Release Notes for OpenCms 8.0.2

August 18, 2011: This is the release of OpenCms 8.0.2. Some important additional features have been added to OpenCms 8 in this version. Moreover, a number of issues that persisted in the 8.0.1 release have been fixed.

Important features of OpenCms 8

  • The "Advanced Direct Edit" (ADE) mode allows to create page content by drag & drop.
  • The sitemap editor allows to create new pages and re-arrange the navigation tree by drag & drop.
  • The "Content Subscription Engine" allows to inform users when subscribed documents have changed.
  • Extended support for creation of content for mobile devices with the <cms:mobile> tag.

Main new features in OpenCms 8.0.2

  • It's now possible to easily enable drag & drop for any existing JSP. Just create a reference to the JSP with the new ADE resource type "Dynamic Function". See the "Login Box" or "Search Box" in the Template III demo for examples.
  • Refined element permissions for ADE now support Elements dragable by everyone, but editable only with special permissions.
  • The sitemap editor now displays status information such as title and VFS location above the currently edited sitemap. It also features a "go to the parent sitemap" button in the toolbar.
  • Group containers now have a "Break Up" option which removes the group and places all elements individually on currently edited page, making it easier to create pages with slightly different configurations.
  • If a content is previewed in the ADE content gallery, it can now directly be dragged & dropped from the content preview to the current page.
  • The legacy direct edit provider for pages using "old" templates now allows to open the "Property" dialog to edit the page properties in direct edit mode. Moreover, it also features a "Logout" option.
  • A full demo of the content subscription engine has been added to Template III.

Other new features and improvements in OpenCms 8.0.2

  • Optimized gallery performance using dynamic scroll-bar and lazily added elements in gallery list.
  • Refined naming schema for automatically created resources now uses "-" instead of "_" for SEO reasons.
  • Restyled message box on top screen now follows the general OpenCms 8 look & feel.
  • Refined the option in the "Simple" tab of the new ADE Properties Dialog.
  • Improved sitemap configuration with "Combo Box" displaying all configured resource types.
  • Improved sitemap configuration with option "Local contents" to create all new resources automatically below the current sitemap.
  • Improved sitemap configuration with new option "Disable all" to disable all inherited configurations.
  • Improved sitemap editor now shows sub sitemap folder resource type icon if a resource is the start of a Sub-Sitemap.
  • Added new EL function for JSP that tests if a detail page is configured for a resource type.
  • Improved server side filtering of <script> tags in user generated content of ADE elements.
  • New XSD path translation feature allows to configure old and new location for moved XSD files that are referenced in existing XML resouces.
  • Removed jQuery references from the devDemo module to simplify it.
  • Unified VFS image widget now used for different gallery types.
  • Changed some JSPs for Template III to use %(link.strong) macro.
  • ADE base schemas are now stored in Java package files, not VFS.
  • Applied patch to abstrract the Lucene index writer used, contributed by Florian Hopf.

Fixed issues in OpenCms 8.0.2

  • Fixed issue in ADE Editor where elements last used (edited, moved, removed, etc.) where not moved to top of the "recent" list.
  • Fixed issue in the ADE gallery full text search of the "Advanced" tab, where options were not shown correctly in localized versions.
  • Fixed issue in sitemap editor, where creating a new page resulted in different names if either the "+" symbol in the top menu or the context menu was used.
  • Fixed issue that sitemap editor in online projects displayed only an empty page., instead the sitemap in now shown in "read only" mode.
  • Fixed issue in the sitemap editor where the "Back" button was not working anymore when the sitemap got changed.
  • Fixed issue with sitemap / module configuration and OCEE cache, where a previously added element was not visible when editing it again.
  • Fixed issue that deleting a user with Root-Admin role failed.
  • Fixed issue where the toolbar could not be switched off in "old" version 7 templates.
  • Fixed several issues in image gallery regarding scaling, resizing, cropping and setting of title / alt text when editing xmlpages.
  • Fixed several issues in download gallery regarding the creation of download links when editing xmlpages.
  • Fixed issue that the ADE button may become overlayed and thus unreachable when pasting external script code in a container.
  • Fixed issue with mouse over handling where buttons often still shown even though the mouse pointer was no longer above the item.
  • Fixed issues that creating a new detail page for a content type in ADE sitemap created a blank container page and not the default model page.
  • Fixed issue that drag & drop of elements did not work if the element type was not configured in the ADE configuration.
  • Fixed issues with preview in galleries regarding scrolling and localization.
  • Fixed issue within image gallery where the fields "Title/Alt Text" and "Copyright" were not filled with the according property values of the selected image.
  • Fixed issue that when a new page is created and repeatedly renamed in the sitemap editor an exception might get thrown in the ADE Editor when this page was edited afterwards.
  • Fixed several issues in style and coloring.
  • Fixed issue that in certain cases the position of a page in the navigation as defined in the sitemap editor was lost after leaving the sitemap editor.
  • Fixed issue that a ConcurrentModificationException happened sometimes when demo content modules were imported.
  • Fixed issue that paging in Template III search did not work.
  • Fixed issue in sitemap editor that the icon of a sub-sitemap moved around in the sitemap changed to the container page icon.
  • Fixed issue where articles assigned to categories where not found in the ADE new wizard.
  • Fixed issue where the "Show last page" button did not work anymore when switching from the sitemap editor to the parent sitemap.
  • Fixed issues with the "Favorites" tab in the ADE clipboard where elements appeared multiple times or removal of elements failed.
  • Fixed issue that newly created empty group containers vanished if the title was not entered.
  • Fixed issue in the property dialog where inherited values were displayed ambiguously after entering / leaving the field without changes.
  • Fixed issue #1976:  Error in ADE to create new section.
  • Fixed issue #1982: "change navigation" fails on expired resources.
  • Fixed issue #1983: Can't create user under sub "Webuser organizational unit".
  • Fixed issue #1986: ADE toolbar cannot be closed when using <cms:editable />.
  • Fixed issue #1988: ADE toolbar covers <cms:editable/> "direct edit" button.
  • Fixed issue #1989: When leaving the ADE sitemap “/cms/” (servlet-mapping) remains in the path.

Other features of OpenCms

  • "Direct Edit" allows creation and modification of content directly from a web page.
  • Structured contents can be defined using a simple XML schema.
  • Includes editors with WYSIWYG and syntax highlighting functionality.
  • Easy to use "Online / Offline" workflow, changes must be approved before they become visible.
  • Link management for all internal resources with broken link detection.
  • Support for WebDAV access to all resources in the OpenCms repository.
  • Integrated image scaling and cropping.
  • Full featured internal user management that supports the concept of "Organizational Units" (OUs).
  • Allows management of multiple websites within one installation.
  • Contents can be served dynamically or exported to static HTML files.
  • Extensions can be added through a flexible module system.
  • Full text search for web pages, but also in PDF, MS Office documents etc.
  • The "time warp" feature allows to view resources which are expired or not yet released.
  • JSP integration for dynamic functionality in templates, dynamic forms etc.
  • Distribution includes a complete demo website "Wonderful World of Flowers".
  • ... and many more

Backward compatibility

We recommend everyone who uses OpenCms to update to the 8.0.2 release.

OpenCms 8.0.2 is fully backward compatible to all prior 7.x versions. Templates and other OpenCms developed code from version 7.0 or 7.5 should work "out of the box" with version 8.0.2.

Notice for users of Alkacon OCEE: OpenCms version 8.0.2 requires Alkacon OCEE version 3.0.2 or later. In case you want to update your OpenCms installation to 8.0.2, please make sure you update Alkacon OCEE to 3.0.2 or later first!

Compatibility with Java versions, Servlet containers and Databases

OpenCms 8.0 has been written and tested using Java 5 / 6. We have tested only with Oracles version (formerly SUNs version) of the JDK. However, OpenCms has no dependencies to sun.* packages so it should in theory run with all compliant JVMs.

We have tested this release on the Tomcat servlet engine. OpenCms works "out of the box" with Tomcat 6.0, which we recommend. Others have reported deploying OpenCms successfully on other servlet containers like JBoss, BEA, Websphere, Glassfish and Resin Professional. We appreciate any feedback regarding other servlet containers.

On the database side, we have tested with MySQL 5.x, Oracle 9.x and Oracle 10.x, as well as PostgreSQL 8.2.x, MS SQL Server 2000 / 2003, DB2 9.1 and HSQLDB 1.8.0. The automatic update wizard for OpenCms 8 supports MySQL, Oracle and PostgreSQL.

Regarding version numbers and build tags

In case you want to check out OpenCms from Git, please keep the following in mind: The tag numbers for all OpenCms 8.0 final releases are "build_8_0_x", so the 8.0.2 release is tagged "build_8_0_2".

The main OpenCms Git repository is available on Github at github.com/alkacon/opencms-core.

How you can help

Contributions to the OpenCms core development are most welcome. Please contact the core development team on the opencms-dev mailing list in case you are interested in supporting the development of OpenCms.

Please use our Bugzilla to report bugs in this release: http://bugzilla.opencms.org/

 

Thank you for using OpenCms and have fun with OpenCms 8 :-)