Release Notes for OpenCms 7 RC 2

June 6, 2007: This is the release of OpenCms 7 RC 2 (aka 6.9.2). OpenCms 7 is a major upgrade, and it vastly expands the features of OpenCms 6.

Features of the OpenCms 7 RC 2 release

• An experimental update Wizard for OpenCms 6 installations on MySQL is available [new in RC 2].
• Support for the PostgreSQL database now included [new in RC 2].
• Improved backward compatibility with OpenCms version 6 [new in RC 2].
• The internal link management has been greatly improved.
• If files (or folders) are moved / renamed, all links to these files are now kept intact.
• Deleting a resource that is linked by other resources does now display a warning / confirmation dialog.
• The new "Content Relationship Engine" (CRE) allows defining arbitrary relations between OpenCms resources.
• Native support for WebDAV access to the OpenCms VFS has been added.
• Publishing of resources is now done using a queue, so a user can continue to work after publishing has started.
• The concept of "Organization Units" (OUs) has been added to the internal user management.
• System permissions are now based on a complete new set of "Roles".
• It is now possible to delegate management of users / groups in OUs to Sub-Administrators.
• A "switch user" (su) function for Administrators in the OpenCms Workplace is now available.
• Many usability improvements for the OpenCms Workplace have been made, especially concerning the handling of other users locks.
• Many dialogs in the OpenCms Workplace are more responsive because of the use of Ajax technologies.
• The context menus in the Workplace are now cascading and can be configured individually based on the users permissions.
• A new "Undelete" function is available on the context menu to restore deleted resources, including complete deleted subtrees.
• The full text search has been greatly improved so that individual resource properties or fields from XML content can be searched directly.
• A "time warp" feature in the Workplace now allows users to view resources with date expired / date released settings.
• Auto correction for structured XML contents now allows changes to the XML schema of existing resources.
• A configurable search tool is now available for content managers in the Workplace.
• A "permalink" handler for resources is available for external references in case a resource is moved or renamed.
• Link management support has been added in editors for standard HTML tags 'area', 'object' & 'embed'.
• The core database structure has been optimized.
• JSP 2.0 and Servlet 2.4 are now used by default.

Improved backward compatibility with version 6

OpenCms 7 RC 2 features much improved backward compatibility with version 6 compared to the 7 RC 1 release. Most templates and other OpenCms developed code from version 6 should work "out of the box" with version 7. A number of API methods from OpenCms 6 have been marked as "deprecated". In case you have made extensive use of OpenCms internal classes and APIs from version 6, there may be some changes required in your code. However, in most cases this should not take longer than a couple of hours.

Please note that since OpenCms 7 uses JSP 2.0 and Servlet 2.4 standards by default, you may have to change that back to JSP 1.2 / Servlet 2.3 so your existing OpenCms JSP templates run without change. You must edit the "web-app" node in the OpenCms web.xml file to do that.

We are still very interested in feedback regarding backwards compatibility to OpenCms 6.2, since we want to improve the 7 API to be as compatible as possible.

Compatibility with Java versions, Servlet containers and Databases

OpenCms 7 RC 2 has been written and tested using Java 1.5 / 1.6. It works well with Java 1.4 using the optional "Java 1.4 compatibility package". It won't work with Java 1.3. We have tested only with SUNs version of the JDK. However, OpenCms has no dependencies to sun.* packages so it should in theory run with all compliant JVMs.

We have tested this release on the Tomcat servlet engine. OpenCms 7 RC 2 works "out of the box" with Tomcat 5.5, which we recommend. Testing for other servlet containers like JBoss, BEA and Websphere has yet to be done for OpenCms 7. We appreciate any feedback regarding other servlet containers.

On the database side, we have tested with MySQL 4.0, MySQL 4.1, MySQL 5.0, Oracle 9.x and Oracle 10.x, as well as PostgreSQL 8.2.x and 7.4.x. Support for other DBs still needs to be updated for OpenCms 7. The automatic update wizard for OpenCms 7 RC 2 supports only MySQL.

Regarding version numbers and CVS build tags

In case you want to check out OpenCms from the CVS, please keep the following in mind: The CVS tag for the 7 RC 2 release is "build_7rc_2". Development of maintenance releases (like 6.2.3) is currently done in CVS HEAD. Development of the next major OpenCms 7.0 release is done in the "DEV_7_0" branch.

How you can help

Contributions to the OpenCms core development are most welcome. Please contact the core development team on the opencms-dev mailing list in case you are interested in supporting the development of OpenCms.

Please use our Bugzilla to report bugs in this release: http://bugzilla.opencms.org/

Thank you for using OpenCms and have fun with OpenCms 7 RC 2 :-)