Compass 1.0 is Released!

By Chris Eppstein

Compass 1.0 is now available!

First, let's address the elephant in the room: This release took way too long. I can give you a list of reasons and excuses, but none of them really matter. Suffice it to say that if you ever find yourself owning an open source project that has gone unmaintained for more than a year like Compass had when I re-engaged with the project, the most prudent course of action is to shut it down. But I'm way too stubborn for that.

What matters now is how things are going to work going forward.

1. Regular bug fix releases. Compass 1.0 is not perfect. Now that it is released, we will be shipping regular updates with bug fixes and fresh browser stats so that your prefixes are always up to date. You can expect a couple releases per month at a minimum.
2. New features. While compass 1.0 has undergone significant rewrites and refactoring, it is actually quite devoid of what I would consider any new significant features since 0.12. Now that it is released and following semantic versioning, we will be free to release new features.

What's in Compass 1.0?

• Vendor prefixing decisions are now data driven by caniuse.com data. You tell Compass what percentage of users you want to support and we'll take it from there.
• Compass core library now enables you to use compass without using the compass command-line tools.
• Compass speeds up your project compile times by enabling import-once importing. Existing projects should add require "compass/import-once/activate" to their configuration to enable this. Documentation.
• Sass sourcemap support. Set sourcemap = true in your compass configuration file to enable it.
• Rewritten watcher/compiler. Compass now use's Sass builtin compiler guaranteeing tighter integration and consistency between the projects.
• Blueprint is removed. Not that you were using it, but if you were it's now maintained as a separate plugin.
• CSS3Pie integration is removed.
• Support for recent CSS Developments: Animation, Flexbox, Official Gradient syntax support, Input Placeholders,
• Compass extensions that have Sass files that are not partials will now deliver compiled css files into a subdirectory of the css output folder.
• And much, much more.

Compass has been a release candidate for a few weeks now. We've fixed many bugs, but given the magnitude of the changes here, we expect that there will be more. If you see something strange, please file a bug! Or better yet, send us a patch :)