News Updates
CWIS version 4.0.1 has been released, and is now available for download on the Scout Site.
This is a maintenance release, with bug fixes and increased compatibility with a wider range of LAMP environments, but there have been a few improvements and additions:
CORE IMPROVEMENTS
- Extended SearchEngine to support 'user is not' searches
- Added help text to all settings on System Configuration and Advanced System Configuration pages
- Any errors reported by enabled plugins are now displayed on the Administration page (as well as the Plugins page)
- Added "uadd" command to cwis command line utility.
CORE IMPROVEMENTS (Internal)
- Revised string handling code so that the mbstring extension is no longer required (though it will be used if available)
- ResourceFactory::ImportResourcesFromXml() added to simplify installation
- Session cookies now have the Secure and HttpOnly flags set when appropriate, to help minimize the possibility of XSS attacks
NEW PLUGINS
- SavedSearchMailings: replaces the saved search mailing feature previously in the core software, and adds support for saved search emails for search results from non-default schemas (e.g. blog posts, events, pages, etc)
PLUGIN IMPROVEMENTS
- DrupalSync: Better error reporting when login sync fails
- MLPHPList: Add local cache of user information to speed up generating Mailing List Metrics page
- BotDetector: Do not assume that any IP listed by httpBL as "suspicious" is a bot (as this includes many IPs that are just part of public wifi networks)
The minimum PHP version for CWIS 4.0.1 is 5.4. At Scout we have moved to PHP 7.0 on our production sites because of the significant performance increase it brings. The minimum MySQL/MariaDB version is 5.0.
As always, after installing the new version we ask that you use the Register with Scout feature on the Administration menu to let us know you're using the new version of the software. It really helps us determine what kind of operating environments the software is running in, and where to go next with development.
We look forward to your feedback on this new version of CWIS.
- You can now search for when a field was last modified, using the "@“ operator, and search now supports prefix and suffix operators (“^" and “$") for text fields. (See the Advanced Search Tips box at the bottom of the Advanced Search page for examples.)
- Search now works across all content types, including entries created and maintained by the Blog, Calendar Events, and Pages plugins, and the search interface has been refactored to be easier to maintain and customize.
- User fields can now be configured to be automatically updated when records are changed.
- There's a new Piwik plugin, that automatically inserts the header code required for use with the open source Piwik web analytics package.
- The Folders plugin now supports folders containing all content types (e.g. resources, events, blog posts) and transferring folders between users.
- Metrics Reporter now tracks and reports on stats for the Blog plugin.
- Password complexity requirements are now configurable.
- The Rules plugin has been completely refactored to use an IF/THEN model, that supports complex search parameters in the IF section and complex email recipient selection parameters in the THEN section.
- The Resource Exporter plugin now supports exporting all content types, allowing the export of (for example) events or blog posts.
- The Batch Edit plugin now supports batch editing records for all content types.
And there were a few new additions intended specifically to make development with CWIS easier:
- All CSS in the default interface has been replaced with SCSS (AKA Sass), which should be easier to maintain and customize.
- The Developer plugin now supports a developer.ini file, that can be used to force plugin configuration settings to specific values and force plugins to be enabled/disabled. (See install/EXAMPLE-developer.ini for more information.) It can come in very handy when copying a database from a production site to a development or test installation.
- There is a new "cwis" command line utility, that can be used to perform some common operations directly from the command line. (The utility can also be found in the install directory – you'll need to copy or link to it to somewhere in your PATH to use it, and possibly also check that the first line points to the correct directory for PHP, if you have the PHP executable installed somewhere other than /usr/bin/php.)
As usual, more information about additions and fixes can be found via the CWIS Revision History option on the Administration menu. (If you’re maintaining a custom user interface for your CWIS site or are doing development of any sort with CWIS, it’s definitely worth a look – there are some additional very significant infrastructure enhancements, that are not mentioned above.)
We look forward to your feedback on this new version of CWIS.
CWIS beta version 3.9.1 has been released, and is now available for download.
While primarily a bug fix and maintenance release, getting ready for 4.0.0, it does include a few enhancements worth noting:
- You can now search for when a field was last modified, using the "@" operator. (See the Advanced Search Tips box at the bottom of the Advanced Search page for examples.)
- User fields can now be configured to be automatically updated when records are changed.
- There's a new Piwik plugin, that automatically inserts the header code required for use with the open source Piwik web analytics package.
And there were a couple of new additions intended to make development with CWIS easier:
- The Developer plugin now supports a developer.ini file, that can be used to force plugin configuration settings to specific values and force plugins to be enabled/disabled. (See install/EXAMPLE-developer.ini for more information.) It can come in very handy when copying a database from a production site to a development or test installation.
- There is a new "cwis" command line utility, that can be used to perform some common operations directly from the command line. (The utility can also be found in the install directory – you'll need to copy or link to it to somewhere in your PATH to use it, and possibly also check that the first line points to the correct directory for PHP, if you have PHP installed in a non-standard location.)
As usual, more information about additions and fixes can be found via the CWIS Revision History option on the Administration menu. As a beta release, this version is not recommended for use on live production sites. If you are going to run it on a production site (which, to be fair, we’ve been doing at Scout for months), please test and monitor your site carefully.
We look forward to your feedback on this new version of CWIS.
CWIS beta version 3.9.0 has been released, and is now available for download. This is a beta release, leading up to CWIS 4.0.
- Interface Refactoring – The standard page start and end in the default interface have been simplified, better documented, and heavily refactored to be more maintainable and much more easily customized. All CSS in the default interface has also been replaced with SCSS (AKA Sass), which should be easier to maintain and customize as well. (It’s preferable to customize your site via the NavEditor plugin and -Override.scss files if possible, before creating custom versions of the standard page start and end.)
- Multi-Schema Support – Search now works across all content types, including entries created and maintained by the Blog, Calendar Events, and Pages plugins, and the search interface has been refactored to be easier to maintain and customize.
- PHP 7 Compatibility – The latest major version of PHP introduced significant performance improvements and some new capabilities to the language, and in the process made a few changes that broke existing PHP code. CWIS 3.9.0 includes revisions that should allow the software to run smoothly under both PHP 5.x and 7.x.
- The Folders plugin now supports transferring folders between users.
- MetricsReporter now tracks stats for the Blog plugin.
- Metadata field group names can now be displayed (or not) on the full record page, via a system configuration option.
- When a plugin is enabled, any plugins upon which it is dependent are now automatically enabled as well.
- Search now supports prefix and suffix operators (^ and $) for text fields.
- Some of the existing measures in CWIS to maintain compatibility with old user interfaces have been eliminated, and others have been moved to the BackwardCompatibility plugin. We don’t anticipate these changes requiring much effort for interfaces based on CWIS 3.x, and interfaces based on CWIS 2.x should still be reasonably easily upgradable. Custom interfaces based on CWIS 1.x will definitely require more effort. In any event, if you need to make changes to your custom interface to get it to work with this release and run into difficulty, we’re happy to provide whatever assistance we can via the CWIS support forums.
- The minimum PHP version for CWIS is now 5.4, which came out in 2012. If you’re running PHP 5.3 or earlier, this might be an excellent time to upgrade to 5.6 or even 7.0, as support (including security fixes) from the PHP team for PHP 5.5 is ending in July, and they are no longer supporting earlier versions at all. On the plus side, one significant benefit to moving to PHP 5.4+ is that you can now count on short echo tags always being available (i.e. you’ll be able to use <?= $MyVar ?> instead of <?PHP print $MyVar; ?>).
CWIS version 3.2.0 has been released, and is now available for download!
- New Batch Edit plugin, that allows you to make changes to collections of resources all at once.
- New Mail It plugin, that allows users to send email to themselves or others with information about a resource.
- New My Searches plugin, that displays a list of recent searches conducted by the user.
- New PHPList plugin, which provides integration with the PHPList mailing list platform.
- The Blog plugin now supports multiple blogs, and the old “Site News” functionality has been replaced with a blog.
- The Folders plugin now allows users to add/remove resources to/from a folder interactively, without reloading the current page.
- The Pages plugin now has support for WYSIWYG editing, uploading images and files, and inserting those images and files within a page.
- Page caching is now supported for anonymous users, which can speed up page loading and greatly improve the user experience.
- Automatic minimization of JavaScript files is now supported, to speed up page rendering and help with SEO.
- Fingerprinting of static asset (image, CSS, and JavaScript) files is now supported, to improve site performance and help with SEO.
CWIS version 3.1.1 has been released, and is now available for download on the Scout site.
- The Metrics Reporter plugin now offers interactive tables and charts of collected metrics data (see attached images), and metrics data collection and reporting has been extended to cover the Blog and Calendar Events plugins.
- The permission system has been significantly revamped and expanded, to simplify permission configuration and support more complex workflows, and now separates out per-schema and per-field permissions.
- RSS feed support has been removed from the core software and replaced by the new RSS Export plugin, which supports creating RSS feeds on a wide variety of pages, using items from any schema type (resources, events, blog posts, etc).
- Resource metadata export has been removed from the core software and replaced by the new Resource Exporter plugin, which allows you to select which fields should be included in the export and export only metadata for resources contained in a specified folder. (Also added: the option to export resource metadata in XML.)
- The most frequently used terms are now displayed at the top of the search results when adding/editing Tree and Controlled Name field values.
- The Cancore, Dublin Core, NSDL, and USGS vocabularies included with the software have all been updated to the latest revisions.
- Effectiveness of the BotDetector plugin has improved significantly, and it now includes support for Project Honeypot’s http:BL service to enhance detection and gather more accurate usage metrics.
- The number of resources that can be placed in a single folder has increased significantly, and the interface now paginates when there are a large number of resources in a folder.
CWIS version 3.0.2 has been released, and is now available for download. This is a bug fix release, resolving a number of minor and a few more significant bugs.
This is a bug fix release, resolving a number of minor and a few more significant bugs. A list of some of the more notable fixes can be found in the changelog for the release, available via the /Administration/ menu. (Our thanks to those of you who have reported and helped us track down some of these bugs!) CWIS 3.0.2 requires PHP 5.2.1 or newer and MySQL 5.0 or newer. Sites running CWIS 1.4.0 or SPT 1.4.0 or later can upgrade directly to 3.0.2.
- new faceted searching
- support for custom user information fields
- support for multiple uploads to Image fields
- new conditional privilege system for metadata schemas and fields
- internal support for multiple metadata schemas
- incremental keyword search (disabled by default)
- completely revamped user help
- CleanURLs plugin (provides SEO-friendly clean URLs for resource browsing and full record pages)
- CalendarEvents plugin (provides configurable full-featured events calendar)
- Blog plugin (provides blog support)
- MobileUISwitcher plugin (provides the ability to automatically switch to a particular user interface if a mobile device is detected)
- SocialMedia plugin added (provides social-media-friendly data in resource full record pages to make them more easily shareable via social media)
- UserCreator plugin added (provides the ability to create new user accounts on the fly when editing resource records)
- upgraded UrlChecker plugin able to check more URLs per day with less server impact
- significantly expanded developer documentation
This is an alpha release, working toward CWIS 3.0. Though we've been running it at Scout for a number of months, it is not recommended for use on a live production site.
- new conditional privilege system for metadata schemas and fields
- internal support for multiple metadata schemas
- incremental keyword search (disabled by default)
- completely revamped user help
- CleanURLs plugin (provides SEO-friendly clean URLs for resource browsing and full record pages)
- CalendarEvents plugin (provides configurable full-featured events calendar)
- Blog plugin (provides blog support)
- MobileUISwitcher plugin (provides the ability to automatically switch to a particular user interface if a mobile device is detected)
- SocialMedia plugin added (provides social-media-friendly data in resource full record pages to make them more easily shareable via social media)
- UserCreator plugin added (provides the ability to create new user accounts on the fly when editing resource records)
- significantly expanded developer documentation
CWIS version 2.4.1 has been released, and is now available for download on the Scout site.
This is a bug fix release that addresses a number of issues. Though no significant new functionality has been added, all users are strongly encouraged to upgrade.
The following plugins have been updated as well:
- AutoScreenshot
- BrowserCapabilities
- Captcha
- Folders
- GoogleMaps
- Mailer
- MetricsReporter
- OAIPMHServer
- OpenId
- Pages
- Tags
- UrlChecker
- phpBBSync
- AccountPruner
Updated versions of these are included in the CWIS 2.4.1 release and are available for download on the individual plugin pages on the Scout site.
CWIS 2.4.1 requires PHP 5.0.5 or newer and MySQL 5.0 or newer. Sites running CWIS 1.4.0 or SPT 1.4.0 or later can upgrade directly to 2.4.1; sites running versions prior to 1.4.0 will first need to upgrade to 1.4.0 and then to 2.4.1.
After installing the new version, we would ask that you use the Register with Scout feature on the Administration menu to let us know you're using the new version of software. It really helps us determine what kind of operating environments the software is running in, and where next to go with development.
We look forward to your feedback on this new version of CWIS. Comments or questions can be posted in the 2.4.1 release thread on the forums.
The Internet Scout staff takes pride in providing links to some of the best online resources in our weekly Scout Report. Although all of the resources we cover are valuable, inevitably some stand out from the pack. In this year's 'Best of' issue, we share some of our favorite sites from the past academic year. The process of choosing which sites to include was not easy, as the interests of our staff vary as much as those of our readers. Whether it is the design of the site, the fascinating content, or its classroom usability, Scout staff all have different rationale for preferring one online resource over another. Nevertheless, we were able to produce a top ten list that we could all agree on.
We hope you enjoy this list, and take a few minutes to revisit some of our favorite sites from 2012–2013. As always, we look forward to providing new batches of fantastic resources throughout the upcoming year.
Please visit the Best of the Scout Report 2012-2013 here, and let us know what you think! We welcome feedback on this and all issues of the Scout Report at scout@scout.wisc.edu.
Internet Scout is pleased to announce the release of CWIS 2.4.0. The new release includes both new functionality and plugins, as well as some updates to popular existing plugins. As with all updates, the goal of this release is to enhance your CWIS experience, so if you have any questions or feedback, please let us know, either by posting in the CWIS forums or by contacting us directly.
The additions and updates included in CWIS 2.4.0 are the following:
New functionality:
- new completely-revamped metadata field editor
- new ability to group metadata fields into collapsible sections within the resource editing interface
- new "Requeue All" option for orphaned tasks on Task Queue page
- new option to pause background task execution (available on Task Queue page)
- server load average now displayed on Administration page
- metadata field ordering functionality revamped
- new "Recently Added Records" section on Metadata Tool home page
New plugins:
- Folders: create and save resource folders (groups of resources), add notes to resources and folders, move resources around in folders and between folders with a drag-and-drop interface
- Pages: create new web pages and add and edit content on these pages with a WYSIWYG editor
- Developer: display page variable values and set PHP error reporting level from the web interface
- Backward Compatibility: encapsulates and isolates some of the CWIS 1.x backward compatibility code
Updated plugins:
- Mailman: new one-click unsubscribe mechanism
- GoogleMaps: improved KML 2.2 schema compliance
- DrupalSync: new automatic propagation of accounts from CWIS to Drupal for CWIS accounts that predate usage of the plugin
- AutoScreenshot: improved error handling and new support for 64-bit servers
- Mailer: new email test option on mail template editing interface
CWIS 2.4.0 requires PHP 5.0.5 or newer and MySQL 5.0 or newer. Sites running CWIS 1.4.0 or SPT 1.4.0 or later can upgrade directly to 2.4.0; sites running versions prior to 1.4.0 will first need to upgrade to 1.4.0 and then to 2.4.0.
After installing the new version, we would ask that you use the Register with Scout feature on the Administration menu to let us know you're using the new version of software. This helps us determine what kind of operating environments the software is running in, and where next to go with development.
We look forward to your feedback on this new version of CWIS.
CWIS now has new online forums, which take over the role formerly held by the CWIS Users mailing list: to act as a venue for discussion about installing, using, customizing, and extending CWIS. Forum topics include Announcements, Metadata and Cataloging, Customization, Plugins, and Troubleshooting. Although news about new versions of the software will appear in the Announcements forum, the forums will not replace the CWIS Announcements mailing list, which will continue to be maintained and used for significant CWIS-related announcements.
We're dedicated to making the forums as useful as possible to the CWIS community. To that end, if you have any questions about CWIS or the use of these forums, please don't hesitate to ask!
At Internet Scout, we take pride in providing links to fantastic online resources in our weekly Scout Report. We know many readers appreciate the variety of resources we seek out. However, we occasionally enjoy finding resources to support a specific theme. The Scout Report Special Issue: National Book Month is the outgrowth of such an effort. The resources in this issue coincide with National Book Month, which occurs each October and is an opportunity for students, teachers, librarians, and other lifelong learners to come together in their love of books and reading. Needless to say, this makes October one of Scout's favorite months! We hope the resources we have included will inspire our readers to look at books in new ways and to celebrate National Book Month with us.
As members of the Internet Scout Research Group, we are happy to welcome you to our new website. We encourage you to explore some of our projects and publications or browse through our archives. If you're new to Scout, you may wish to start with About Us and Staff Bios to get a feel for who we are and what we do.
We are always interested to hear what you think of the site and our work. Please feel free to drop us a line to let us know how we're doing, suggest a site for review in the Scout Report, inquire into how your organization might take advantage of CWIS, or ask about any of our other projects and services.
The results of the 2012 ATE Central Social Media Survey are now available. The five-page report summarizes the aims, methods, findings, conclusions, and implications of the survey. It explores the stances of the ATE community towards social media use and identifies key areas in which the ATE community desires support. It also briefly explains current and future tools and project components offered by ATE Central that will encourage better adoption and use of social media technologies.