2.12 1.4 to 1.5 upgrade

Daisy 1.5 was released on August 16, 2006.

Read this document carefully, especially the upgrading instructions. Take your time to do the upgrade. This release contains various changes that will make future updates a lot easier.

2.12.1 Changes

Some important changes that affect deployment or compatibility: READ THIS SECTION

• Daisy Wiki: the configuration and data used by the Daisy Wiki is now stored in a separate wikidata directory, similar to the data directory of the repository server. The data directory contains things such as the skins, the site definitions, the doctype XSLs, the logs, ... In earlier Daisy versions, these items were simply stored inside the Daisy Wiki webapp. The new structure is also illustrated in the updated deployment diagram.
  The introduction of the wikidata directory has several advantages:
• Clear separation of data and application
• Clear view on official extension points
• Upgrading and backups become easier: it will no longer be needed to copy over your site definitions, skins, etc. after upgrading.
• OpenJMS is replaced with ActiveMQ as default JMS implementation.
• We embedded the ActiveMQ inside the repository server so from now on, the OpenJMS server doesn't need to be started anymore.
• The ActiveMQ project is much more alive then OpenJMS, provides more ways to connect to it, ...
• A new default skin
• Much more CSS-based, the layout is better controllable through CSS only.
• The rather big default.css file has been split up in multiple smaller CSS files
• Aesthetic improvements:
• lighter look
• fixed width layout (better readability on wide screens)
• ...
• See also the compatibility notes if you have created your own skin(s) based on the old default skin.

Other changes:

• Various query language improvements. See this mail and the updated query documentation.
• The content of the blobstore directory is now organised hierarchically. This should scale better on most file systems.
• A new field type, link, to allow structured linking between documents. See this mail for an overview.
• Query-based selection lists. See this mail.
• Publisher:
• preparedDocuments will now execute a separate publisher request for the document and each document it includes. The publisher request to be used is determined based on a mapping definition which can test on things like the documentType (using the same expressions as in the ACL). This allows to retrieve additional information for certain sets of documents, e.g. related documents & queries. Together with things like the link field type or the ContextDoc function in the query language, this opens many new possibilities. See this documentation and the upgraded publisher docs.
• The publisher request model has been made more flexible and supports a some new tags. See also the third star in this mail.
• Document styling:
• The input XML for the stylesheets now has a "isIncluded" attribute on the root <document> element. This attribute allows to render the document differently depending on whether it is included it another document.
• The input XML for the stylesheets now includes the full Daisy Wiki page context (the <context> element) instead of just the user information.
• Links to Attachment-documents now link directly to the attachment data. This behaviour is easily controllable via XSL. See this mail for more information.
• The content of non-Daisy-HTML-parts can now be inlined during publishing, so that it is available to the document-styling XSLT. See this mail.
• Image thumbnails and metadata extraction: details see this mail.
• Auto-redirecting between sites: when requesting a document that does not occur in the navigation tree of the current site, the other sites are now considered to see if they are better suited (either because of a match in the navigation tree, or because the document belongs to the collection associated with the site). This behaviour can be disabled (see the compatibility section). See also the docs.
• Added version info: the Daisy Wiki and the Daisy repository server now add an X-Daisy-Version header, the <context> element available in the Daisy Wiki skinning now includes version info, and most command line utilities support a -v and --version option.
• Allow to switch between live and staging views in the Wiki. Up till now, the Wiki displayed by default the live versions of all documents. When switching to staging mode, the last versions of the documents are displayed by default. So it shows how everything would look if the last versions of all documents would become live. This also applies to navigation trees, queries embedded in documents, et cetera. See docs.
• Navigation trees:
• Nodes can now be hidden or visible-when-active. Hidden nodes allow to have the navigation tree expanded up to a certain point, and to control the URL path, without having to overload the navigation tree (this will probably mostly be done using queries). Visible-when-active is similar: the node is always hidden except when it is active.
• Query nodes in the navigation tree can now create hierarchies instead of just a flat list of nodes. For example, if you enter a query like:
  

  select documentType, name where true order by documentType, name

  this will create group nodes per document type, and normal document nodes below that. This can of course work multiple levels deep. Make sure the order by clause is meaningful (thus: sort values in the same order as selected).

• Books:
• A new book publication process task, named "custom", allows to specify a Java class to do custom processing.
• Publication types can now specify parts for which they need the binary content to be available.
• The input for the doctype XSLs now has a /document/@isIncluded attribute, just as in the Wiki, to distinguish included documents.
• Added two publication tasks: renderSVG and callPipeline, both of which are useful in combination with the new part-download capability (see the second bullet)
• The publication task copyBookInstanceImages has been renamed to copyBookInstanceResources, though the old name still works. The new name also comes with some new functionality: not only img/@src resources are copied, but also resources linked to in a/@href, embed/@src, object/@data.
• Faceted navigation: allow to limit the set of documents on which the faceted navigation is performed, through an <defaultConditions> element in the faceted navigation definition.
• Removed the need to have absolute paths in the myconfig.xml by supporting property substitutions (where needed), such as ${daisy.datadir} and ${daisy.home}. The repository initialisation script now generates such myconfig.xml's without absolute paths. This allows to move the data directory around without having to adjust these paths. (DSY-271)
• The homepage of a site, as defined in the siteconf.xml, can now be a custom path instead of only a document ID. This is for example useful to let the homepage point to some extension URL. See the sites documentation.
• The recent changes page now has links to the RSS feeds (including link elements in the page header, so that the feeds can be detected automatically).
• Editor: improvements to the image browser dialog:
• the collection of the current site is automatically selected by default, so the user immediately sees the images in that collection. The list of collections has been changed to a drop-down list.
• it is possible to select no collection, thus showing all images, without a collection constraint
• the image browser now shows all documents that have an 'ImageData' part. Previously it showed all documents of type 'Image'. The benefit of this is that you can have custom document types for images, and as long as they reuse the 'ImageData' part for the rendered image, it will now show up in the image browser.
• Document editor:
• Allow to initialise new documents with some content before showing the editor ( docs).
• Allow to specify a custom location to redirect to after editing is done (useful for included/aggregated content).
• Included documents now show edit links next to their title(if you have edit rights on the document) (similar to Wikipedia).
• The document basket: a new Daisy Wiki feature that allow end-users to do things with sets of documents (such as aggregate them for easy printing), as described in this mail.
• Added a schema uploader tool, which allows to create a Daisy repository schema (document, part, field types) from an XML file.
• Added SVG support, through a new SvgDocument document type. This is roughly based on the scratchpad article, but with several enhancements: the SVGs embedded in HTML are automatically resized by some javascript, and the SVGs are also properly rendered in the books (in the PDF publication by default at 250dpi).
• The document type specific XSLs, and the query styling XSLs are now put in the directory of the skin. This makes fallback between skins work for them.
• Added a version reversion feature in the Wiki, accessible through the versions overview page.

To also see bug fixes or some non-functional changes, check the change lists for each individual 1.5 Milestone release.