use Perl

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.

  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