Noosfero, version 0.43.0

Hello guys!

On this new version called Caritianas we had some troubles with the release then we just mixed up some new features and bugfixes together in the same version. We hope we don't need to do it once again in the future, but who knows? =D

Enough talk and to the real things!

Bugs

Custom Forms

Validation of mandatory fields

The Custom Forms plugin wasn't telling the user when there was some problem with the form (like not filling a mandatory field). So the user thought he had submitted his answers but they never arrived to the form creator. This problem is now solved.

Field options appearing after closing colorbox

After editing a field options and closing the colorbox, this options were displayed below the fields. Not anymore.

Event link "breed" of ampersands

When the user added a link to his event with a '&', every time the event was saved the '&' was transformed to '&'. This was creating some url like 'myevent.com/?param1=value&param2=value2'. Not now!

Plugins' features folder on production

After we added support for the plugins to have acceptance tests using cucumber and selenium, we introduced a bug on production environments because the admin was trying to enable a plugin, Noosfero would try to create a symlink to the plugins' features folder inside Noosfero's features folder. The catch is: there is no features folder in production. This problem is fixes.

Article published_at only as date

The Article published_at attribute was of date format instead of datetime. This was causing some sort problems. This problem was fixed.

Escaped html issues

After a security update on the rails package lots of places all over Noosfero started to display escaped html where they shouldn't be escaped. We reviewed the whole code to find out all of the places that weren't in conformity with this new security issue and we fixed. It's possible to still find them in some obscure places, so if you come by any case of this problem from this version on please register the bug on our tracker.

Features

Add this outside the article's view

Since addThis is useful also on other places of Noosfero instead of only in the article's view we moved it's code to support addThis all over the place.

Chat system is back online

After some version around 0.37.0 our chat stopped working. But we discovered the problems with it and it's now back online! Check it out and let us know if there are any problems.

Search Engine Refacotoring

This is good news specially for the developers. On this version we refactored the search infrastructure and we modularized it so that Noosfero would support search engines as Noosfero plugins. This way we are no longer bound to a specific search engine and the environment admin will also have the power to choose the search engine that fits best his needs.

Together with this refactoring we tranformed our Solr search engine into a Noosfero plugin. Now that it's independent of Noosfero's the admin must make sure there is a Solr server running and that it's properly configured through the plugins/solr/config/solr.yml file, just like other services we use like Memcached or even PostgreSQL itself.

We also created a new search engine called PgSearch that uses PostgreSQL Full-Text Search. Which is much less powerful than Solr engine but is also much more lighter.

In case no search engine is enabled Noosfero will fallback to the plain on sql "like" which we don't recommend. Also if you enable more than one search engine the first one to answer will overlap the others and we do not guarantee crazy side effects, so be careful with it!

We still lack some documentation on how to create your own search engine but that might come soon in the future.

That's all for this version. See you on the next one! o/