News Updates

CWIS version 4.0.0 has been released, and is now available for download on the Scout Site.

 

More than anything, CWIS 4.0 represents a quantum jump for the software in three areas:  maintainability, customizability, and SEO-friendliness.  We’ve invested a great deal of time and energy in the almost two years since 3.2 was released, on smoothing out many of the rough edges in the underlying user interface code, adding new conveniences to make CWIS-based sites easier to maintain, and optimizing the metadata and areas of performance most important to search engines.

 

That said, there have also been some other improvements and significant new functionality added to CWIS since 3.2:

• 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.)

 

 

This version focuses on three main areas:

1. 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.)
2. 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.
3. 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.

A few other improvements you’ll find in this release:

• 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.

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.

 

Moving toward 4.0, we’re very much looking toward the future.  Because of that, two additional notes:

1. 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.
2. 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; ?>).

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.

This is primarily a bug fix release, addressing issues that have been discovered and resolved since 3.1.0, but it does introduce experimental support for SASS (SCSS), which can make CSS for custom interfaces much easier to write and maintain. For more specific information about what 3.1.1 includes, please see the CWIS Revision History option, available off of the Administration menu. CWIS 3.1.1 requires PHP 5.2.1 or newer and MySQL 5.0 or newer. 

As might be expected from the version number, this is a major release of the software, and one we've been working toward for the past two years.  There were two areas of focus for 3.0:  1) refactoring, upgrading, and expanding the underlying infrastructure to reflect the current state-of-the-art in web software and support the new capabilities we plan to implement in CWIS going forward, and  2) adding new functionality and features that have been requested and/or are now expected as part of a state-of-the-art web-based software platform.  While we haven't achieved everything on our wish list for 3.0.0, we do believe the release delivers significant new functionality and will provide both a very adaptable development platform for custom CWIS-based sites, and a very solid launching pad for new technology in CWIS 4.x and beyond.

 

A few of the highlights:

• 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

(Some features were previously available in the 2.9.0 alpha release.)

 

CWIS 3.0.0 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 3.0.0.  Sites running versions prior to 1.4.0 will first need to upgrade to 1.4.0 and then to 3.0.0.