Last OpenCms 7 preview before final release

Development of OpenCms 7 has reached the last milestone before public release as the second and final release candidate (RC 2) of OpenCms 7 is now available. The main development on OpenCms 7 is done by Alkacon Software with contributions from the OpenCms community.

This OpenCms 7 RC 2 Preview release is available as binary package from the Download section on opencms.org. The source code is available in the public CVS in the "DEV_7_0" branch (Tag "build_7rc_2").

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.
• Link management support has been added in editors for standard HTML tags 'area', 'object' & 'embed'.
• 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 comlete 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 user 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.
• The core database structure has been optimized.
• JSP 2.0 and Servlet 2.4 are now used by default.

Who should use this OpenCms 7 RC 2 distribution download?

It is recommended for heavy OpenCms users, developers and contributors to install and try out this release candidate version, in order to prepare for the upcoming OpenCms 7 final release.

Users looking for a stable installation should use the latest 6.2.x version now and upgrade to OpenCms 7 when the final release is available. Please note that there will be no update wizard provided for any release candidate (RC) version to the final release of OpenCms 7.

OpenCms 7 release plan:

OpenCms 7.0 final will be released July 4, 2007. Compared to the RC 2 version, we expect no changes except fixes for bugs or other issues that have been found in the RC 2 release. This version will also contain the update wizard for Oracle.

Please note that this feature list and release plan for OpenCms 7 comes without any warranty and it is subject to change without notice. Updates will be published on the OpenCms website and the opencms-dev mailing list.