OpenCms News

OpenCms in the CMS Garden @ LinuxTag 2013

Alkacon Software GmbH — Wed, 08 May 2013 15:15:41 GMT

After the great success on CeBIT 2013 Alkacon Software and the OpenCms community will present OpenCms in the CMS Garden at the LinuxTag 2013.

This year’s LinuxTag takes place from May 22 to May 25, 2013. The CMS Garden is located in Hall 7 on the Berlin Fairgrounds.

Ambassadors from more than ten open source CMS communities will present their systems in a shared booth in the CMS Garden. Like at the CeBIT, the CMS Garden will be an attractive target for agencies, organisations and companies which are in need of an open source CMS.

The concept of the CMS Garden is to show the variety of the systems to visitors. Additionally, the ambassadors from the systems have the opportunity to get to know other systems as well.

Visit us in the CMS Garden and we will present you the exiting new features of OpenCms 8.5 in a live installation.

CMS-Garden @ LinuxTag 2013
When: 22.-25.05.2013
Where: Hall 7 - Fairgrounds - Berlin

OpenCms Days 2013 - Save the date!

Alkacon Software GmbH — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 12:38:31 GMT

The main topic of the 5th edition of the international user conference and expo will be the release of OpenCms 9. The Days will be the perfect stage to exchange experiences around OpenCms with high profile participants and speakers from all over the world.

This years` OpenCms Days will take place from September 30 to October 1, 2013 in Cologne, Germany.

Please already note this date and do not miss out on a great conference. Detailed information will follow shortly.

OpenCms in the CMS Garden @ CeBIT 2013

Alkacon Software GmbH — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 13:51:12 GMT

Alkacon Software and the OpenCms community will present OpenCms in the CMS Garden at the CeBIT 2013.

CeBIT in Hannover is the world’s largest IT trade fair. This year’s CeBIT takes place from March 5 to March 9, 2013. The CMS Garden is located in Hall 6, close to the open source park.

In the CMS Garden, ambassadors from more than ten open source CMS communities will present their systems in a shared booth of about 100m². Visitors can compare the different approaches of the various CMS to find the solution best suited for their needs.

The most relevant Open Source Content Management Systems. All in one place. With expert members of each community on hand to help you get started. Compare the options and choose the right Open Source CMS for you and your business.

Visit us in the CMS Garden and we will present you the exiting new features of OpenCms 8.5 in a live installation.

CMS-Garden @ CeBIT 2013
When: 05.-09.03.2013
Where: Hall 6 - CeBIT 2013 - Hannover

Alkacon OCEE 3.5.1 for OpenCms 8.x released

Alkacon Software GmbH — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 11:43:06 GMT

Alkacon OCEE for OpenCms is a commercial extension for OpenCms that offers Support for LDAP, Clustering, Replication and improved performance. Full information about OCEE is available on the Alkacon website.

The new OCEE version 3.5.1 is a bugfix release that fixes some issues of earlier OCEE versions.

Please see the OCEE release notes for a full description about the new features and changes in this version.

OCEE 3.5.1 is required by the new OpenCms 8.5.1 and backward compatible with all older OpenCms 8.x versions. Backward compatibilty for OpenCms 8.0.x is also provided by this OCEE version.

About Alkacon OCEE

The Alkacon OpenCms Enterprise Extensions (also called OCEE) are a commercial extension for OpenCms. Alkacon OCEE adds features to OpenCms that are often required for running OpenCms in a medium or large Enterprise, where data consistency, security and failover are highly important.

The main components are:

Alkacon OCEE Cluster Manager
Allows for clustering of OpenCms Servers for mission critical environments.
Alkacon OCEE Replicator
Makes it possible to replicate the OpenCms repository data to remote database instances, e.g. from "test" to "live" servers.
Alkacon OCEE LDAP Connector
Provides full integration of existing LDAP user directories with the OpenCms permission system.
Alkacon OCEE Accelerator
Provides additional high performance caches to accelerate the data access and delivery.

The Alkacon OpenCms Enterprise Extensions are available as a licensed software product from Alkacon Software GmbH, the company responsible for most of the development of the open source core OpenCms system.

OCEE is installed on a standard OpenCms system. OCEE is a binary only distribution. This means that the source code for the OCEE modules is not available. To use any of the Alkacon OCEE packages, you need to enter a license key that will be provided by Alkacon software after your purchase of an Alkacon OCEE license.

OpenCms 8.5.1 available

Alkacon Software GmbH — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 10:43:10 GMT

OpenCms 8.5.1 is now ready and available for download.

OpenCms is one of the most popular Open Source Content Management Solutions. This new version was developed by Alkacon Software GmbH with the support of the international OpenCms developer community.

OpenCms 8.5 features inline editing, Solr integration and numerous other enhancements.

Main new features and improvements in OpenCms 8.5.1

The content editor shows preview thumbnails for selected images.
The content editor displays resource information like e.g. "Title" for selected files.
The performance of the content editor has been improved significantly.
The workplace property dialog has been replaced with the advanced HTML 5 dialog from the page editor.
The Solr integration provides better performance, configurability and multi-language handling.

General features of OpenCms 8.5

The new inline content editor allows to edit content "in place" on the web page.
The form based content editor has been completely rewritten for improved speed and ease-of-use.
Integration of SEO features with automatic sitemap.xml generation and page alias support.
Integration of Solr for improved search and noSQL like content queries.
Integration of CMIS access to the content repository.

We recommend everyone who uses OpenCms to update to the 8.5.1 release. OpenCms 8.5.1 is fully backward compatible to all prior 8.x and 7.x versions. Templates and other OpenCms developed code from these versions work "out of the box" with version 8.5.1.

Users of the Alkacon OCEE packages require a new version of Alkacon OCEE for use with this OpenCms release. OpenCms version 8.5.1 requires Alkacon OCEE version 3.5.1 or later.

Please check out the release notes for further details of the changes in this release.

Features of OpenCms in General

The page editor allows to create and arrange content on web pages by drag & drop.
The sitemap editor allows to create new pages and re-arrange the navigation tree by drag & drop.
Support for creation of content for mobile devices with the <cms:mobile> tag.
Structured contents can be defined using a simple XML schema.
Editors with WYSIWYG and syntax highlighting functionality.
Easy to use "Online / Offline" workflow, changes must be approved before they become visible.
Link management for all internal resources with broken link detection.
Integrated image scaling and cropping.
Full featured internal user management that supports the concept of "Organizational Units" (OUs).
Allows management of multiple websites within one installation.
Contents can be served dynamically or exported to static HTML files.
Extensions can be added through a flexible module system.
Full text search for web pages, but also in PDF, MS Office documents etc.
The "time warp" feature allows to view resources which are expired or not yet released.
JSP integration for dynamic functionality in templates, dynamic forms etc.

... and many more

About OpenCms

Independent research has shown OpenCms to be a market leading solution amongst Open Source CMS systems. The software has been in continuous development for the last 13 years and has an active community of Open Source developers.

More than 100 international IT companies have been registered as official OpenCms Solution Provider on the OpenCms website. A steadily growing list of reference sites also shows the increasing use of OpenCms.

OpenCms is an enterprise - ready web content management solution build in Java and XML from open source components. OpenCms can easily be deployed on almost any existing IT infrastructure and provides powerful features especially suited for medium and large enterprise internet or intranet applications. OpenCms is open source software distributed under the LGPL license.

Alkacon Software GmbH is the company responsible for the development of OpenCms. Today OpenCms is a leading open source CMS solution in widespread use all over the world. Many businesses and organizations use OpenCms as a cost effective, professional alternative to expensive license products.

Alkacon Software GmbH offers its customers training, support and add-on products for OpenCms. This gives our customers a layer of security and convenience often required for mission critical OpenCms installations. Please see the Alkacon product overview for more details.

The team at Alkacon Software - The OpenCms Experts wants to thank everyone who has contributed to this release of OpenCms.

Release Notes for OpenCms 8.5.1

Alkacon Software GmbH — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 10:42:43 GMT

OpenCms 8.5.1 is an update which improves the content editor functionality as well as the Solr integration. This version also fixes a lot of issues that persisted in the 8.5.0 release.

Please note: This version of OpenCms requires Java 6 because of library dependencies.

Main new features of OpenCms 8.5.1

The content editor shows preview thumbnails for selected images.
The content editor displays resource information like e.g. "Title" for selected files.
The performance of the content editor has been improved significantly.
The workplace property dialog has been replaced with the advanced HTML 5 dialog from the page editor.
The Solr integration provides better performance, configurability and multi-language handling.

Other improvements in OpenCms 8.5.1

Added content editor selector, to detect whether the old or new XML content editor should be used.
Added text based language detection utilities.
Added configuration option that allows to index contents only when they occur on container pages.
Added ability to exclude file names from VFS sync with pull request #86, provided by Daniel Latzer.
Improved Solr field configuration for indexing nested contents with multiple occurrences.
Improved performance due to increased content definition cache size.
Improved locale handling when opening the new content editor.
Improved Solr field mappings defined within XSDs.

Fixed issues in OpenCms 8.5.1

Fixed issue #20 where browsing a download gallery with custom resource types showed up empty.
Fixed issue #37 where a "white page" appeared after clicking on the advanced button of the property dialog.
Fixed issue #44 where it was not possible to save property values for old xmlpage contents.
Fixed issue #56 where content tool "Language node copier" was broken.
Fixed issue #64 where CmsResource had an incorrect resource state after de-serialization.
Fixed issue #68, #70 where file name translation rules were missing, provided by Christian Steinert.
Fixed issue #73 where HTTP error 409 was returned when importing contents using WebDAV servlet.
Fixed issue #75 where sorting column "display name" of the field configuration was incorrect.
Fixed issue #77 where XML content boolean data types should return plain text values, provided by Wolfgang Illmeyer.
Fixed issue #83 where the new content editor had a problem with comments and JavaScript.
Fixed issue #84 where saving + exit in the new content editor was possible even if a validation rule was invalid.
Fixed issue #87 where OU names containing "." would lead to a 404 error on log out.
Fixed issue #88, #119 where the selector widget had problems with the default value.
Fixed issue #89 where help bubbles were shown with no text configured.
Fixed issue #90 where too many tabs were displayed in the new content editor.
Fixed issue #92 where clicking on a link in the inline editor caused an error.
Fixed issue #93 where file selector widget did not find any container pages that were part of the default site.
Fixed issue #95, #96, #97 where FireFox changed user agent string.
Fixed issue #98 where new content editor did not work for expired resources.
Fixed issue #99 where displaying XSD choice options at the bottom of the editor window were cropped.
Fixed issue #102 where renamed resources were remaining within gallery dialogs.
Fixed issue #104 where TinyMCE entity-escaping resulted in broken links.
Fixed issue #105 where the category widget showed all categories even if a pre-selection was configured.
Fixed issue #106 where gallery dialogs popped up empty when opening them with the gallery buttons of the rich text editor.
Fixed issue #107 where CMIS only found the default locale of XML contents.
Fixed issue #108 where SEO file JSP had the wrong cache property.
Fixed issue #110 where the TinyMCE toolbar overflowed unexpectedly in Chrome browsers.
Fixed issue #111 where the login bean always switched to the users default site.
Fixed issue #112 where the content access bean performed wrong empty check for nested element types.
Fixed issue #113 where "CreateNew" in model pages was not behaving as expected.
Fixed issue #115 where no error message was provided when the password field was left blank, provided by Yuta Aoki.
Fixed issue #116 where the upload did not work from gallery folder tab.
Fixed issue #117 where xsd:choice nesting another xsd:choice caused errors in new content editor.
Fixed issue #121 where the gallery items were sorted incorrect.
Fixed issue #123 where the new content editor created a new default locale node even when a none-default locale already exists.
Fixed issue #124 where search excerpt was missing when using wildcards.
Fixed issue #126 where newly added xsd:choice elements did not show choices.
Fixed issue #127 where the image gallery widget did not open correctly using Internet Explorer.
Fixed issue #128 where an exception was thrown when indexing dependent documents.
Fixed issue #131 where a NPE was thrown when using custom widgets in the new content editor.
Fixed issue #132 where index selection in the workplace search had no effect.
Fixed issue #135 where upload to gallery was displaying errors.
Fixed issue #136 where using custom styles for TinyMCE Editor with "style_formats" caused problems, provided by David Landreman.
Fixed issue #139 where image URLs treated wrongly as external when they contain scale parameters and workplace server was HTTPS.
Fixed issue #141 where JavaScript animations were flickering in Chrome 24.
Fixed issue #142 where TinyMCE toolbar was positioned inside the text area.
Fixed issue #144 where database schema for HSQLDB was improved, provided by Georgi Naplatanov.
Fixed issue where fall-back locale was not used.
Fixed issue where file selector widget did ignore the start gallery.
Fixed issue where file selector widget text overflowed unexpectedly.
Fixed issue where radio select widget did handle the default value wrongly.
Fixed issue where HTML widget initialization failed for choice options.
Fixed issue where string widget added unwanted line breaks.
Fixed issue where writing search configuration failed when Solr index configured.
Fixed issue where 'Publish with related resources' did not work as expected.
Fixed issue where view permissions were not handled correctly in gallery dialogs.

Features of OpenCms in general

The page editor allows to create and arrange content on web pages by drag & drop.
The sitemap editor allows to create new pages and re-arrange the navigation tree by drag & drop.
Support for creation of content for mobile devices with the <cms:mobile> tag.
Structured contents can be defined using a simple XML schema.
Editors with WYSIWYG and syntax highlighting functionality.
Easy to use "Online / Offline" workflow, changes must be approved before they become visible.
Link management for all internal resources with broken link detection.
Integrated image scaling and cropping.
Full featured internal user management that supports the concept of "Organizational Units" (OUs).
Allows management of multiple websites within one installation.
Contents can be served dynamically or exported to static HTML files.
Extensions can be added through a flexible module system.
Full text search for web pages, but also in PDF, MS Office documents etc.
The "time warp" feature allows to view resources which are expired or not yet released.
JSP integration for dynamic functionality in templates, dynamic forms etc.
... and many more

Backward compatibility

We recommend everyone who uses OpenCms to update to this 8.5.1 release.

OpenCms 8.5.1 is fully backward compatible to all prior 8.x and 7.x versions. Templates and other OpenCms developed code from these versions should work "out of the box" with version 8.5.1.

Notice for users of Alkacon OCEE: OpenCms version 8.5.1 requires Alkacon OCEE version 3.5.1 or later. In case you want to update your OpenCms installation to 8.5.1, please make sure you update Alkacon OCEE to 3.5.1 or later first!

Compatibility with Java versions, Servlet containers and Databases

Please note: OpenCms version 8.5.1 requires Java 6 because of library dependencies.

OpenCms 8.5.1 has been written and tested for Java 6 and 7. We have tested only with ORACLEs version of the JDK. However, OpenCms has no dependencies to sun.* packages so it should in theory run with all compliant JVMs.

We have tested this release on the Tomcat servlet engine. OpenCms works "out of the box" with Tomcat 7, which we recommend. Others have reported deploying OpenCms successfully on other servlet containers like JBoss, BEA, Websphere, Glassfish and Resin Professional.

On the database side, we have tested with MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, MS SQL Server, DB2 and HSQLDB. The automatic update wizard for OpenCms 8.5.1 supports MySQL, Oracle and PostgreSQL.

Regarding version numbers and build tags

In case you want to check out OpenCms from Git, please keep the following in mind: The tag numbers for all OpenCms 8.5 final releases are "build_8_5_x", so the 8.5.1 release is tagged "build_8_5_1".

The main OpenCms Git repository is available on Github at github.com/alkacon/opencms-core.

How you can help

Contributions to the OpenCms core development are most welcome. Please send us your pull requests directly on GitHub.

Please use our issue tracker on GitHub to report bugs in this release: https://github.com/alkacon/opencms-core/issues

Thank you for using OpenCms and have fun with OpenCms 8.5 :-)

Alkacon OCEE for OpenCms 8.5 released

Alkacon Software GmbH — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 07:38:33 GMT

The latest OCEE release version 3.5.0 is a compatibility update for the new OpenCms version 8.5.0.

Please note: OCEE 3.5.0 is not compatible with OpenCms 8.0.x

Please see the OCEE release notes for a full description about the new features and changes in this version.

Main features in OCEE

Support for multi-staging scenarios with the OCEE Replicator: You can configure a "development" server that first pushes all generated content to a "staging" server e.g. for approval, and then afterwards to the "delivery" server. This is freely configurable, and there is no limit on the number of stages.
Centralized configuration of servers with the OCEE Cluster: You can now edit the scheduled jobs, search index configuration and module parameters for all individual servers in the cluster from a common GUI in the workplace server.
Support for OpenCms OUs in the LDAP Connector: It is now possible to connect each OpenCms OU with an individual path in the LDAP Server.
Improved performance with the OCEE Accelerator: A much improved cache policy in the Accelerator now selectively flushes only certain cached items after publishing instead of just flushing everything.

About Alkacon OCEE

Release Notes for OpenCms 8.5

Alkacon Software GmbH — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 14:41:21 GMT

This is the first release of OpenCms 8.5 (8.5.0). OpenCms 8.5 is a major update that introduces several new features like inline editing, SEO optimization, Solr integration and CMIS support to OpenCms.

Main new features of OpenCms 8.5

The new inline content editor allows to edit content "in place" on the web page.
The form based content editor has been completely rewritten for improved speed and ease-of-use.
Integration of SEO features with automatic sitemap.xml generation and page alias support.
Integration of Solr for improved search and noSQL like content queries.
Integration of CMIS access to the content repository.

Other improvements in OpenCms 8.5

Support for "Inheritance Groups".
Content is now directly saved when you edit a page, no more confirmation required.
Option to undo all changes done on a page (or resource) that have not been published.
Option to hide a page in the sitemap, so that it does not appear in the navigation.
Option to edit content directly from the clipboard favorites.
Option to directly delete an element removed from a page when it is no longer used anywhere.
New code / plain text editor, based on CodeMirror.
New "Navigation level" function in the sitemap.
New "Attribute information" dialog for all content items on a page, gallery and sitemap.
New and improved dialog for assigning or selecting content categories.
New Log file tool in the OpenCms Administration allows to switch on/off log channels on the fly.
Usage of nice looking scroll bars in most of the new onscreen dialogs.
... and many more!

Features of OpenCms in general

The page editor allows to create and arrange content on web pages by drag & drop.
The sitemap editor allows to create new pages and re-arrange the navigation tree by drag & drop.
Support for creation of content for mobile devices with the <cms:mobile> tag.
Structured contents can be defined using a simple XML schema.
Editors with WYSIWYG and syntax highlighting functionality.
Easy to use "Online / Offline" workflow, changes must be approved before they become visible.
Link management for all internal resources with broken link detection.
Integrated image scaling and cropping.
Full featured internal user management that supports the concept of "Organizational Units" (OUs).
Allows management of multiple websites within one installation.
Contents can be served dynamically or exported to static HTML files.
Extensions can be added through a flexible module system.
Full text search for web pages, but also in PDF, MS Office documents etc.
The "time warp" feature allows to view resources which are expired or not yet released.
JSP integration for dynamic functionality in templates, dynamic forms etc.
... and many more

Backward compatibility

We recommend everyone who uses OpenCms to update to this 8.5.0 release.

OpenCms 8.5.0 is fully backward compatible to all prior 8.x and 7.x versions. Templates and other OpenCms developed code from these versions should work "out of the box" with version 8.5.0.

Notice for users of Alkacon OCEE: OpenCms version 8.5.0 requires Alkacon OCEE version 3.5.0 or later. In case you want to update your OpenCms installation to 8.5.0, please make sure you update Alkacon OCEE to 3.5.0 or later first!

Compatibility with Java versions, Servlet containers and Databases

OpenCms 8.5.0 has been written and tested for Java 5, 6 and 7. We have tested only with ORACLEs version of the JDK. However, OpenCms has no dependencies to sun.* packages so it should in theory run with all compliant JVMs.

On the database side, we have tested with MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, MS SQL Server, DB2 and HSQLDB. The automatic update wizard for OpenCms 8 supports MySQL, Oracle and PostgreSQL.

Regarding version numbers and build tags

In case you want to check out OpenCms from Git, please keep the following in mind: The tag numbers for all OpenCms 8.5 final releases are "build_8_5_x", so the 8.5.0 release is tagged "build_8_5_0".

The main OpenCms Git repository is available on Github at github.com/alkacon/opencms-core.

How you can help

Contributions to the OpenCms core development are most welcome. Please send us your pull requests directly on GitHub.

Please use our issue tracker on GitHub to report bugs in this release: https://github.com/alkacon/opencms-core/issues

Thank you for using OpenCms and have fun with OpenCms 8.5 :-)

Get the new OpenCms 8.5 now!

Alkacon Software GmbH — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 14:40:50 GMT

OpenCms 8.5 is now ready and available for download.

OpenCms is one of the most popular Open Source Content Management Solutions. This new version was developed by Alkacon Software GmbH with the support of the international OpenCms developer community.

OpenCms 8.5 inline editing, Solr integration and numerous other enhancements.

Main new features of OpenCms 8.5

The new inline content editor allows to edit content "in place" on the web page.
The form based content editor has been completely rewritten for improved speed and ease-of-use.
Integration of SEO features with automatic sitemap.xml generation and page alias support.
Integration of Solr for improved search and noSQL like content queries.
Integration of CMIS access to the content repository.

We recommend everyone who uses OpenCms to update to the 8.5.0 release. OpenCms 8.5 is fully backward compatible to all prior 8.x and 7.x versions. Templates and other OpenCms developed code from these versions work "out of the box" with version 8.5.0.

Users of the Alkacon OCEE packages require a new version of Alkacon OCEE for use with this OpenCms release. OpenCms version 8.5.0 requires Alkacon OCEE version 3.5.0 or later.

Please check out the release notes for further details of the changes in this release.

Features of OpenCms in General

The page editor allows to create and arrange content on web pages by drag & drop.
The sitemap editor allows to create new pages and re-arrange the navigation tree by drag & drop.
Support for creation of content for mobile devices with the <cms:mobile> tag.
Structured contents can be defined using a simple XML schema.
Editors with WYSIWYG and syntax highlighting functionality.
Easy to use "Online / Offline" workflow, changes must be approved before they become visible.
Link management for all internal resources with broken link detection.
Integrated image scaling and cropping.
Full featured internal user management that supports the concept of "Organizational Units" (OUs).
Allows management of multiple websites within one installation.
Contents can be served dynamically or exported to static HTML files.
Extensions can be added through a flexible module system.
Full text search for web pages, but also in PDF, MS Office documents etc.
The "time warp" feature allows to view resources which are expired or not yet released.
JSP integration for dynamic functionality in templates, dynamic forms etc.

... and many more

About OpenCms

Independent research has shown OpenCms to be a market leading solution amongst Open Source CMS systems. The software has been in continuous development for the last 10 years and has an active community of Open Source developers.

The team at Alkacon Software - The OpenCms Experts wants to thank everyone who has contributed to this release of OpenCms.

Try OpenCms 8.5 online!

Alkacon Software GmbH — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 10:42:59 GMT

The latest version of OpenCms 8.5 is now online on the live demo server at http://demo.opencms.org

Try yourself, how easy it is to create a website structure and edit contents with OpenCms 8.5.

The online demo uses the well known Template III, a configurable Template for website creation by drag & drop.

Test OpenCms 8.5 for 30 days and get used to the intuitive and reliable OpenCms 8.5 features as Advanced Direct Edit, the Sitemap Editor and the OpenCms Workplace.

The OpenCms tutorial describes the basic functions of OpenCms to create, modify and organize content. The tutorial is available as a screencast and also as a comprehensive text.