OpenACS Release Notes

The ChangeLogs include an annotated list of changes since the last release and in the entire 5.2 release sequence.

Release 5.2.0 release candidate 2

  • Bug fixes.

    New TIPs implemented.

    This release does not include new translations.

Release 5.1.4

  • Bug fixes.

    The missing CR TCL API has been filled in, thanks to Rocael and his team and Dave Bauer.

    This release does not include new translations.

Release 5.1.3

  • Bug fixes, primarily for .LRN compatibility in support of upcoming .LRN 2.1.0 releases. This release does not include new translations since 5.1.2.

Release 5.1.2

  • Translations syncronized with the translation server. Basque and Catalan added.

  • For a complete change list, see the Change list since 5.1.0 in Changelog.

Release 5.1.1

  • This is the first release using the newest adjustment to the versioning convention. The OpenACS 5.1.1 tag will apply to OpenACS core as well as to the most recent released version of every package, including .LRN.

  • Translations syncronized with the translation server.

  • Bug 1519 fixed. This involved renaming all catalog files for ch_ZH, TH_TH, AR_EG, AR_LB, ms_my, RO_RO, FA_IR, and HR_HR. If you work with any of those locales, you should do a full catalog export and then import (via /acs-lang/admin) after upgrading acs-lang. (And, of course, make a backup of both the files and database before upgrading.)

  • Other bug fixes since 5.1.0: 1785, 1793, and over a dozen additional bug fixes.

  • For a complete change list, see the Change list since 5.0.0 in Changelog.

Release 5.1.0

  • Lots of little tweaks and fixes

  • Complete Change list since 5.0.0 in Changelog

  • Many Bug fixes

Release 5.0.4

  • New translations, including for .LRN 2.0.2.

Release 5.0.3

Release 5.0.2

Release 5.0.1

  • All work on the translation server from 7 Nov 2003 to 7 Feb 2004 is now included in catalogs.

  • One new function in acs-tcl, util::age_pretty

  • Complete Change list since 5.0.0 in Changelog

  • Many documentation updates and doc bug fixes

Release 5.0.0

This is OpenACS 5.0.0. This version contains no known security, data loss, or crashing bugs, nor any bugs judged release blockers. This version has received manual testing. It has passed current automated testing, which is not comprehensive. This release contains work done on the translation server http://translate.openacs.org through 7 Nov 2003.

Please report bugs using our Bug Tracker at the OpenACS website.

You may want to begin by reading our installation documentation for the section called “a Unix-like system”. Note that the Windows documentation is not current for OpenACS 5.2.0b8, but an alternative is to use John Sequeira's Oasis VM project.

After installation, the full documentation set can be found by visiting http://yourserver/doc.

New features in this release:

  • Internationalization support. A message catalog to store translated text, localization of dates, number formatting, timezone conversion, etc. Allows you to serve your users in their language.

  • External authenticaiton. Integrate with outside user databases through e.g. LDAP, RADIUS, Kerberos, MS Active Directory. Imports user information through IMS Enterprise 1.1 format. Easily extended to support other authentication, password management, account creation, and account import mechanisms. This includes improvements to the basic cookie handling, so logins can be expired without the user's identity being completely lost. You can set login to expire after a certain period (e.g. 8 hours, then password must be refreshed), or you can have all issues login cookies expired at once, e.g. if you have left a permanent login cookie on a public machine somewhere.

  • User interface enhancements. All pages, including site-wide and subsite admin pages, will be templated, so they can be styled using master template and site-wide stylesheets. We have a new default-master template, which includes links to administration, your workspace, and login/logout, and is rendered using CSS. And there's a new community template (/packages/acs-subsite/www/group-master), which provides useful navigation to the applications and administrative UI in a subsite. In addition, there's new, simpler UI for managing members of a subsite, instantiating and mounting applications, setting permissions, parameters, etc. Site-wide admin as also seen the addition of a new simpler software install UI to replace the APM for non-developer users, and improved access to parameters, internationalization, automated testing, service contracts, etc. The list builder has been added for easily generating templated tables and lists, with features such as filtering, sorting, actions on multiple rows with checkboxes, etc. Most of all, it's fast to use, and results in consistently-looking, consistently-behaving, templated tables.

  • Automated testing. The automated testing framework has been improved significantly, and there are automated tests for a number of packages.

  • Security enhancements. HTML quoting now happens in the templating system, greatly minimizing the chance that users can sneak malicious HTML into the pages of other users.

  • Oracle 9i support.

  • Who's online feature.

  • Spell checking.

Potential incompatibilities:

  • With the release of OpenACS 5, PostgreSQL 7.2 is no longer supported. Upgrades are supported from OpenACS 4.6.3 under Oracle or PostgreSQL 7.3.

  • The undocumented special handling of ~ and +variable+ in formtemplates, found in packages/acs-templating/resources/*, has been removed in favor of using <noparse> and \@variable\@ (the standard templating mechanisms). Locally provided formtemplate styles still using these mechanisms will break.

  • Serving backup files and files from the CVS directories is turned off by default via the acs-kernel parameter ExcludedFiles in section request-processor (The variable provides a string match glob list of files and is defaulted to "*/CVS/* *~")

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Release 4.6.3

Release Notes for 4.6.3

Release 4.6.2

Release Notes for 4.6.2

Release 4.6

Release Notes for 4.6

Release 4.5

Release Notes for 4.5

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