Tenthttps://tent.io/blog2014-05-09T00:05:00ZMay Office Hourshttps://tent.io/blog/201405-office-hours2014-05-09T00:05:00Z2026-10-18T17:37:56+00:00<p>Tent office hours will be held <a href="/officehours">online</a> on Tuesday, May 13th
at <a href="http://everytimezone.com/#2014-5-13,420,5x1">19:00 UTC</a>.</p>
<p>Questions may be asked in advance as status posts with the hashtag #officehours
or in realtime on IRC. A recording will be made available after the event.</p>
<p><strong>Update</strong>: <a href="/officehours/2014-05-13">The recording</a> is available.</p>
January Office Hourshttps://tent.io/blog/201401-office-hours2014-01-21T22:20:00Z2026-10-18T17:37:56+00:00<p>Tent office hours will be held <a href="/officehours">online</a> on Tuesday, January 28th
at <a href="http://everytimezone.com/#2014-1-28,480,6bj">20:00 UTC</a>.</p>
<p>Questions may be asked in advance as status posts with the hashtag #officehours
or in realtime on IRC. A recording will be made available after the event.</p>
<p><strong>Update</strong>: <a href="/officehours/2014-01-28">The recording</a> is available.</p>
December Office Hourshttps://tent.io/blog/201312-office-hours2013-12-22T16:40:00Z2026-10-18T17:37:56+00:00<p>Tent office hours will be held on Monday, December 30th.</p>
<p>Questions may be asked in advance as status posts with the hashtag #officehours.</p>
<p><strong>Update</strong>: <a href="/officehours/2013-12-30">The recording</a> is available.</p>
Changes to the Tent Roadmaphttps://tent.io/blog/roadmap-change2013-11-04T17:30:00Z2026-10-18T17:37:56+00:00<p>Today we are announcing several major changes to the Tent protocol roadmap.</p>
<p>First, the features scheduled for 0.4 and 0.5 will now be in a single point
version. We originally planned to revert to a more iterative schedule with 0.4
but <a href="https://cupcake.io/blog/2013/new-tent-server">changes to the reference
implementation</a> make a single
release preferable. The features planned for this next release now include:</p>
<ul>
<li>Groups</li>
<li>Server-app streaming</li>
<li>Web of trust</li>
<li>New query syntax</li>
<li>Query-able post bodies</li>
<li>Machine-readable post schemas</li>
<li>Advanced subscriptions</li>
<li>Deep links</li>
</ul>
<p>This list remains in flux and subject to significant changes.</p>
<p>This release is a major step towards 1.0. The protocol will likely move from
Alpha to Beta with this version. This version will include nearly every planned
feature relevant to application development. All changes currently planned for
versions after 0.4 affect only servers and hosts. It is likely some cleanup will
still be necessary before 1.0 which could result in breaking changes. However,
with Tent 0.4 application developers will have access to the vast majority of
the protocol feature set.</p>
<p>The addition of this feature set will delay the release. We plan to publish RFCs
for the major additions and changes in the first few months of 2014. Questions
and feedback before then are welcome.</p>
November Office Hourshttps://tent.io/blog/201311-office-hours2013-11-03T21:00:00Z2026-10-18T17:37:56+00:00<p>Tent office hours will be held <a href="/officehours">online</a> on Monday,
November 11th at <a href="http://everytimezone.com/#2013-11-11,420,6bj">19:00 UTC</a>.</p>
<p>Questions may be asked in advance as status posts with the hashtag #officehours,
or in realtime on IRC. A recording will be made available after the event.</p>
<p><strong>Update</strong>: <a href="/officehours/2013-11-11">A recording</a> is available.</p>
October Office Hourshttps://tent.io/blog/201310-office-hours2013-09-15T19:25:00Z2026-10-18T17:37:56+00:00<p>Tent office hours will be held <a href="/officehours">online</a> on Tuesday,
October 1st at <a href="http://everytimezone.com/#2013-10-1,420,6bj">19:00 UTC</a>.</p>
<p>Questions may be asked in advance as status posts with the hashtag #officehours,
or in realtime on IRC. A recording will be made available after the event.</p>
<p><strong>Update</strong>: <a href="/officehours/2013-10-01">A recording</a> is available.</p>
August Office Hourshttps://tent.io/blog/201308-office-hours2013-07-31T18:20:00Z2026-10-18T17:37:56+00:00<p>Tent office hours will be held <a href="/officehours">online</a> on Tuesday,
August 6th at <a href="http://everytimezone.com/#2013-8-6,420,6bj">19:00 UTC</a>.</p>
<p>Questions can be asked in advance as status posts with the hashtag #officehours,
or in realtime on IRC. A recording will be made available after the event.</p>
<p><strong>Update</strong>: <a href="/officehours/2013-08-06">A recording</a> is available.</p>
The Tent Trademarkshttps://tent.io/blog/the-tent-marks2013-06-08T18:00:00Z2026-10-18T17:37:56+00:00<p>Today we are proud and excited to announce the official Tent logo. The logo was developed from a design by <a href="http://www.designforthem.com">Christophe Antonio</a>. We also thank <a href="https://lorenb.tent.is">Loren Brichter</a> for his contributions to the design process.</p>
<p>The Tent logo will be used to promote Tent and increase visibility of the ecosystem throughout the web. The Tent logo can be used to link to Tent entities, for “sign in with Tent” buttons, and to show a product’s compatibility with Tent. In addition to digital design assets, we hope to have logo apparel available for sale in the future.</p>
<p>Tent® is a trademark of Apollic Software, LLC and the Tent logo is a trademark of Tent.is, LLC. These trademarks are important both to provide users with a consistent experience and ensure technical interoperability. Because Tent is a protocol, not a piece of software or a service, there are limited avenues available to ensure products that use Tent work as promised. </p>
<p>Trademark protection is crucial in preventing the protocol from fragmenting and ensuring the long term stability of the ecosystem. Most importantly, users need to know that Tent service providers have implemented the entire protocol. This policy will be expanded with the release of the Tent protocol validator, a piece of software that helps in the development of new Tent servers and verifies that the protocol has been implemented correctly. </p>
<p>We carefully considered usage guidelines and requested comments from the community before releasing the logo. There is a <a href="/trademark-guidelines">complete page</a> dedicated to the current guidelines. The basic spirit is simple: do not create modified versions of the marks, clearly state the level of Tent integration your project or product provides, and never use “Tent” or the logos in your product’s name, logo, icon, domain name, or company name. </p>
<p>If you have any questions about the logo, marks, or guidelines, <a href="mailto:help@tent.io">contact us</a>.</p>
<p>The Tent logos are available for download on the <a href="/trademark-guidelines">trademarks page</a>.</p>
May Office Hourshttps://tent.io/blog/201305-office-hours2013-05-13T16:35:00Z2026-10-18T17:37:56+00:00<p>This month’s Tent office hours will be held <a href="/officehours">online</a> on Tuesday,
May 21st at <a href="http://everytimezone.com/#2013-5-21,480,6bj">20:00 UTC</a>.</p>
<p>Questions can be asked in advance as status posts with the hashtag #officehours,
or in realtime on IRC. A recording will be made available after the event.</p>
<p><strong>Update</strong>: <a href="/officehours/2013-05-21">A recording</a> is available.</p>
March Office Hourshttps://tent.io/blog/201303-office-hours2013-03-15T21:05:00Z2026-10-18T17:37:56+00:00<p>This month’s Tent office hours will be held <a href="/officehours">online</a> on Tuesday,
March 19th at <a href="http://everytimezone.com/#2013-3-19,480,6bj">20:00 UTC</a>.</p>
<p>This session will focus on Tent 0.3. We especially welcome questions about the new version of the protocol.</p>
<p>Questions can be asked in advance as status posts with the hashtag #officehours,
or in realtime on IRC. A recording will be made available after the event.</p>
<p><strong>Update</strong>: <a href="/officehours/2013-03-19">A recording</a> is available.</p>
Updated Tent Roadmaphttps://tent.io/blog/updated-roadmap2013-03-15T17:30:00Z2026-10-18T17:37:56+00:00<p>Today we released some notes on the changes coming on Tent v0.3. This post will explain the motivation behind many of those changes and lay out the next steps in the evolution of the Tent protocol.</p>
<p>A complete list of the proposed changes is available on <a href="https://github.com/tent/tent.io/issues?labels=v0.3&page=1&state=open">GitHub</a>.</p>
<h2 id="motivation">
Motivation</h2>
<p>Tent 0.3 is a major step towards 1.0 and enables several major new classes of functionality which can be combined to great effect throughout the ecosystem.</p>
<p>We learned a lot from users, application developers, and hosts during their use of Tent 0.1 and 0.2.</p>
<p>Today we know a lot more about what Tent can and should do which enabled us to distill the most important parts of Tent. 0.3 is simpler, more consistent, and more powerful.</p>
<p>By reducing the number of extraneous data types and representations we were able to add features that open a whole new set of possibilities for apps and users. This version brings us <em>much</em> closer to achieving the original vision of Tent.</p>
<p>There are many small and some large optimizations that come in response to requests from developers and seeing how Tent behaves in the wild. We also tried to consolidate as many “breaking changes” as possible into a single version to make future version transitions cleaner for developers and hosts.</p>
<h2 id="major-changes">
Major Changes</h2>
<p>In addition to performance and stability improvements, v0.3 includes several major structural changes that affect the future of Tent development.</p>
<h3 id="almost-everything-is-a-post">
(Almost) Everything is a post</h3>
<p>Posts are Tent’s most powerful and expressive data type. Most other information in Tent already inherited many of the features and characteristics of posts including versions and permissions. As the post format evolved it became clear that almost all other information stored in Tent including profiles and relationships could be stored as posts.</p>
<p>This let us add a number of important new features to posts.</p>
<h3 id="post-type-fragments">
Post type fragments</h3>
<p>Fragments are like subtypes of posts that let developers add more information about the meaning of a post. For example, status posts have the fragment <code>#reply</code> which indicates a post is in reply to another. This allows a great deal of unwanted noise to be removed from users feeds as well as more powerful querying.</p>
<h3 id="versions">
Versions</h3>
<p>Tent posts are now essentially a light weight version control system. Each post can have many versions with complex inheritance structures. Users can even specify another user’s post as the parent of their own. This will enable Tent-powered collaborative editing apps and allow content to more clearly evolve over time. Each version can also have its own distinct permissions, so a user can keep previous or future versions of a post private or shared with only a limited group (think drafts).</p>
<h3 id="status-posts">
Status posts</h3>
<p>Status posts now support Tent Flavored Markdown which include <strong>bold</strong>, <em>italic</em>, <del>strikethrough</del>, <code>code</code>, <a href="https://tent.io">links</a>, and standardized inline mentions.</p>
<p>Status posts can also include a media reference like a photo post. This means microblogging apps won’t be swamped with photos when an entity uploads all their vacation albums, but users can still share photos easily.</p>
<p>The <code>#reply</code> fragment will also aid in feed cleanup: apps can query for status posts that reply only to someone the user follows, removing extraneous conversations.</p>
<h3 id="private-mentions">
Private mentions</h3>
<p>Mentions are increasingly important now that most data is represented as posts. Mentions can be set to private enabling private tags and bcc messaging.</p>
<h3 id="tags">
Tags</h3>
<p>Rather than create a new metadata field, tags are just posts. To tag a post, mention a post of type <code>https://tent.io/types/tag/v0#</code>. To get a list of posts with a specific tag, just query for posts mentioning the tag post.</p>
<p>Tags can also be used as a sort of topical inbox. Users can tag posts with another user’s tags, alerting the author of the tag about the post. Similarly users can query another user’s tag post for posts mentioning it publicly. There are a number of ways this can be used to collaborative content aggregation and sharing.</p>
<h3 id="batch-requests">
Batch requests</h3>
<p>Applications can now request many posts at once.</p>
<h2 id="upgrading">
Upgrading</h2>
<p>We recommend that hosts update all posts and records in their databases to their 0.3 equivalents. While Tent remains in alpha converting legacy posts will continue to be rocky, but this process will be formalized and simplified before the 1.0 release candidate.</p>
<h2 id="roadmap">
Roadmap</h2>
<p>We have a fairly clear picture of the road to Tent 1.0. Here’s how it looks today:</p>
<h3 id="04">
0.4</h3>
<ul>
<li>Multipart responses</li>
<li>Machine readable post schemas</li>
<li>Views</li>
<li>Streaming</li>
<li>Cryptographic signatures</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="05">
0.5</h3>
<ul>
<li>Deep linking</li>
<li>Post body query syntax</li>
<li>Asynchronous login</li>
<li>Dependant batch requests</li>
<li>Quorum-based actions</li>
</ul>
<h3 id="06">
0.6</h3>
<ul>
<li>Protocol extensions (including logging)</li>
</ul>
<p>This list will evolve over the coming months and items may be added, edited, removed, or moved to a different release. Continuing at our current pace, we hope to have a release candidate for Tent 1.0 near the end of 2013.</p>