Over the xmas holidays I tweeted a call for help to debug some work I'd recently done on Minimee. A few dedicated souls (@leepowell, @GWcode) were kind enough to jump in and kick its tires. Thanks to their fantastic input, I'm proud to announce Minimee's 1.1.0 release!

You can download the latest copy of Minimee now.

Highlights of the release

I've bumped the version number from 1.0.2 to 1.1.0 due to significant changes under the hood - a slew of improvements that makes Minimee easier and more stable to use.

cURL support

Previously, Minimee relied on file_get_contents() to retrieve external files (which yes, includes {stylesheet=}). Due to an occasional shared hosting glitch, as well as the welcomed PHP5 requirement as of EE 2.1.2, it seemed necessary to add cURL support.  While cURL is now the default, I've given users the option to specify which method to use if they so desire.

Support for global variables

Support for Global Variables became a request I could no longer ignore: but to keep performance up, Minimee will only trigger EE's global parsing routine if it detects any existing EE tags.

Yummy PHP5 support

Seeing as EE2.1.2 has dropped PHP4 support, so has Minimee - You might not notice anything different, but it has greatly improved the clarity and structure of the code.

'Intelligent' templating

Previously, Minimee's output of <link ..> and <script ...> tags were hard-coded; the only thing you could customise was the media parameter for the link tag. Now though, Minimee uses the first HTML tag it encounters as a "template" for output. As long as your first tag is formatted as you so desire, MInimee's final output will be, too.

Of course because of this change, the "media=" parameter is now obsolete.

New 'debug' mode

There's a new configuration option to turn on "debugging", which will output HTML comments for any error encountered. Should you encounter difficulty getting Minimee up and running, this should help you quickly nail down the problem.

Note: Error and debug messages will always be sent to EE's logging mechanism (available in /system/codeigniter/system/logs/log-yyyy-mm-dd.php) - as long as you've turned on your debug threshold.  More on that in Minimee's User Guide.

'Strict' mode removed

By default, Minimee used to silently ignore any missing file(s), thereby creating a cached file based on whatever was available at the time. This behaviour could be turned off by setting the mode "strict" to TRUE (via config or param), but frankly all this feature did was cause problems & confusion.  Hence I've completely removed this feature: now MInimee will only work if all files are found.

From true/false to yes/no

Any configuration settings or parameters that were once boolean (TRUE/FALSE or the string 'true'/'false') should now be set with 'yes' or 'no', as appropriate.  This was to simplify the normalising of settings.  The details behind this deserve a brief article that I'll publish in a few week's time.

Jeez, anything else?

Actually yes. A few bug fixes, and a few other tweaks here and there, makes this a very exciting release. As usual if anyone has any problems, you're encouraged to use the support forums on devot-ee.com.  I keep a close eye on this and do my absolute best to respond in a timely manner.