MidCOM 1.4.0 Technology Preview II released

MidCOM development was started by Linksystem Muenchen in March 2002, and it has since evolved into a stable and production-proven platform. Its continuing development is now too sponsred bei Nemein Oy and by Torben Nehmer. MidCOM is available under GNU LGPL.

This is a preview of the new features of the upcoming 1.4.0 release. Many features are already stabilized, but most are not widely tested yet. Use this release at your own risk therefore. Further details about the new features can be found in the CHANGELOG.

Notable new Features since the 1.3 strain:

• Swedish translation added
• Core
  • Centralized Relocation handler, for convenience mostly.
  • You can now access the debug log through an web interface, this is disabled by default for security reasons.
  • A sessioning service is now available directly within the core, available for all components.
  • Components can now store custom data within the component context they are currently running in. This largly eliminiates the need for global variables, as this data is handled by-reference.
  • Added a E-Mail template engine to be used with the new mailtemplate datamanager datatype.
• Debugger
  • debug_print_r does now print the exact type of the variable.
  • debug_print_type can print only the type of the variable, use this when you might encounter objects that reference others so that print_r doesn't work.
• Datamanager
  • Fields can now be shown only in AIS, but not on Datamanager-driven forms on-site.
  • Full-blown CSV interface added to the datamanager, lets you easily create CSV exports based on any schema.
  • It is now possible to store data in arbitarily named parameters. This has been built to be able to edit a component's configuration data on a given topic, but can also be used to work with legacy data.
  • A field can now have an helptext property. It is currently only shown as a tooltip, which is unfortunalety cut after about 50 characters in Mozilla.
  • The datamanager now locks all records that are currently being edited. You can specify the lock timeout and the permission level required to override the lock. See bug #80 for problems related to this feature.
  • New Datatype and Widget: Account (User/Password) with crypt support.
  • New Widget: CommunityHTML Datatype, a very simple widget without WYSIWYG capabilites designed for guestbooks with smilies and the like.
  • New Datatype and Widget: Mail-Template, can store everything you need to generate customizable E-Mails. The type is charset-aware.
  • A helper function lets you now easily display all MidgardGroups in the current sitegroups in a (mulit)-select widget.
  • New Widget: Schemaselect allows you to select a schema from a snippet referenced in another text field.
  • The text widget now has a password inputstyle, a set password is not propagated into the HTML code of course.
  • Added Validation support. This feature requires HTML_Quickform out of the PEAR archive installed. See the Datamanager's docs for further details.
  • The Fieldgroup function now has default styles acciociated with them. This does only affect places, where you had fieldgroups without any css declaration in place.
  • Upgraded to HTMLArea 3.0 RC 1. You might have to check your configuration snippets vor vailidity, though there should be no major problems here. Changes include: Better hyperlink handling, a context menu, better plugin loading, Mozilla can now insert <p>'s (hit enter twice) and, of course, loads of bugfixes.
  • Added a longtext_preformatted text widget format mode, which shows the entered text in a <pre>-like manner both in form and view mode.Added a number datatype to the datamanager with automatic rounding to a given precision. See datatype_number.
• Content Manager
  • The topic control toolbar now respects user privileges, only power users and admin users will see all controls.
  • L10n editor has been moved to Textareas to improve usability with long strings.
• Caching Engine
  • The DBM-cache can now be configured for multilang and non-multilang operations. This is not related to the Midgard Multilang feature, but to the MidCOM i18n service one. It is mainly a matter of cache optimization.

MidCOM requires working PHP 4.1 or later with the iconv extension and Midgard 1.4.4 or later. In addition, Aegir 1.0.1 is recommended for using the MidCOM Site Template package.

Download Page: http://www.midgard-project.org/projects/midcom/download/1.4-alpha.html

Installation instructions: http://www.midgard-project.org/documentation/installation/midcom

Getting started guide: http://www.midgard-project.org/documentation/getting-started/

Project Bugtracker:
http://midcom.tigris.org/servlets/ProjectIssues

Torben Nehmer, MidCOM Lead Developer