eZ Publish 4.3.0 released

We are proud to announce the release of eZ Publish 4.3.0, after a development cycle of six months. This release contains many new features, performance enhancements and over 150 bug fixes in both the kernel as in its associated extensions compared to eZ Publish 4.2.0

Highlights

eZ Publish kernel improvements

• General improvements to the LDAP login handler
• A new content/dashboard view has been introduced
• Fetch function for shop orders and wishlist for current user
• Simplified creation of new RSS feed from a node with gui functionality to simplify creating node feeds
• Better support image/media/file in RSS export (<enclosure> and <description>)
• smtp class has been replaced with ezcMailSmtpTransport
• Added class attribute category field for data map grouping in object edit interface (limited to admin2 design for now)
• Added object states for content/remove policy
• Added possibility to have help / description text on class and class attributes (shown to editors when editing content) (limited to admin2 design for now)
• Fixed an issue where class editing would make a class loose its group
• Make sure that eZ JSCore is enabled by default during eZ Publish install
• Deprecated classes have been removed
• ezi18n() has been deprecated, so in the future calls to to the translation system from PHP code should go via ezpI18n::tr()
• templateInit() has been deprecated, so in the future calls to to get template instance should go via ezTemplate::factory()
• Important fix in the mysqli database handler, fixing a potential apache crash
• Cache clearing scripts are now more strict, when being run by root.
• Mail transport classes can now be placed inside extensions
• eZ JSCore - file names were cut
• Added date picker for ezdate and ezdatetime datatypes in admin2
• several bugfixes related to mail transport
• bugfixes for eZ Comments: class editing, redirection, translatable strings
• bugfixes in the new functionalities of eZ Find on context aware indexing
• correct packaging of eZ Teamroom and its dependencies
• corrected an issue with eZODF in clustered setups
• Added support for extending eZCache, letting for instance eZ JSCore add entry for clearing packed javascript and stylesheet cache

eZ JSCore (1.1.0)

• New AppendLastModifiedTime setting to append last modified time to packed js/css files to be able to set far future http headers on the files to let (reverse) proxy's serve them without potential cache issues.
• New CustomHosts setting to override the domain host name pr file type if you use specific doamin aliases to serve static files as suggested by YSLow as a client side performance tweak.
• Policy checking in has_access_to_limitation template operator and ezjscore/call (server calls) now support more complex roles and policy-setups correctly.
• New reusable ezjsc::search server call for searching content with ajax calls with or without ezfind installed.
• Y.io.ez() & jQuery.ez() now lets you force that you want to use GET request instead of POST for http cache reasons. For YUI api is same as Y.io(), for jQuery.ez() it is done by setting second 'post' parameter to false.
• jQuery.ez() second 'post' parameter now additionally supports the jQuery.serializeArray() format so you can post jQuery serialized form data directly.
• eZ JSCore is now cluster enabled.

eZ Find (2.2.0)

• Configurable context aware handling of attributes with respect to search, facets, filtering and sort
• Multi-lingual improvements: option to have each language being served from its own index with language specific spellchecks, synonyms, stemming, ...
• Improved highlighting, now also configurable in ezfind.ini
• Possibility to specify commit delays without using cron (useful for installations with lots of updates and UGC)
• Improvements of the elevate administration panel

Admin interface refresh

"Admin2", the new admin re-design is the biggest visual change in this release. Efforts have been put into making the design lighter, more modern, faster, more extendable, more consistent and only show the elements the current user has access to.

Additionally several key user interface operations have been given some love with focus on letting both editors and power users be more efficient on day to day task. For instance, ajax on moving class attributes up / down, focus on added class attribute, an extra toolbar in top of content & class edit interface, inline search on relation datatypes, a more compact tabbed interface for node details, and while not only admin2 related, the help / description text on class and class attributes.

New eZ Publish release includes configurable dashboard functionality where users can see various information coming from website activity. Access to your last drafts or to your latest content has never been this easy. Content is displayed in dashboard blocks depends on the current user permissions. Dashboard enables developers to add their own customizable blocks. Each dashboard block is template based and can be setup very easily just by defining it in dashboard.ini file. Blocks has configurable information about number of content items displayed as well as priority which determine when block should be displayed.

Notable new extensions

New default bundled extensions

In the 4.3.0 release several new extensions are part of the standard distribution:

eZ JSCore provides core functionalities for: Ajax, integration of JS frameworks like YUI and jQuery and also utility functions for CSS and JS files

eZ Script Monitor provides a way to register script for background processing. Long running processes from the GUI can now be sent to the background. An example of such feature is the ability to defer the modifications of content objects that need to be updated when their content class got changed. This can be achieved by overriding the ContentClassEditHandler entry ([ContentSettings] section from site.ini) to eZContentClassEditDeferredHandler.

Notable updates in stand-alone extensions

eZ Teamroom

eZ Teamroom is an extension that facilitates collaboration of teams, possibly geographically dispersed. It has an easy to use, Ajaxified GUI and customisable dashboard. It is also an excellent foundation for intranets and extranets, as it provides document management, project management, wiki's, file sharing, calendar (with recurring events) and more...

The extensions comes bundled with three other extensions that will be certified within the scope of eZ Teamroom: eZ Event (recurring events), eZ Lightbox (a flexible container) and eZ XML installer (a tool to configure and modify new and existing installations of eZ Publish)

eZ Find

eZ Find got a major update to allow for better multi-lingual handling, facets, performance enhancements, powerful functions to be used in filtering and boosting and many bug fixes.

eZ Flow 2.1

Various enhancements (better localization, support for additional search parameters) to the AJAX search functionality, better integration with eZ Find. Beside of many bug fixes eZ Flow has also enabled support for clustering for timeline functionality.

Website Interface 1.6

A new feature in Website Interface 1.6 allows users to easily and quickly create RSS feeds for various pages directly from website toolbar. Now you can setup RSS feed for your news folder just by clicking one button. For maximum flexibility with custom content classes, mapping between attributes can be configure in the INI file. Also, the eztagcloud template operator used for creating dynamic tag clouds has a new sorting option.

eZ Comments

eZ Comments is an extension that provides a high traffic commenting system for eZ Publish content. The features include: a dedicated storage area (outside the ezobjects/eznode tables), dedicated permissions system, notifications, show/hide of comments and more.

Misc

eZ Multiupload, eZ Survey also got several bug fixes for stability and compatibility

Notes on backwards-compatibility

Backwards compatibility notes for 4.3.0

Changelogs

For a detailed list of changes see the full changelog: 4.2.0 to 4.3.0

Upgrading

Please follow the upgrade instructions over at the documentation site to upgrade your existing installation to 4.3.0.

Downloads

eZ Publish 4.3.0 and extension downloads

Other

Also read the official press release.

And leave your comments at the associated discussion, below