Thread: [htmltmpl] ANN: Bricolage 1.10.1 Released
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From: David W. <da...@ki...> - 2006-03-21 03:27:53
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Fellow HTML::Templaters, It is with great pleasure that the Bricolage development team announces the release of Bricolage 1.10. The culmination of over 19 months of development, version 1.10 represents a significant advance for the celebrated open-source content management and publishing system. Here are some of the highlights: PHP Templating Bricolage is the first content management system to support three different Perl-based templating architectures (Mason, Template Toolkit, and HTML::Template) as well as one in a completely different programming language: PHP 5. Bricolage 1.10 adds PHP templating support, allowing template developers to use the popular Web programming language to formatting their documents for output. This functionality is thanks to a killer new technology, known as PHP::Interpreter, that loads the PHP 5 interpreter into a Perl 5 interpreter, and affords transparent access between PHP and Perl code. The upshot is that PHP templaters get full access to the entire Bricolage API, as well as the ability to use whatever other PHP or Perl libraries they wish. Our expect is that this development will push Bricolage into new environments where PHP developers can make use of the powerful content management and publishing system without having to learn a new programming language. Furthermore, we hope that PHP::Interpreter will act as a bridge between the Perl and PHP communities, such that there is a greater exchange of ideas and a greater ability to use each other's libraries. PHP::Interpreter was developed by OmniTI. PHP::Interpreter and the PHP templating support in Bricolage were sponsored by SAPO--Portugal Online. LDAP Authentication Bricolage 1.10 includes support for a pluggable authentication architecture, and in addition to its built-in authentication has added a module for authentication against an LDAP directory server. This new feature is sure to be welcome in busy enterprises that rely on a directory server, such as Windows Active Directory http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/technologies/directory/activ edirectory/default.mspx, Novel eDirectory http://www.novell.com/products/edirectory/, or OpenLDAP http://www.openldap.org/. Authentication can be limited to members of a directory group, and supports LDAP v.3 and TLS connectivity. Contributed by Kineticode. Revamped Interface Bricolage 1.10 sports a completely revamped browser interface that is XHTML compliant and handles all styling via CSS. Yes, our 1999-era table-driven interface is officially a thing of the past. The upshot is that the interface is much more elegant, easier to skin with your own look (by overriding its CSS files), allows search results and editing fields to expand and contract with the browser window size, and delivers pages as much as 70% smaller than they were before. The new interface was Contributed by Marshall Roch. A second major new UI feature is the revamped "Bulk Edit" interface. Gone is the old "Super Bulk Edit" interface, with the Bulk Edit revisions overtaking its functionality. Now you can edit the entire contents of a story document, from the top-most element to the bottom-most field, in a single textarea field with no reloads. The secret to allowing the full-text editing of Bricolage's unique hierarchical element structures is Plain Old Documentation, or "POD". Subelements are denoted by a new =begin POD tag, and end with a matching =end tag. The result is a much more natural editing interface. Even related stories and media are supported by new POD tags. We believe that this improvement will greatly facilitate the editing process, making Bricolage a much more enjoyable product for content editors to work with. The Bulk Edit revision is complemented by two new additions: diff support and a JavaScript-powered "Find and Replace" dialog box. Users can now see at a glance the changes between one version of a document and another. The changes are shown on a word-by-word basis, with additions in green with an underline and deletions in red with a strikeout. A similar interface is used to show the differences between versions of templates using the traditional "unified diff" format rather than word-by word. The JavaScript-powered "Find and Replace" dialog box can be used to search by strings or regular expressions in a Bulk Edit or Template editing environment. Found bits of text can also be replaced or even globally replaced. We believe that this powerful new feature, combined with the new Bulk Edit interface, makes Bricolage a compelling content editing environment. The Bulk Edit, diff, and Find and Replace features were contributed by Kineticode. What's in a Name? A somewhat less apparent but no less massive change in Bricolage 1.10 is a system-wide naming normalization. Now all objects in Bricolage are known by the same names, from the UI to the class to the database to the SOAP server. Most noticeable in the UI will be the elimination of the old "Element Type" object, and the renaming of "Element" objects to "Element Types." This change has the benefit of disambiguating element types, which define the structure of documents, and elements, which are the document parts that contain content. Gone is the confusion between element administration and content elements; there are now only element types and elements. Another example is the renaming of "Data Elements" to "Field Types" and "Fields". And in tandem with this change, the storage of field values in the database has been denormalized, so that every field value does not also store the name and key name of the field. This greatly reduces the size of the database, and should make field lookups much faster, particularly in formatting templates. And while we were going about denormalizing field storage, the data types of the database columns were also normalized. Old-style, inefficient column types have been dumped in favor of more efficient, precise column types. For example, all "NUMERIC" columns, which everywhere only contained integers or booleans, have been converted the "INTEGER" and "BOOLEAN" data types, as appropriate. This change will also be invisible to the everyday Bricolage user, but should enhance database performance by optimizing the storage of object attributes. And finally, a more visible change: Bricolage 1.10 introduces much more flexible URI formats. You can now use many more parts of the cover date in the URI, and in whatever format you like. So you could have a format of "/%{categories}/%Y-%m-%d/" and end up with the URI "/foo/bar/2004-09-22/" if you wanted. Or even "/%{categories}/%Y/%V/" to get the week number as part of the URI. You can also include document UUIDs, and even your own text, (e.g. foobar in /%{categories}/%Y/%m/foobar/%{uuid}/". This enhancement finally allows users to almost always be able to replicate legacy URI formats in Bricolage, for a seamless upgrade from an older CMS. What are You Waiting For? There are many, many more changes in Bricolage 1.10 that, overall, make using it a joy. For a complete list of the changes, see the changes list at http://www.bricolage.cc/news/announce/changes/bricolage-1.10.0/. For the complete history of ongoing changes in Bricolage, see Bric::Changes at http://www.bricolage.cc/docs/current/api/Bric::Changes. Download Bricolage 1.10.0 now from the Bricolage Website at http://www.bricolage.cc/downloads/, from the SourceForge download page at http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=34789, or from the Kineticode download page at http://www.kineticode.com/bricolage/downloads/. About Bricolage Bricolage is a full-featured, enterprise-class content management and publishing system. It offers a browser-based interface for ease-of use, a full-fledged templating system with complete HTML::Mason, HTML::Template, PHP5, and Template Toolkit support for flexibility, and many other features. It operates in an Apache/mod_perl environment and uses the PostgreSQL RDBMS for its repository. A comprehensive, actively-developed open source CMS, Bricolage has been hailed by eWEEK as "quite possibly the most capable enterprise-class open-source application available." Enjoy! --The Bricolage Team |
From: David W. <da...@ki...> - 2006-03-21 03:32:23
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Fellow HTML::Templaters, Apologies for the previous email, which contained the announcement for Bricolage 1.10.0, which was released in January. This is the correct announcement for Bricolage 1.10.1, which was released today. The Bricolage development team is pleased to announce the release of Bricolage 1.10.1. This maintenance release adds a few new features, a number of improvements, and many bug fixes. Highlights include new SOAP modules, improved packaging support, and smother upgrades from 1.8.x versions. The most important changes are: New Features * Added ContribType, Destination, and Preference SOAP modules. [Scott] * Added upload and download feature to the template interface, so that templates can optionally be uploaded or downloaded. Suggested by Chris Sutton. [David] Improvements * Added installation defaults for FreeBSD that will be used when the USE_DEFAULTS environment variable is set to "freebsd" during installation. [Rod Taylor] * Created two new make targets, "install_files" and "install_db", to allow the files to be installed without doing anything with the database. Useful for packagers who need to let users manually create the database. [Marshall] * Updated Bric::ElementAdmin to be conversant in the merging of element type sets and elements. That is, it now makes sense in the context of Bricolage 1.10. Reported by Ryan O'Toole. [David] * The View/Edit link has been restored to stories, media, and templates on desks, and the title has been returned to its status as a preview link. The URI is no longer a link. [David] Bug Fixes * The database upgrade script now updates table permissions after executing all of the scripts for each version to be upgraded, rather than after all of the upgrade scripts have run, thus allowing later scripts to properly access tables created by earlier scripts. Reported by Nate Perry-Thistle. [David] * Fixed some of the 1.8.9 upgrade scripts that run after the 1.9.x upgrade scripts to that they are properly compatible. [Nate Perry-Thistle, Rod Taylor, and David] * Reverting stories and media no longer leads to occasional errors such as, "Too many Bric::Biz::Element::Container objects found". Reported by Simon Wilcox. [David] * Disabled the "sticky" scroll bar in the story profile. It just didn't work very well. [David] * The "Allow Multiple" checkbox and "Size" field in the "Add New Field" section of the element type profile work again. Reported by Rod Taylor and Paul Orrock. [David] * Multiple select lists no longer break the story and element profiles, and can once again have their values properly changed from multiple to single to none. Spotted by Rod Taylor. [David] * Assets can once again be properly deleted from desks. [David] * Cancelling the checkout of an media document now deletes any new file that has been uploaded and, if the AUTO_PREVIEW_MEDIA bricolage.conf directive is enabled, re-previews the previous version of the media file. [David] * The autopopulated fields for image element types are now created when a new image element type is created. This was made possible by moving the selection of media type (Image, Audio, Video, or Other Media) to the New Element Type screen, where it is now part of the "Content Type" select list, which also includes the Story and Subelement options. As a result, one can no longer change the media type in an existing element type (not that it ever made sense to do so). Reported by Paul Orrock. [David] * Failed jobs can once again be cancelled. Reported by Rod Taylor. [David] * Publishing multiple versions of a document before any of the publish jobs for those versions are executed no longer leads to publishing errors when the older version is published. Thanks to Rod Taylor for the spot! [David] For a complete list of the changes in Bricolage 1.10.1, see the changes list at http://www.bricolage.cc/news/announce/changes/bricolage-1.10.1/. For the complete history of ongoing changes in Bricolage, see Bric::Changes at http://www.bricolage.cc/docs/current/api/Bric::Changes. Download Bricolage 1.10.1 now from the Bricolage Website at http://www.bricolage.cc/downloads/, from the SourceForge download page at http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=34789, or from the Kineticode download page at http://www.kineticode.com/bricolage/downloads/. About Bricolage Bricolage is a full-featured, enterprise-class content management and publishing system. It offers a browser-based interface for ease-of use, a full-fledged templating system with complete HTML::Mason, HTML::Template, PHP5, and Template Toolkit support for flexibility, and many other features. It operates in an Apache/mod_perl environment and uses the PostgreSQL RDBMS for its repository. A comprehensive, actively-developed open source CMS, Bricolage has been hailed by eWEEK as "quite possibly the most capable enterprise-class open-source application available." Enjoy! --The Bricolage Team |