Release Notes for OpenCms 8

This is the initial release of OpenCms 8. OpenCms 8 contains a greatly improved user interface for content managers and numerous other enhancements.

New Features of OpenCms 8

• The "Advanced Direct Edit" mode allows to create page content by drag & drop.
• The new sitemap editor allows to create new pages and rearrange the navigation tree by drag & drop.
• A multiple file enabled upload dialog all based on HTML replaced the old "Upload Applet".
• The new "Content Subscription Engine" allows to inform users when important documents have changed.
• The XML content editor now support <xsd:choice> elements.
• The new publish dialog supports session based selection of content as well as add/remove of individual resources.
• Extended support for creation of content for mobile devices with the <cms:mobile> tag.
• A central "Shared Folder" has been added that is available from all sites for sharing content.
• JPA support has been added to the database layer, so there's support for 10 additional databases.

Features of OpenCms in General

• "Direct Edit" allows creation and modification of content directly from a web page.
• Structured contents can be defined using a simple XML schema.
• Includes editors with WYSIWYG and syntax highlighting functionality.
• Easy to use "Online / Offline" workflow, changes must be approved before they become visible.
• Link management for all internal resources with broken link detection.
• Support for WebDAV access to all resources in the OpenCms repository.
• Integrated image scaling and cropping.
• Full featured internal user management that supports the concept of "Organizational Units" (OUs).
• Allows management of multiple websites within one installation.
• Contents can be served dynamically or exported to static HTML files.
• Extensions can be added through a flexible module system.
• Full text search for web pages, but also in PDF, MS Office documents etc.
• The "time warp" feature allows to view resources which are expired or not yet released.
• JSP integration for dynamic functionality in templates, dynamic forms etc.
• Distribution includes a complete demo website "Wonderful World of Flowers".
• ... and many more

Backward compatibility

We recommend everyone who uses OpenCms to update to the 8.0.0 release.

OpenCms 8 is fully backward compatible to all prior 7.x versions. Templates and other OpenCms developed code from version 7.0 or 7.5 should work "out of the box" with version 8.

Users of the Alkacon OCEE packages require a new version of Alkacon OCEE for use with this OpenCms release. OpenCms 8 requires Alkacon OCEE version 3 or newer.

Compatibility with Java versions, Servlet containers and Databases

OpenCms 8.0 has been written and tested using Java 5 / 6. We have tested only with SUNs version (well actually it's ORACLEs version now) 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 works "out of the box" with Tomcat 6.0, which we recommend. Others have reported deploying OpenCms successfully on other servlet containers like JBoss, BEA, Websphere, Glassfish and Resin Professional. We appreciate any feedback regarding other servlet containers.

On the database side, we have tested with MySQL 5.x, Oracle 9.x and Oracle 10.x, as well as PostgreSQL 8.2.x and 7.4.x, MS SQL Server 2000 / 2003, DB2 9.1 and HSQLDB 1.8.0. The automatic update wizard for OpenCms 8 supports MySQL, Oracle and PostgreSQL.

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 numbers for all OpenCms 8.0 releases are "build_8_0_x", so the 8.0.0 release is tagged "build_8_0_0". Development of maintenance releases is currently done in CVS HEAD.

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 8 :-)