[opencms-dev] OpenCms 5.3.5 available in CVS

[Alexander Kandzior]

Hi all,

OpenCms version 5.3.5 is now available in the CVS HEAD. As usual, all
feedback on this development version is greatly appreciated. 

The version is tagged with the "build_5_3_5" tag. 

The most important new feature in this version is the addition of a "relase
date" and an "expiration date" to every resource in the VFS. Setting this
dates (both optional) controls the availability of a resource can be
time-limited. The new dates are set using the "Touch" dialog in the
Workplace explorer. 

One important change is that we now use UTF-8 as default encoding. This
allows for almost unlimited use of all kind of "non western european" chars
in e.g. the properties or the file content. A great amount of work has been
put into this, but still some encoding issues may be present. Please report
all issues regarding charset/encoding you find in the 5.3.5 release.

There a couple of changes in the DB schema. If you want to import content
from older 5.3.x (or even 5.0.x) versions, you need to do a full export and
re-import all the files. You may have to set your default encoding in
opencms.properties to the value from the old installation.

We are getting closer to the first "public" downloadable alpha release of
OpenCms 6. Yet we have some more schema changes in mind that we want to have
finished before we get the public binary download. 

The target release date for 6.0 is the 2nd half of this year, as it appears
now it's likley to be in the 4th quarter. 


Here's the complete list of changes from the history.txt:

Legend:
! New Feature
* Bug fixed
- General comment

OpenCms 5.3.5 Ix - June 16, 2004
- Important: This version contains changes to the OpenCms VFS database
schema
  To update you must do a full export and re-import all resources
! The content of a xmlPage is now verified with the DTD when saving from any
editor
! Improved error handling when an error occurs during save in the editors,
  it's now possible to go back and correct the errors
! All editors now ensure that the selected encoding/charset is used for
  the content, if chars are not available these are escaped with HTML
entities
! If the encoding property of a file is changed, all HTML entities that are
  avalable in the new encoding are converted to characters and vice versa  
! Elements available in the control file but not declared using the
template-elements
  property are now also displayed in the editor element selection 
! If a template property points to a template that is not located in a
'regular'
  template folder, this template is now added to the template selection as
well  
! Added 'update workplace' event to re-initialize the Workplace after
changes are made  
! Resource locales are now cached
* Fixed issue with galleries not working when in root site  
* Fixed issue with NPE in CmsXmlPage.initBookmarks() method
* If a xmlPage is read from a CmsFile, the byte array is now directly used
for the
  generation of the xml document (fixing an encoding issue)
! All user Workplace preferences are now fully configurable 
  in the opencms-workplace.xml file
* The "internal use only" flag has been placed on the permission dialog
again
- Refactored package org.opencms.page to org.opencms.xml.page
! Added "Relase Date" and "Expiration Date" to the structure table of the
resource
- Using long values instead of Timestamps for date information in VFS
resource tables
! Added Junit test setup for OpenCms VFS tests
! Added a couple of initial Junit test cases for the CmsObject
! Added target "unittests" to build.xml to execute all OpenCms Junit tests
- Now using dom4j 1.5 (beta2) because version 1.4 apparently has issues in
CDATA handling 
- Added jaxen as separate jar (jaxen-1.1-beta-2.jar) since it is not longer
included in dom4j.jar
- Now using the latest htmlparser version 1.41
* Fixed issue with links that contain escaped characters like '%20'
- "Relase Date" and "Expire Date" GUI added to Touch dialog in the Workplace
- Flex Cache now invalidates entries according to "Relase Date" and "Expire
Date"
- Added org.opencms.file-CmsResourceFilter to filter results from VFS
queries
- Added patch for OpenCms to run on JBoss
! Added support for additional JDBC options during setup
- The default encoding has been set to UTF-8
* It's not longer required to run OpenCms with the same encoding as the
default system encoding
! "Relase Date" and "Expire Date" are now also displayed in the OpenCms
Explorer
- Property definitions are now shared among ALL resources, not per resource
type
- Improved locale handling in XmlPage
- Added "Cache-Control" "must-revalidate" for all Workplace requests to
prevent caching, this 
  should allow operation with a browser setting "Check for new version of a
page" of "Auto"
* Better error message when file upload size is exceeded
! Added setting in user preferences "Start with site" and "Start in folder"
! Added setting in user preferences to restrict user to a subtree of a site
! When switching sites, the last used folder in the site is now displayed
instead of the root folder
* Individual and shared properties are now exported and imported correctly
- Improvements to the (new) XML handling classes


Best Regards,
Alex.

Alexander Kandzior
Alkacon Software - The OpenCms Experts
http://www.alkacon.com