Bricolage 1.11.0 Changes

2008.04.30

New Features

  • Added pick-a-type dropdown to Job Manager, so you can constrain the jobs listed to, for example, only today’s job or only failed jobs. [Scott]

  • Added support for the FCKeditor WYSIWYG editor. Sponsored by Freerun Technologies. [David]

  • Added support for MySQL 5.0.3 or later, from Andrei Arsu’s 2006 Google Summer of Code project. [Andrei Arsu]

  • Added a NONE function to Bric::Util::DBI. For any list parameter where you could’ve used ANY before, you can now also use NONE to return only objects that don’t match. [Scott]

  • Added support for Apache 2. See Switching to Apache 2 in Bric::Admin for details on swtiching an existing Bricolage installation from Apache 1 to Apache 2. [Scott, Chris Heiland, David]

  • Added element occurrence specification, from Christian Muise’s 2006 Google Summer of Code project. Element types and field types can now have required minimum and maximum numbers of times they appear in a document. For example, if a pull quote element type has a minimum of 2 and a maximum of 4, when a new story is created it will be pre-populated with 2 pull quote elments. The user can add up to two more, but no more. If either min or max are 0, then there is no minimum or maximum. For backwards compatibility, the upgrade will set existing element types and field types to have min and max set to 0. [Christian Muise]

UI Improvements

  • JavaScript is now being used more extensively throughout the UI to improve performance and usability.

    • The following items can now be edited on-the-fly (i.e. without reloading):

      • Fields and subelements in the story, media, and category profiles

      • Keywords in the story, media, and category profiles

      • Categories in the story profile

      • Output Channels in the story and media profiles

      • Organizations in the source profile

      • Roles in the contributor profile

      • Contacts in the user and contributor profiles

      • Extensions in the media type profile

      • Rules in the alert type profile

    • Fields and subelements in the story and media profiles are displayed recursively, so a story’s entire contents can be edited from one screen, as opposed to one screen per subelement as it was previously.

    • The right side of desk items has been redesigned. Icons are used because they save space. and they finally allow assets to be moved between desks from the Workspace, and assets to be checked in to any desk from the Desk view. The and Publish and and Shelve options have also been added. Additionally, you have the option to immediately publish assets on publish desks, or schedule them for later.

    • Desks now use JavaScript to execute actions immediately. Where you previously had to choose an action from a select list and scroll all the way to the bottom to execute it, you can now check in, move, check out, or delete an asset in one click, without a full page refresh.

    • The event log and trail have been merged and improved. The trail was a subset of the event log that only showed desk moves. You can now filter the log by any event type, and there’s a dedicated link to choose the right event types to recreate the trail.

    • Error details (including oft-requested stack traces) are now viewable directly from the 500 error page, instead of having to check the error_log or view the error page’s source. To avoid scaring lay people, the details are only shown (via JavaScript) when the new View Error Details link is clicked.

    • When more than 3 error messages need to be displayed, the first three are shown, along with a (more) link, which expands to show the remaining messages.

    [Marshall, part of the Google Summer of Code 2006]

  • The left nav menu no longer uses an <iframe>. JavaScript and cookies are used instead, making the left nav faster. [Scott, Marshall, David]

  • Added the new BLOB_SEARCH bricolage.conf directive, which enables data text searches in the UI to search paragraph-type fields as well as shorter header-type fields. [David]

  • When editing a field type, if a numeric value is set to an empty value, it will be set to 0 rather than retaining its previous value. [David]

  • The expire information for sources is now localized in the list view (the Sources Manager). [David]

Improvements

  • Moved the Mason UI components in comp/widgets/wrappers/sharky/ to comp/widgets/wrappers/ since sharky makes no sense. [Marshall]

  • Updated the Portuguese localizations. [Pedro Custodio]

  • Added the related_story_id and related_media_id parameters to Bric::Biz::Element::Container->list(). [David]

  • Added the —fatal-no-cat option to contrib/bric_media_upload. [Scott]

  • Added support for a bunch of environment variables during installation. They’re documented under Installation Variables in Bric::Admin, and are most useful when used in combination with either INSTALL_VERBOSITY=QUIET or make dev. [David]

  • The installer is no longer required to become the system super user (root) during make install, although it is still recommended. During the database configuration, the installer asks whether it should create the database and if it should become the database system user during installation, which is the bit that required the user to be root, and is required for compatibility with ident authentication. The default is to not become the database system user, although make install may still need to be run as the super user in order to install files in their proper locations. [Brian Smith and David]