Today we're happy to announce the release of Yeoman 1.0 beta 4. A number of large updates have been made to the project since beta 3, covering scaffolding, performance improvements and overall stability.

The community around the project has also been growing, tackling ideas such as Rails, PHP and Express middleware as well as new generators. In this post, I'll summarize the major updates made to the project as well as exciting work done by the community.

Team expansion

I am happy to welcome Brian Ford to the Yeoman team as a core contributor. I am also happy to welcome the following developers as official maintainers of our generators: Revath S Kumar (Backbone, BBB), Anthony Bull (Ember) and Jimmy Moon (Chrome extension). Special thanks are also in order to Pascal Hartig and Kevin Mårtensson who have been heavily contributing to the project lately.

Project updates

Note: You can update to the latest version by running npm update -g yo .

Windows support for 1.0 beta is close to being stable and many users are already using it on Windows without any issues. We'll be fixing any rough edges in the coming week.

support for 1.0 beta is close to being stable and many users are already using it on Windows without any issues. We'll be fixing any rough edges in the coming week. Yeoman generators can now be optionally installed globally, which was not previously possible with beta 3.

The Web App generator now attempts an automatic post-install of Bower/other dependencies, which should save time when starting new projects (thanks to Sindre Sorhus). Performance optimizations have also been made here with our image, html, svg, css minification as well as coffeescript and sass compilation processing now all done concurrently.

post-install of Bower/other dependencies, which should save time when starting new projects (thanks to Sindre Sorhus). Performance optimizations have also been made here with our image, html, svg, css minification as well as coffeescript and sass compilation processing now all done concurrently. Our Backbone.js generator is now compatible with 1.0 beta and RequireJS support has been added as a prompt. Our BBB - Backbone Boilerplate Buddy generator has also been updated to support 1.0 beta.

Our Ember.js generator is now 1.0 compatible and has been updated to the latest Ember starter kit. The generator also now correctly writes the Gruntfile for you.

Our AngularJS generator has been updated. Changes include automatic dependency installation, fixed CoffeeScript compilation and integration of grunt-rev into the build. More notes available in the changelog.

The Chrome Extension generator has also been updated to support the 1.0 beta

Start-up performance of all generators has been greatly improved (thanks to Pascal).

We've begun work on rewriting the Grunt-init templates to use our generator system. We hope to have this work complete in the coming weeks.

Documentation for our 1.0 generator system is being rewritten at present. Focus is on providing users with the right snippets to complete common tasks with generators.

Our entity-driven tooling proposal had a positive response from the community. We're going to discuss your feedback further and evaluate whether it's worth prettying this concept.

Workflow write-ups

I can't express how excited I am to see developers actively using Yeoman with a variety of different backend stacks. Recent articles by the community show you how to get these setup include:

and I've included a few others you might find interesting:

New generators for 1.0 beta

Remember that anyone in the community can write their own generator, helping developers kick-start off a project using a specific boilerplate or workflow. Some of the recent generators written by the community include:

You can see all of them on npmjs.org. For those wishing to take a look at a simple, but practical generator example, see the generator for HTML5 Boilerplate.

Sindre Sorhus has also written a few other simple generators that might be of interest including H5BP Mobile Boilerplate and a generator for server config.

New videos

Rob Levin, who previously recorded a number of videos about using Yeoman and Bower is back with new new videos about how to use Yeoman with Backbone and RequireJS. Watch Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4 for all the details.

Help us make Yeoman better

Yeoman is an open-source project and we're always looking for more help to assist us in improving developer productivity. Whether it's contributing patches, reviewing code or writing documentation, we have tasks you can help with. If you're interested, hit us up and we'll help you contribute :)

Until next time, thanks and always feel free to let us know if we can improve the project in any way.

Note: If you experience an issue with beta 4, please read the issue submission guidelines and inform us of the bug.