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Bricolage 1.8.2 Released

Theory on 2004-09-13T17:04:28

The Bricolage development team is pleased to announce the release of Bricolage 1.8.2. This maintenance release addresses quite a large number of issues in Bricolage 1.8.1. The most important changes were to enhance Unicode support in Bricolage. Bricolage now internally handles all text content as UTF-8 strings, thus enabling templates to better control the manipulation of multibyte characters. Other changes include better performance for searches using the ANY() operators and more intelligent transaction handling for distribution jobs. Here are the other highlights of this release:

Improvements

  • Bricolage now runs under a DSO mod_perl as long as it uses a Perl compiled with -Uusemymalloc or -Ubincompat5005. See The mod_perl FAQ for details.
  • Alerts triggered to be sent to users who don't have the appropriate contact information will now be logged for those users so that they can see them and acknowledge them under My Alerts.
  • Added bric_media_dump script to contrib/.
  • The category association interface used in the story profile when the ENABLE_CATEGORY_BROWSER bricolage.conf directive is enabled now uses radio buttons instead of a link to select the primary category. Suggested by Scott Lanning.
  • Existing jobs are now executed within their own transactions, as opposed to no transaction specification. This means that each job must succeed or fail independent of any other jobs. New jobs are executed before being inserted into the database so as to keep them atomic within their surrounding transaction (generally a UI request). All this means that transactionality is much more intelligent for jobs and will hopefully eliminate job table deadlocks.
  • All templates now execute with UTF-8 character strings enabled. This means that any templates that convert content to other character sets might need to change the way they do so. For example, templates that had used <%filter> blocks to convert content to another encoding using something like Encode::from_to($_, 'utf-8', $encoding) must now use something like $_ = Encode::encode($encoding, $_), instead. Bric::Util::CharTrans should continue to do the right thing.
  • Added encoding attribute to Bric::Util::Burner so that, if templates are outputting something other than Perl utf8 decoded data, they can specify what they're outputting, and the file opened for output from the templates will be set to the proper mode. Applies to Perl 5.8.0 and later only.
  • Added SFTP_HOME bricolage.conf directive to specify the home directory and location of SSH keys when SSH is enabled.

Bug Fixes

  • make clone once again properly copies the lib/Makefile.PL and bin/Makefile.PL files from the source directory.
  • Added missing language-specifying HTML attributes so as to properly localize story titles and the like.
  • The list of output channels to add to an element in the element profile now contains the name of the site that each is associated with, since different sites can have output channels with the same names.
  • The Advanced Search interface once again works for searching for related story and media documents.
  • Bricolage no longer attempts to email alerts to an empty list of recipients. This will make your SMTP server happier.
  • The version numbering issues of Bricolage modules have all been worked out after the confusion in 1.8.1. This incidentally allows the HTML::Template and Template Toolkit burners to be available again.
  • Misspelling the name of a key name tag or including a non-repeatable field more than once in Super Bulk Edit no longer causes all of the changes in that screen to be lost.
  • When a user overrides the global Date/Time Format and Time Zone preferences, the affects of the overrides are now properly reflected in the UI.
  • Publishing a story or media document along with its related story or media documents from a publish desk again correctly publishes the original asset as well as the relateds.
  • Deleted output channels no longer show up in the select list for story type and media type elements.
  • Deleting a workflow from the workflow manager now properly updates the workflow cache so that the deleted workflow is removed from the left navigation without a restart.
  • When Bricolage notices that a document or template is not in workflow or on a desk when it should be, it is now more intelligent in trying to select the correct workflow and/or desk to put it on, based on current workflow context and user permissions.
  • Content submitted to Bricolage in the UTF-8 character set is now always has the utf8 flag set on the Perl strings that store it. This allows fields that have a maximum length to be truncated to that length in characters instead of bytes.
  • Elements with autopopulated fields (e.g., for image documents) can now be created via the SOAP interface.
  • Fixed a number of the parameters to the list() method of the Story, Media, and Template classes to properly handle an argument using the ANY operator. These include the keyword and category_uri parameters. Passing an ANY argument to these parameters before this release could cause a well-populated database to lock up with an impossible query for hours at a time.
  • Template sandboxes now work for the Template Toolkit burner.

For a complete list of the changes, see the changes. For the complete history of ongoing changes in Bricolage, see Bric::Changes.

Download Bricolage 1.8.2 now from the Bricolage Website Downloads page, from the SourceForge download page, and from the Kineticode download page.

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 was hailed as quite possibly the most capable enterprise-class open-source application available by eWEEK.

Enjoy!

--The Bricolage Team