On behalf of the Nikola team, I am pleased to announce the immediate availability of Nikola v8.0.0b1.

Nikola v8.0.0b1 (Beta 1) is the first test release of the v8 series. The v8 series adds a ton of new features and fixes bugs, while also breaking backwards compatibility.

What is Nikola?

Nikola is a static site and blog generator, written in Python.
It can use Mako and Jinja2 templates, and input in many popular markup
formats, such as reStructuredText and Markdown — and can even turn
Jupyter (IPython) Notebooks into blog posts! It also supports image
galleries, and is multilingual. Nikola is flexible, and page builds
are extremely fast, courtesy of doit (which is rebuilding only what
has been changed).

Find out more at the website: https://getnikola.com/

Downloads

Install using pip install Nikola==8.0.0.beta1.

Before upgrading to Nikola v8, make sure to read the “Upgrading” document.

Changes in v8.0.0b1

Important compatibility changes

• Rename crumbs.tmpl to ui_helper.tmpl and the breadcrumbs
  bar function to breadcrumbs (your templates may need
  changing as well)
• Rename post.is_mathjax to post.has_math. Themes using
  post.is_mathjax must be updated; it is recommended that they are
  changed to use math_helper.tmpl.
• Reading reST docinfo metadata, including first heading as title,
  requires USE_REST_DOCINFO_METADATA now (Issue #2987)
• RSS feeds might have changed their places due to RSS_PATH
  behavior changes (you may need to change RSS_PATH,
  RSS_FILENAME_BASE)
• Atom feeds for archives and Atom pagination are no longer supported
  (Issue #3016)
• Sections are replaced by categories (Issue #2833)

Features

• Support hackerthemes.com themes and renamed bootswatch_theme command subtheme (Issue #3049)
• Add DISABLE_MAIN_ATOM_FEED setting (Issue #3016, Issue #3039)
• Add ATOM_FILENAME_BASE setting (defaults to index for
  existing sites, but feed for new sites) (Issue #3016)
• Add CATEGORY_DESTPATH_AS_DEFAULT, CATEGORY_DESTPATH_TRIM_PREFIX,
  CATEGORY_DESTPATH_FIRST_DIRECTORY_ONLY settings, as part of
  replacing sections with categories (Issue #2833)
• Tags draft, private and mathjax are no longer treated
  special if USE_TAG_METADATA is set to False (default for
  new sites) (Issue #2761)
• Replace draft and private tags with a status meta field
  (supports published, featured, draft, private)
  and mathjax with .. has_math: yes (Issue #2761)
• Rename TAG_PAGES_TITLES → TAG_TITLES,
  TAG_PAGES_DESCRIPTIONS → TAG_DESCRIPTIONS.
• Rename CATEGORY_PAGES_TITLES → CATEGORY_TITLES,
  CATEGORY_PAGES_DESCRIPTIONS → CATEGORY_DESCRIPTIONS.
• Produce a better error message when a template referenced in another
  template is missing (Issue #3055)
• Support captioned images and image ordering in galleries, as well as
  arbitrary metadata through a new metadata.yml file (Issue #3017,
  Issue #3050, Issue #2837)
• New ATOM_PATH setting (Issue #2971)
• Make crumbs available to all pages
• Allowing to customize RSS and Atom feed extensions with
  RSS_EXTENSION, ATOM_EXTENSION settings (Issue #3041)
• Allowing to customize filename base appended to RSS_PATH
  with RSS_FILENAME_BASE setting (Issue #3041)
• Use basic ipynb template by default for slightly better appearance
  and behavior
• Fixing behavior of RSS_PATH to do what the documentation
  says it does (Issue #3024)
• Add support for fragments in path handlers (Issue #3032)
• New METADATA_VALUE_MAPPING setting to allow for flexible global
  modification of metadata (Issue #3025)
• New smartjoin template function/filter that joins lists and
  leaves strings as-is (Issue #3025)
• Explain index.html conflicts better (Issue #3022)
• Recognize both TEASER_END and (new) END_TEASER (Issue #3010)
  (warning: if you perform manual splits, the regex change means new
  indexes must be used)
• New MARKDOWN_EXTENSION_CONFIGS setting (Issue #2970)
• Replace flowr.js with justified-layout.js by Flickr
  (does not require jQuery!)
• bootblog4 is the new default theme (Issue #2964)
• New bootstrap4 and bootblog4 themes (Issue #2964)
• New Thai translation by Narumol Hankrotha and Jean Jordaan
• Support for Commento comment system (Issue #2773)
• New PRESERVE_ICC_PROFILES option to control whether ICC profiles are
  preserved when copying images.
• Use baguetteBox in Bootstrap theme (part of Issue #2777)
• New default-config command to generate a clean configuration.
• New thumbnail shortcode similar to the reStructuredText
  thumbnail directive (via Issue #2809)
• Rewrite nikola auto with asyncio and aiohttp (Issue #2850)
• New listings shortcode similar to the reStructuredText listings
  directive (Issue #2868)
• Switch to reStructuredText’s new HTML 5 renderer (Issue #2874)
• Deprecate html4css1.css in favor of rst_base.css (Issue
  #2874)
• Add support for MetadataExtractor plugins that allow custom,
  extensible metadata extraction from posts (Issue #2830)
• Support YAML and TOML metadata in 2-file posts (via Issue #2830)
• Renamed UNSLUGIFY_TITLES → FILE_METADATA_UNSLUGIFY_TITLES
  (Issue #2840)
• Add NIKOLA_SHOW_TRACEBACKS environment variable that shows
  full tracebacks instead of one-line summaries
• Use PRETTY_URLS by default on all sites (Issue #1838)
• Feed link generation is completely refactored (Issue #2844)
• Let path handlers return absolute URLs (Issue #2876)
• Add BLOG_EMAIL to global context to make it available for
  templates (Issue #2968)

Bugfixes

• Fixes behavior for posts not available in default language
  (Issues #2956 and #3073)
• Always follow FEED_LENGTH for Atom feeds
• Apply filters to all Atom feeds
• Read file metadata if compiler metadata exists and prefer it over
  compiler metadata (Issue #3008)
• Rename DISABLE_INDEXES_PLUGIN_INDEX_AND_ATOM_FEED to DISABLE_INDEXES
  and DISABLE_INDEXES_PLUGIN_RSS_FEED to DISABLE_MAIN_RSS_FEED (Issue #3039)
• Make chart shortcode its own plugin and make the reST directive
  depend on it.
• Put post_list shortcode in its own plugin and make the reST
  directive depend on it.
• Don’t silence syntax errors and other exceptions that occur while
  reading metadata
• Use documented dateutil API for time zone list (Issue #3006)
• Handle trailing slash redirects with query strings correctly in
  nikola serve (Issue #3000)
• Fix w3c validation errors for itemscope entries in default themes
• Hide “Incomplete language” message for overrides of complete
  languages
• Handle '/' and other absolute paths better in POSTS / PAGES / TRANSLATIONS
  (Issue #2982)
• Fix loading non-default languages
• Support KaTeX for reST display math (Issue #2888)
• Use npm for asset management instead of bower, which was deprecated
  (Issue #2790)
• Properly handle SHOW_INDEX_PAGE_NAVIGATION with Jinja templates
  (Issue #2960)
• Prevent crashes due to Windows-specific code in auto running on
  all platforms (Issue #2940)
• Don’t run hyphenate on <pre> blocks (Issue #2939)
• Make errors in reST display in logs again
• Unquote paths given to link:// magic URLs (Issue #2934)
• Specify UTF-8 input encoding for Mako as default (Issue #2930)
• Don't trigger rebuilds in auto mode for files it's safe to ignore
  (Issue #2906)
• Fix padding for Jupyter code blocks (Issue #2927)
• Apply SCHEDULE_ALL to posts only (Issue #2921)
• Restore version number to Bootswatch URLs (Issue #2916)
• Do not strip trailing slash in slug magic links
• Ignore empty tags in HTML metadata reader (Issue #2890)
• Do not remove doctype if add_header_permalinks or
  deduplicate_ids are used
• Handle empty slug metadata (Issue #2887)
• Fix crash when compiling empty .html posts (Issue #2851)
• Make failures to get source commit hash non-fatal in
  github_deploy (Issue #2847)
• Less cryptic error when guessing format from extension in new_post
  fails
• Use Jupyter name more consistently in docs
• Support CODE_COLOR_SCHEME in Jupyter notebooks (Issue #2093)
• Language was not passed to title and link generation for page indexes
• Addressed issue with snaps not allowing certain functions to work properly.

Removed conf.py settings

The following settings have been removed. Nikola will now always
behave as if the value was what is displayed afer the setting name.

• FEED_PREVIEWIMAGE = True
• SITEMAP_INCLUDE_FILELESS_DIRS = True
• USE_OPEN_GRAPH = True
• USE_BASE_TAG = False

Removed features

• Removed Colorbox, baguetteBox is used instead (Issue #2777)
• Removed googleplus comments (no longer supported) (Issue #635)
• Removed the slides directive for docutils, it will now be a separate plugin.
• Dropped Python 2 and Python 3.3 support (oldest supported version is 3.4)
• Removed nikola install_theme — use nikola theme instead
• Droppped insecure post “encryption” feature
• Stopped supporting all deprecated config options
• Dropped annotations support (annotateit.org closed down in March 2017)
• Removed taxonomy option also_create_classifications_from_other_languages
  (Issue #2785) and generate_atom_feeds_for_post_lists (Issue
  #3016)
• Removed old 7-line metadata format (Issue #2839)
• Atom feeds are now limited to one page (Issue #3016)
• Removed sections (replaced by improved categories) (Issue #2833)