Thursday, October 21, 2010

Magnolia CMS 4.4 - Milestone 1

The team has finished its first sprint of Magnolia 4.4 development. As you might know, we aim to deliver some acutely missed enterprise features with this release.

If you want to see some of the features in action please have a look at the video done by Federico:



Features we have implemented in the first sprint:
  • Diff view (EE). We have implemented a visual diff based on the rendered HTML output.
  • Translation export/import (EE). Export and import of translatable text to and from CSV files. The export uses the dialog configuration to determine what should be exported and what not.
  • Soft locking (EE). Show a warning message if other users have a page open in the edit mode.
  • ModeShape support. Magnolia can now be backed with the JBoss JCR repository implementation.
  • FCKEditor update. We updated to 2.6.6. The most interesting feature in this version is a SpellChecker.
  • Early paragraph execution. Paragraphs sometimes want to execute logic before the page rendering starts. This is needed to perform operations like forward and redirect. This is now possible due to a new filter which executes the model in an early phase. This enables us to build multi-step forms (see next sprint).
In the second sprint, which will be the last one, we will mainly work on:
  • De-coupling deletion and de-activation. The immediate de-activation of content on deletion was always problematic. We have worked out a concept and are about to solve the issue.
  • Reference view (EE). A page which lists content that references a page and content the page references. This can be used to build a warning message on deletion and to show dependent content in the workflow dialog.
  • Multi-step forms (CE/STK). Enhancement of the form builder so that one can build wizard-like multi-step forms. Each step is created as a sub-page. Each step validates and the status is kept in the session. The concept is based on the new early paragraph execution.

Finally we want to thank Aperto (diff view), MediaCatalyst/Sony Europe (translation export/import) and fastforward (FCKEditor update) for their substantial contributions.

You can download the bundles from our Maven/Nexus repository. Be aware of the fact that those releases are definitely not meant to be used in production.

1 comment:

Magister said...

Nice.. pretty nice.. We needed spell checking and simultaneous editing warning until mgnl 3.5!!! ;-)

Good work, Philipp!
Matteo