release (355 commits, including 149 for the modern editors) is confirming you can count on me to carry it on.

On to the next stage: 3.0.0! A new development cycle during which I’ll try to reach two main goals:

1. make Retraceur attractive to plugin and block developers by promoting their work into the corresponding “Add New” administration screens ;
2. improve the Post Status API extensibility.

Featured photo credits Dan Farrell on Unsplash