ANNOUNCE: Bricolage-Devel 1.7.0

It give me great pleasure to announce the release of Bricolage-Devel
1.7.0,
the first development release for what will eventually become Bricolage
1.8.0. In addition to all of the bug fixes included in the 1.6.x series,
this version of the open-source content management system adds a number
of
significant new features. The most significant changes include:

* Added multisite support. Now all stories, media, output
channels,
templates, categories, and workflows may be associated with
different sites, and even have the same names in different
sites.
This simplifies the management of multiple Web sites with
Bricolage.
Story type and media type elements may be shared between sites.
Funded by Portugal Telecom Multimedia.

* Added document aliasing. Stories and media in a site may now be
aliased and published in another site, as long as the elements
on
which they are based are shared between sites. Control over the
content of aliased documents remains in the original site, thus
ensuring the editorial integrity of the document for that site.
Funded by Portugal Telecom Multimedia.

* Added "$burner->sdisplay_element" method to Bric::Util::Burner.
This
is a "sprintf"-style version of "$burner->display_element".

* Added the "YEAR_SPAN_BEFORE" and "YEAR_SPAN_AFTER"
bricolage.conf
directives. These directives enable control how many years
before
and after the current year to display in the list of years in
the
date and time select widget. The default values are 10 for each,
meaning that if the current year is 2003, then the date span
will be
from 1993 to 2013.

* Added "Email" action, which can be used to email the files
generated
by a publish to one or more email addresses. Funded by ETonline.

* Callbacks were moved from Mason components to modules based on
Params::Callback and managed by MasonX::Interp::WithCallbacks.
This
makes the UI layer more responsive and enhances maintainability.

* Optimized performance of URI uniqueness checks by adding
database
tables to do the job, rather than constructing the URIs for all
other documents in the same categories as the document being
checked. This was the last major bottleneck affecting SOAP
performance, as well as document editing in general. Funded by
Kineticode.

* Added "output_channel_id" parameter to the "list()" methods of
Story
and Media to enable querying for documents in output channels
other
than the primary output channel.

* Added Keyword Management interface to centrally manage keywords.

* Added HTML::Mason Custom tags support, allowing template
developers
to write code blocks that are context sensitive.

* Added new page extension support to the burner, which allows
template developers to set string extensions to use for
successive
file names, rather than the traditional use of numeric file name
extensions for successive file names.

* Added "Text to search" option in the Advanced search of Media
and
Stories to search for documents based on the contents of their
field.

* All preview links are now generated by a single widget. This
widget
adds the story or media URI to the "title" attribute of the
link tag
(which is modern browsers will automatically work as a roll-over
tooltip), makes the story or media URI copyable (by relying on
JavaScript to actually open a new window for the preview), and
manages selecting an output channel in which to preview a story.

* Made User Group Permissions UI wieldy with larger numbers of
users
by adding a select list to choose which type of Permission to
look
at.

* Added "contrib_id" parameter to the "list()" methods of
Bric::Biz::Asset::Business::Story and
Bric::Biz::Asset::Business::Media to return a list of story or
media
documents associated with a given contributor.

* Switched Bric::Util::CharTrans from using Text::Iconv to Encode,
thus removing the dependency on a C library (libiconv). Note
that
this has changed the API of Bric::Util::CharTrans. Its
"to_utf8()"
and "from_utf8()" methods now always convert the argument
passed in
in place. They did this before for references, but now they do
it
for plain strings, as well. Also note that use of character
translation also now requires Perl 5.8.0 or later.

* Added MediaType, Site, and Keyword SOAP modules.

* Added "element" attribute to Bric::Util::Burner so that
"$burner->get_element" should always return the element
currently
being burned.

* Added a "throw_error()" method to Bric::Util::Burner so that
template developers can easily throw an exception that their
users
will see in the UI.

* Moved category selection from Media and Story Profiles into
their
own separate components so that organizations with hundreds or
thousands of categories don't have to load them into a dropdown
list
every time an asset is edited. The category "browser" uses an
interface similar to 'Associate Contributors', which has the
advantage of being searchable rather than looking through a
"long
list of all categories". This feature can be enabled via the new
"ENABLE_CATEGORY_BROWSER" bricolage.conf directive.

* Added list paging to Desks and My Workspace.

* Added the ability to test templates without having to deploy
them by
using "template sandboxes" for each template developer.

* Added Template Toolkit burner support.

* Added support for installing and upgrading Bricolage with
PostgreSQL
on a separate host.

* Added context-sensitive help for pages that were missing it.

For a complete list of the changes, see the changes file at:

http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=192790

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,
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 as "Most Impressive" in 2002 by eWeek.

Learn more about Bricolage and download it from the Bricolage home page,
http://bricolage.cc/.

Enjoy!

David

--
David Wheeler AIM: dwTheory
david(at)kineticode(dot)com ICQ: 15726394
http://www.kineticode.com/ Yahoo!: dew7e
Jabber: Theory(at)jabber(dot)org
Kineticode. Setting knowledge in motion.[sm]