use Perl

I'm thrilled to announce the release of Bricolage-Devel 1.7.3, the fourth development release for what will soon 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 third development release, 1.7.2, and adds several new features and numerous improvements. The most significant changes since 1.7.2 include:

• New Features
• • The virtual FTP server now moves templates into workflow when they're uploaded and puts them into the user's sandbox. This behavior allows the user to test the template changes without imposing possible bugs upon other Bricolage users. This approach is much safer than the previous behavior, which simply checked in and deployed a template upon upload. Templates can still be deployed via the virtual FTP server by appending .deploy to their names. The original behavior of always deploying templates upon upload can be restored by enabling the FTP_DEPLOY_ON_UPLOAD bricolage.conf directive. [David]
  • Added ANY function to be used with select parameters to story, media, and template (formatting) list. Pass a list of values to this function to have any of of them match for a given parameter. This is especially useful for matching on, say, a list of URIs or category IDs. This function is automatically available in templates. [David]
  • Added a feature that counts characters used in a textarea subelement on the fly. It displays this figure and the number of characters left, immediately above the textarea. This feature is enabled when the Max size attribute for the textarea is given a non zero value when adding it to the element profile stage. The JavaScript will also not allow you to have more than max size characters in the textarea by truncating the data to that number of characters every time someone adds another character beyond the maximum. [Paul Orrock/Digital Craftsmen]
  • Added a feature to display image thumbnails in the search results and active view for media objects that are image objects. This feature uses the Perl module Imager from CPAN and the relevant image library for each format you want to display. It can be turned on or off using the USE_THUMBNAILS bricolage.conf directive. See Bric::Biz::Asset::Business::Media::Image for more information. [Paul Orrock/ Digital Craftsmen]
• Improvements
• • More story, media, and template query optimization. [David]
  • The story, media, and template queries now use aggregates to create arrays of group IDs, instead of returning a separate row for each individual group ID. Since all story, media, and template objects are now returned in single rows instead of potentially many rows, this greatly cuts down on the overhead of fetching data from the database. Suggested by Josh Berkus. [David]
  • Thanks to the aggregation of group IDs into a single row for each story, media and template object, the Offset and Limit parameters to the list() methods of the story, media, and template (formatting) classes are now handled by the database back end, instead of in Perl space. This makes using these parameters much more efficient.
  • Added get_element() method to Bric::Biz::Asset::Business and deprecated the get_tile() method. This will make things a bit more consistent for template developers, at least. [David]
  • Added primary_category_id parameter to the story class' list() method. [David]
  • The list of output channels available to be included in an output channel now has the name of the site with which each is affiliated listed as well. This is to prevent confusion between output channels with the same names in different sites. [David]
  • The Contributor manager no longer presents a "New" link if the Contributor Type on which the contributor is based has no custom fields. This will prevent folks from creating new contributor roles in the UI only to find that Bricolage hasn't created them because there are no custom fields. [David]
  • In the formBuilder interface used by the Element and Contributor Type profiles, the maximum length of text and textarea fields is no "0", or unlimited. [David]
  • When publishing from a publish desk, you can now uncheck related assets in order to not publish them. [Scott]
• Bug Fixes
• • The virtual FTP server now correctly creates a utility template when a template with an unknown name is uploaded. [David]
  • The virtual FTP server now pays proper attention to all permissions. [David]
  • A number of upgrade script annoyances were cleared up. [David]
  • The simple parameter to the Media class' list() method works again. As a result, so does "Find Stories" in the UI. [David]
  • Several Alert Type fixes. Rule regular expression matching (=~, !~) now handles patterns containing slashes (important for URIs, for example). Attributes no longer show up as stringified hash references in subject or message variable substitution. $trig_password was removed from the Profile as it caused an error and was useless anyway. And finally, duplicate and spurious attributes were removed from the rules and message variable lists. [Scott & David]
  • Fixed Template Element list, where container elements appeared twice. [Joao Pedro]
  • Changes to site settings are now correctly reflected in the UI for all users as soon as they are made. [David]
  • Autopopulated fields in media elements can once again have their values fetched in templates. This problem was due to bad key names being created for new image elements created after upgrading to 1.7.0. [David]
  • The workflow profile no longer displays deactivated sites in the site select list. Thanks to Serge Sozonoff for the spot. [David]
  • Fixed URI uniqueness upgrade scripts, which were having problems with PostgreSQL permissions. [David]
  • make clone works again. [David]
  • Distribution jobs can be edited via the UI again. Thanks to Marshall Roch for the spot. [David]
  • Publishes once again work when the "Date/Time Format" preference is set to something other than ISO-8601. Reported by Marshall Roch. [David]
  • Fixed previewing with multiple OCs. [Serge Sozonoff]
  • Fixed a bug in bric_soap story create/update caused by refactoring in version 1.7.0. Found by David during a demo. [Scott]
  • An attempt to preview a story for which no template exists now gives a friendly error message again. This was broken by the change in 1.7.2 that made the Mason burner use document templates as true dhandlers. [Dave Rolsky]
  • The workflow menus in the side navigation layer no longer disappear after a server restart. Reported by Ben Bangert. [David]
  • The Mason burner's special <%publish>, <%preview>, and <%chk_syntax> tags now work as advertised. Reported by Ben Bangert. [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