Just a Theory

The Bricolage development team is pleased to announce the release of Bricolage 1.8.3. This maintenance release addresses a number of issues in Bricolage 1.8.2. The most important changes eliminate or greatly reduce the number of deadlocks caused during bulk publishes of many documents. Other changes include new contributed scripts for importing contributors and for generating thumbnail images, Russian localization, and various fixes for database transaction, template formatting, and various user interface fixes. Here are the other highlights of this release:

Improvements

• Added contrib/thumbnails/precreate-thumbs.pl script to pre-create thumbnails from images. Useful for upgraders. [Scott]
• Added contrib/bric_import_contribs to import contributors from a tab-delimited file. Development by Kineticode, sponsored by the RAND Corporation. [David]
• Added the published_version parameter to the list() methods of the story, media, and template classes. This parameter forces the search to return the versions of the assets as they were last published, rather than the most recent version. This will be most useful to those looking up other documents in templates and publishing them, as a way of avoiding pulling documents out from other anyone who might have them checked out! [David]
• All publishing and distribution jobs are now executed in their own transactions when they are triggered by the user interface. This is to reduce the chances of a deadlock between long-running publishing transactions. [David]
• Optimized SQL queries for key names or that order by string values to use indexes in the list() and list_ids() methods of the story, media, and template classes. [David]
• Added Russian localization. [Sergey Samoilenko].
• Changed the foreign keys in the story, media, and formatting (template) tables so that DELETEs do not cascade, but are restricted. This means that before deleting any source, element, site, workflow, or other related object that has a foreign key reference in an asset table, those rows must be deleted. Otherwise, PostgreSQL will throw an exception. Hopefully, this will put a stop to the mysterious but very rare disappearance of stories from Bricolage. [David]
• A call to $burner->burn_another in a template that passes in a date/time string in the future now causes a publish job to be scheduled for that time, rather than immediate burning the document and then scheduling the distribution to take place in the future. Reported by Ashlee Caul. [David]
• Changing the sort order of a list of items in a search interface now properly reverses the entire collection of object over the pages, rather than just the objects for the current page. Thanks to Marshall for the spot! [David]

Bug Fixes

• Publishing stories not in workflow via the SOAP server works again. [David]
• The Burner object’s encoding attribute is now setable as well as readable. [David]
• The category browser works again. [David]
• Fixed Media Upload bug where the full local path was being used, by adding a winxp key to Bric::Util::Trans::FS to account for an update to HTTP::BrowserDetect. [Mark Kennedy]
• Instances of a required custom field in story elements is no longer required once it has been deleted from the element definition in the element manager. Reported by Rod Taylor. [David]
• A false value passed to the checked_out parameter of the list() and list_ids() methods of the story, media, and template (formatting) classes now properly returns only objects or IDs for assets that are not checked out. [David]
• The cover date select widget now works properly in the clone interface when a non-ISO style date preference is selected. Thanks to Susan G. for the spot! [David]
• Sorting templates based on Asset Type (Element) no longer causes an error. [David]
• Fixed a number of the callbacks in the story, media, and template profiles so that they didn’t clear out the session before other callbacks were done with it. Most often seen as the error Can’t call method get_tiles on an undefined value in the media profile, especially with IE/Windows (for some unknown reason). Reported by Ed Stevenson. [David]
• Fixed typo in clone page that caused all output channels to be listed rather than only those associated with the element itself. [Scott]
• Fixed double listing of the All group in the group membership double list manager. [Christian Hauser]
• Image buttons now correctly execute the onsubmit() method for forms that define an onsubmit attribute. This means that, among other things, changes to a group profile will persist when you click the Permissions button. [David]
• Simple search now works when it is selected when the Default Search preference is set to Advanced. Reported by Marshall Roch. [David]
• Multiple alert types set up to trigger alerts for the same event will now all properly execute. Thanks to Christian Hauser for the spot! [David]
• Publishing stories or media via SOAP with the published_only parameter (—published-only for bric_republish) now correctly republishes the published versions of documents even if the current version is in workflow. Reported by Adam Rinehart. [David]
• Users granted a permission greater than READ to the members of the All Users group no longer get such permission to any members of the Global Admins group unless they have specifically been granted such permission to the members of the Global Admins group. Thanks to Marshall Roch for the spot! [David]

For a complete list of the changes, see the changes. For the complete history of ongoing changes in Bricolage, see Bric::Changes.

Download Bricolage 1.8.3 now from the Bricolage Website Downloads page, from the SourceForge download page, and from the Kineticode download page.

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 was hailed as quite possibly the most capable enterprise-class open-source application available by eWEEK.

Enjoy!

—The Bricolage Team