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Bricolage-Devel 1.7.2

Theory on 2004-02-13T02:09:45

I'm thrilled to announce the release of Bricolage-Devel 1.7.2, the third development release for what will eventually become Bricolage 1.8.0. This version of the open-source content management system addresses all of the bugs discovered since the release of the second development release, 1.7.1, and adds several new features and some tremendous performance optimizations. The most significant changes since 1.7.1 include:

  • New Features
    • Bricolage now has a much more robust security policy. Users with permission to edit various objects and groups in the administrative interface can no longer increase their permissions. Nor can they manage the membership of groups of which they are not members or do not have EDIT access to the members. All this is to prevent users from giving themselves higher permissions. [David]
    • Added "publish_another()" method to Bric::Util::Burner. This method publishes a document other than the one currently being published. This is useful when a template for one document type needs to trigger the publish of another document. [David]
    • Added new permissions "RECALL" and "PUBLISH". These permissions apply only to asset groups, including desks, categories, and workflows. Now users must have RECALL permission to recall assets from the library and bring them into workflow, and PUBLISH permission to publish assets. This should make it much easier to create more flexible permissions to manage approval processes. [David]
    • Bricolage now supports per-user preferences. Admins can mark a preference as overrideable, which allows users to set this preference to their preferred value. [Dave Rolsky]
    • The character set and language preferences have been moved into the database, so that these can be overridden by individual users if needed. [Dave Rolsky]
    • Added the "bric_queued" daemon to take advantage of the new publication scheduling of Bric::Util::Job::Pub. Together with the use of a carefully tuned instance of Bricolage, these new features allows the Bricolage administrator to control the amount of system resources given over to publishing. [Mark]
    • German localization completed. [Thorsten Biel]
    • Added User and Desk (asset) modules to the SOAP API, added asset commands to the Workflow module, and made corresponding changes to bric_soap. [Scott]
    • Added "burn_again" attribute to the Mason burner. This method can be called from within a template to force the burner to burn the current page again, creating a new file. This can be useful for creating multi-file output without extra paginated subelements. [David]
    • Added zh-cn localization, with translation based on zh-tw. [Kang-min Liu]
  • Improvements
    • Fixed upgrade scripts to be more intelligent in their handling of transactions. They no longer allow SQL errors without failing the upgrade. The upgrade scripts have also been updated to ensure successful upgrades to Bricolage installations as far back as 1.4.0. [David]
    • Added "element_key_name" parameter to the "list()" method of the story, media, and formatting classes. This makes it easier to use the name of a story type element, media type element, or template element to search for assets, rather than the "element__id" parameter, which isn't as friendly. [David]
    • Added "Filter by Site Context" preference. When active, search results only return assets relative to the site context instead of all the sites the user has access to [Jo„o Pedro]
    • The Mason burner now uses document templates as true dhandlers, enabling full Mason-style inheritance from autohandlers to work properly. [David & Dave Rolsky]
    • "All *" groups can now be accessed via the Group Manager. Their names and memberships cannot be edited, but their permissions can. Inspired by a bug report from Patrick Walsh. [David]
    • Queries for stories, media, and templates have been greatly optimized. Thanks to a large database from *The Register* and query optimization from Josh Berkus (under sponsorship from WHO) and Simon Myers of GBDirect, searches for stories in the UI are now 10-40 times faster than they were before (depending on the version of PostgreSQL you're running). [David]
    • Added the "story.category" parameter to the "list()" method of Bric::Biz::Asset::Business::Story. Pass in a story ID, and a list of stories in the same categories as the story with that ID will be returned, minus the story with that ID. This parameter triggers a complex join, which can slow the query time significantly on underpowered servers or systems with a large number of stories. Still, it can be very useful in templates that want to create a list of stories in all of the categories the current story is in. But be sure to use the parameter! Thanks to Josh Berkus for his help figuring out the query syntax. [David]
  • Bug Fixes
    • Category groups can be edited again. Reported by Alexander Ling. [David]
    • Elements can be edited again. Thanks to Alexander Ling for the spot! [David]
    • Element fields can be edited again without encountering the "called the removed method 'get_name'" error. Reported by Alexander Ling. [David]
    • Templates can be deleted again. Thanks to Adeola Awoyemi for the spot! [David]
    • Stories and media with non-unique URIs can now be deleted. Reported by Simon Wilcox. [David]
    • Checkin and Publish once again works in the media profile. Thanks to Alexander Ling for the spot. [David]
    • The inline "Bulk Edit" feature in story and media profiles works again. Thanks to Neal Sofge for the spot! [David]
    • Templates are now correctly saved to the user's sandbox when "Save and Stay" is pressed. [Jo„o Pedro]
    • Select lists now correctly save their states so that, for example, dropdown menus in New Story remember the element and category that was selected last time. [Scott]
    • Sites can now be disassociated with elements. Reported by Alexander Ling. [David]
    • Redirects during previews work again. [David]
    • The virtual FTP server works again for the first time since before the release of 1.7.0. Now when you log in to the FTP server, the root directory will contain a list of sites. When you change directories into one of the site directories, you'll see a list of the output channels in that site. [David]
    • The virtual FTP server no longer displays output channels or categories (or sites) that the user does not have at least READ permission to access. [David]

For a complete list of the changes, see the changes file.

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.

Enjoy!

David