Release Notes for OpenCms 5.0 rc 2

2/4/2003: This version is the second "release candidate" for OpenCms 5.0. The core features planned for the 5.0 release are all fully implemented. Due to some major cleanup in the Java source tree and some improvements "under the hood" of the OpenCms core, I found that it was better to have yet another release candidate before making the final release. The final release of OpenCms 5.0 will be made available in 4 to 8 weeks if no major bugs are discovered.

OpenCms now runs with a default content-encoding of ISO-8859-1 (Western Europe). In case you do not care about the encoding, this default is most likley what you need. The previous 5.x releases had the encoding pretty much hardcoded to UTF-8 (Unicode). With the 5.0 rc 2 release it's now possible to select different encodings from the default. The selected value must match the value of the file.encoding set for the Java VM, the wizard will make sure that this is the case.

OpenCms 5.0 rc 2 is Open Source software published under the LGPL license.

The OpenCms 5.0 rc 2 includes all features from the last "major" release 4.6.1, the FLEX alpha 1, the 4.7.7 version and of course the 5.0 beta 1, 5.0 beta 2. and 5.0 rc 1. It's at last as stable as all of these earlier versions. I encourage everyone to try this version and provide feedback on the opencms-dev mailing list.

OpenCms 5.0 rc 2 supports Java 1.4. and 1.4.1. Because of required features related to file encoding and JDBC, Java 1.3 is not longer supported.

If you run Java 1.3 on your OpenCms server, please upgrade to 1.4.1. for OpenCms 5.0.

The almost complete list of changes and improvements in OpenCms 5.0 rc 2:

Please use our Bugzilla to report bugs in this release: http://www.opencms.org/bugzilla/

You can find the "TODO" list for the final release here: http://www.opencms.com/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/opencms/todo.txt?rev=1.13 .
Note that all items on the list have been completed in the 5.0 rc 2 release.

Thank you for using OpenCms and have fun with OpenCms 5.0 rc 2 :-)

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