Infrae News http://infrae.com/viewer/rss Main site of the Infrae software development company, located in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Infrae builds tools for content, web-authoring, and asset management. All related services are provided. Infrae's products are open source software. unknown 2004-10-11T14:23:51Z Silva 2.1 Released http://infrae.com/newsitems/silva_2_1_released 27 august 2008 – Infrae is pleased to announce the final release of Silva 2.1. This release adds a range of features for both Author/Editors and Site Managers, as well as performance and technical improvements such as functional tests. New features A quota subsystem has been added. It lets Managers set a quota on a publication (which can also be a virtual host root). Containers within the publication acquire the quota. The quota does not count the space used by the xml of documents but tallies the assets. The space utilized is tracked on every container and displayed in the settings screen. Quotas can be set by Managers in the settings screen of the publication. The quota subsystem is off by default. The Zope Pluggable Authentication System ( PAS ) has been integrated into Silva. This means a whole range of existing plugins are available to integrate Silva with different authentication services. In addition to LDAP, we have integration with Radius working, and we've written a plugin for OpenID Authentication. We’ve added infrastructure for ‘elaborate’ Code Sources, where the parameters form appears in a pop-up window, instead of a Kupu toolbox. A new “Editor Comments” toolbox in Kupu displays the contents of the comments metadata field. This promotes the visibility of internal/editor comments so anyone editing the document will see them. The toolbox only appears if there is a comment. The Automatic Table of Contents is much more configurable, with the following new options: choose which Silva types will be listed (any Silva type, including Assets) change the depth of the AutoTOC optionally display the metadata description of content optionally show the icon of each content type specify sort order: alphabetical, modification date, or Silva folder order Several lookup window improvements: the lookup window will now always list containers which you can click to ‘drill down’, in addition to navigating with the sidebar.  a “place reference to this container...“ button was added, so you don’t have to use the sidebar to navigate up one level  as soon as a radio button is selected, the lookup window is closed and the reference is placed automatically the lookup window returns to the last visited location When adding a new item in a folder with existing content, you can choose the location at which it should be inserted by selecting the corresponding checkbox. No need to create and then move. The preview screen in the SMI now previews using the public layout. We’ve realized a significant performance improvement in converting folders to publications and vice-versa. The user interface has been modernized with new buttons and navigation. All assets used in the interface are now aggressively cached. Infrae News kit blake 2008-08-01T09:32:32Z Open Source CMS Awards 2008: Nominations Are Open! http://infrae.com/newsitems/packt_cms_awards_2008 Nominations are open for the third edition of the Open Source CMS Award, hosted by Packt Publishers. Selected CMS’s will go to the next round of the contest. “The Packt Open Source Award is designed to encourage, support, recognize and reward Open Source Content Management Systems (CMS) that have been selected by a panel of judges and visitors to www.PacktPub.com .” Nominate! From July 14 to August 25, you can suggest a CMS, for instance you could nominate Silva in the ‘Other’ category . ‘Other’ basically means not php-based, so Silva will be competing with Java, .Net, and Django systems, including the established Plone, which is also based on Zope: Infrae News kit blake 2008-08-06T09:15:29Z Silva 2.1 alpha, plus Firefox 3 Compatibility Releases http://infrae.com/newsitems/ff3_compatibility_21 21 june 2008 – Infrae announces an alpha release of Silva 2.1, plus three releases for Silva versions that fix problems with the Firefox 3 web browser. There are Silva 2.0.8, 1.6.3, and 1.5.12 versions available. New features of the Silva 2.1 alpha will be announced on the silva-general mailing list . In the 2.x series the key improvements are: Added support for ‘elaborate’ Code Sources, that appear in a pop-up window instead of a toolbox. When SMTP errors occur while sending notifications, we log them, but no longer abort the process. When PDF /Word file conversion for indexing results in errors, the converted text is indexed anyway. Infrae News kit blake 2008-06-21T06:25:22Z Silva Forum Released, with OpenID Authentication http://infrae.com/newsitems/silva_forum_released 28 May 2008 – Infrae is pleased to announce the first public release of Silva Forum, an extension for Silva 2.x that provides a classic discussion forum environment. It can be integrated with OpenID authentication and a CAPTCHA to prevent ‘spambots’ from attempting to post. Sponsored by the Bijvoet Center for Bioinformatics , Silva Forum was developed as a collaboration tool for scientists working on the EU -funded project GlycoGold (MRTN-CT2005-05645). Silva Forum features Silva Forum allows site visitors to create topics (subjects or questions) and add comments to existing topics. Entries are ordered chronologically and displayed on multiple pages for extended conversations. Users can preview their posting, and a clickable interface for inserting emoticons in messages is provided. Infrae News kit blake 2008-05-28T09:26:08Z Sign the Petition to the European Parliament on ICT lock-in http://infrae.com/newsitems/openparliment Open source community delegates draw the attention of the Members of the European Parliament to the current situation where the institution’s ICT systems are locked into the products of one vendor, warn about the implications of this for participative democracy and for fair competition, and call for action to promote Open Standards and Interoperability. Sign the petition at: http://openparliament.eu/ The focus of this petition is to ask the European Parliament to review their policies for choosing software and for publishing data. We’d like the elected politicians to be able to choose open source and we’d like data to be published in open standards The online petition is not part of the official petitions process inside the European Parliament, but it is a way to show that this issue is important. On the openparliament.eu website you can read the text of the petition and sign it . Infrae News kit blake 2008-05-14T15:55:40Z University of Bedfordshire’s Silva site wins Heist Award http://infrae.com/newsitems/uob_heist_award 9 May 2008 – The website of the University of Bedfordshire has been awarded a Bronze prize for ‘Best Website’ in the prestigious Heist Awards. The site is powered by Silva . Congratulations to the university! About the University of Bedfordshire The University of Bedfordshire is a pioneering institution with an emphasis on a modern curriculum that relates theory to practice. It is among the top universities in the UK for graduate employment. UoB was established in August 2006 by a merger of the University of Luton and De Montfort University’s Bedford campus. UoB also won a Bronze Award for its Local & Regional Student Recruitment Campaign . Infrae News kit blake 2008-05-12T08:42:26Z 3 Google Code Sources Available http://infrae.com/newsitems/3google_sources_available 19 april 2008 – Three new Code Sources that enable embedding of Google objects are available. There’s a YouTube video, Google Maps, and a Google Calendar source. These Code Sources should work with Silva 1.5, 1.6, and the 2.0 range. Thanks to the University of Coimbra for the Google Maps source. What’s a Code Source? Silva documents permit all ‘the usual’ elements such as various headings, lists types, insertion of images and alignment, styling of text, etc. Sometimes other functionality is needed, such as the insertion of a live list of news items, or embedding a Quicktime movie. For these situations a Code Source can be inserted, which provides the author with a settings form. For instance for a YouTube video the parameters that can be configured are: width, height, and url. Another example of Code Source functionality is retrieval and insertion of live data from an external database. Infrae News kit blake 2008-04-19T14:10:15Z Silva Math Released http://infrae.com/newsitems/silvamath_released 2 March 2008 – Silva Math is an extension product for the Silva CMS to enhance Silva Documents with mathematical formulas. Mathematical expressions are edited and stored in TeX format and rendered as PNG images. The formulas are embedded into documents as Code Sources. Silva Math uses LaTeX and dvipng to render mathematics. Silva Math benefits from the long tradition of math handling in TeX and LaTeX with its extensive math language and mature rendering capabilities. An advantage of Silva Math compared to Silva JSMath is mathematical expressions are rendered on the server side as images. Thus, there is no need for JavaScript or mathematical fonts on the client side. This gives the server operator full control over the appearance of the mathematical expressions. On the downside, the printing quality of the images is not yet optimal. Infrae News kit blake 2008-03-10T06:56:03Z Silva Security Bulletin: Potential security issue with External Sources http://infrae.com/newsitems/silva_security_bulletin_08-02-05 5 February 2008 – We have had a security issue brought to our attention that potentially affects all versions of Silva using the External Sources extension. This might prompt an update if you suspect your site is affected. The issue Silva indexes Silva Documents and other content to make it searchable. To this end the full text of a Silva Document (version) is extracted and stored in the catalog, so that searches on words occurring in the document will include the document in the results. It appears that the fulltext extraction was a tad naive in that it takes the Silva XML and throws away all tags. This is problematic in the case of Code Sources, in which the parameter values appear enclosed in tags such as: <source id="foo"> <parameter type="string" key="should_be_hidden_text"> verboten </parameter> </source> Infrae News kit blake 2007-05-18T14:32:09Z Silva dLCMS 1.6.1 Released http://infrae.com/newsitems/silva_dlcms_1_6_1_released 8 January 2008 – ETH Zurich and Infrae are pleased to announce the release of the dynamic Learning Content Management System ( dLCMS ) 1.6.1. This is an update of the 1.6 series. For a complete list of changes see HISTORY.txt in the package, but the most important changes are: The dLCMS metadata has been changed making the set more comprehensible and easier to use. dLCMS contents support the Silva subscription feature. Content packaging export now supports URL queries and produces a flat folder hierarchy in the zip archive. What is the dLCMS? The main goal of the dLCMS is the enhancement of learning content’s reusability through the separation of content and graphical presentation, the consequent use of small, modular learning objects that can easily be rearranged into new learning units, and the collaborative use of learning content by teachers and content designers via the Internet. Infrae News kit blake 2007-05-18T14:32:09Z Silva News Network 2.6 beta released http://infrae.com/newsitems/silvanewsnetwork_2_6b_released 6 december 2006 – Infrae has just released Silva News Network 2.6 beta. This is the first Silva 2.x compatible release of SNN . While primarily a compatibility release, SNN 2.6 does include a few new features like a category filtering asset, more configuration options for InlineNewsViewers, and support for the “Atom” syndication format.  It includes the following features and bug fixes: Features First Silva 2.x compatible release SilvaNewsCategoryFilter can be used to limit the category lists in Filters and the properties tool in the NewsItem editor Refactoring of Viewer / Filter rendering code, which means faster page loads Improved InlineNewsViewer which provides more control over how it displays within documents. More developer friendly: NewsItem metadata are now in the catalog Zope 3 interfaces for all content types Improved syndication support: RSS and Atom feeds are provided for News and Agenda Viewers Infrae News kit blake 2007-12-06T17:28:35Z OAI Document Library 1.3 Released http://infrae.com/newsitems/oaidocumentlibrary_1_3_released 15 november 2007 - Infrae has just released the OAI Document Library 1.3. OAI Document Library is a document management application intended for the tracking of large amounts of documents in an organization. The application is open source. It is also open data: the contents of OAI Document Library can be harvested using the standard OAI-PMH protocol and integrated with other applications. OAI integration with the Silva CMS is provided. Changes in 1.3 We’ve prepended ‘OAI’ to the old ‘Document Library’ product name. This to help differentiate it from other applications and make the name more easily searchable. The buildout has been updated. See INSTALL.txt for more information, but getting a demo of the library running is just a bootstrap and buildout away! When manually making a document available, the available date is modified to that moment. When manually expiring a document, the expiry date is modified to that moment. There is a "plaintext available" flag in the form now. This allows you to explicitly disable plaintext from being made available. The plaintext is still available in the feed for full-text indexing, however. The mail sending behavior has been simplified and is less failure-prone. No more need to start a mail queue processor manually to receive email. Infrae News kit blake 2007-11-15T11:22:28Z Silva Poll Released http://infrae.com/newsitems/Silva_Poll_released 12 november 2007 – Infrae is pleased to announce Silva Poll, an extension that enables users to conduct polls inside Silva sites. A question is posed to the public and results of the answers are displayed to those that respond. The poll can be an independent page or be embedded in a document as a Code Source. What is Silva Poll? Silva Poll enables users to conduct polls and collect answers in a Silva site. Results are displayed with numbers as well as graphically with percentage bars. A stylesheet for the content type is supplied so users can easily customize the presentation for their own site. Visitors can be allowed to vote multiple times or votes can be limited by setting a cookie on the user’s computer. Each poll can have a start date, a closing date, a results viewing date, and a results closing date. Silva Poll comes with two different services that manage poll data: there’s one to add the data to the ZODB and one that uses a MySQL database. The ZODB based version creates a new transaction on every vote, thus sites that expect heavy usage may want to use MySQL to store the results separately. Infrae News kit blake 2007-11-12T07:09:52Z Silva Comes In #3 in Packt Other CMS Awards http://infrae.com/newsitems/silva_number_three 30 october 2007 – Silva has come in as #3 in the Packt Open Source Content Management System Award’s “ Best Other Open Source Content Management System ” category.  The category winner is a .Net system, mojoPortal . Our sister solution Plone came in second. Note that the Zope apps come out ahead of two Java-based systems. Thanks for your votes! What is Silva? Silva is a powerful CMS for organizations that manage multiple or complex websites. Content is stored in clean and futureproof XML , independent of layout and presentation. Features include versioning, workflow system, integral visual editor ( Kupu ), content reuse, sophisticated access control, multi-site management, extensive import/export facilities, fine-grained templating, and hi-res image storage and manipulation. Infrae News kit blake 2007-10-25T08:38:32Z Silva 2.0.1 Released http://infrae.com/newsitems/silva_2_0_1_released 26 october 2007 – Infrae has just released version 2.0.1 of the Silva content management system. This is a maintenance release that fixes various minor issues. Changes in Silva and related products A list of the most important changes follows. For complete details of the fixed issues see HISTORY.txt in the packages. Silva Fixed a thumbnailing/caching bug with images that didn’t appear resized in the editor after scaling. The lookup window allowed one to add content and assets to ghostfolders, which isn’t really advisable. This is no longer possible. Silva TOC rendering was fixed to be 100% XHTML compliant. A variety of other minor issues, see HISTORY.txt in svn for a list. Infrae News kit blake 2007-10-25T08:38:32Z Silva 2.0 Released http://infrae.com/newsitems/silva_2_0_released 23 may 2007 – Infrae has released version 2.0 of the Silva content management system. This architectural release targets Zope 2.10 and higher and takes advantage of much of the new technology. Infrae has striven to keep Silva 2.0 almost feature identical to Silva 1.6, while refactoring and rebuilding large parts of the system ‘under the hood’, using advances in Zope and Five infrastructure. This major reworking should especially help extension developers by expanding the set of tools available to them. Changes in Silva 2.0 Major refactoring of Silva to work with Zope 2.10 and up. The Silva Find extension has been included in the Silva core. Many thanks to all who contributed. See HISTORY.txt in the Silva core package for detailed information about changes in Silva 2.0. For developer changes, see doc/developer_changes. Also see the changes in components such as Silva Metadata, External Sources, etc. Infrae News kit blake 2007-03-26T07:03:35Z Silva dLCMS 1.6 Released http://infrae.com/newsitems/silva_dlcms_1_6_released 18 may 2007 – ETH and Infrae are pleased to announce the release of the dynamic Learning Content Management System (dLCMS) 1.6.0. This is the first stable release of the 1.6 series and enhances the product by the following features (for a complete list of changes see HISTORY.txt in the package): A new slide content type: A dLCMS Slide is an element of a slide show. The slide consists of a slide show and a handout part. The slide show part is displayed during a slide show viewing mode, the handout part is shown when printed or in the normal web-viewing mode.  Support for Silva Layout: Layouts can be managed more efficiently on the file system. Different skins defined and easily selected.The Silva dLCMS Layout product provides such skins as an example.  Selectable skins for content packaging: Together with the additional Silva dLCMS Layout product, which is based on Silva Layout, alternative skins can be easily selected for the content package. Multimedia CodeSources for Flash, Java and Quicktime provide a reference lookup window and are installed automatically together with the dLCMS product. Infrae News kit blake 2007-05-18T14:32:09Z Silva issues now tracked in Launchpad http://infrae.com/newsitems/silva_issues_on_launchpad 3 april 2007 – Infrae is pleased to announce that Silva’s issue tracking is now in Launchpad . This move is part of an effort to enhance collaboration with other components in the software stack. Besides being the home of the GNU/Linux distribution Ubuntu , Launchpad also hosts Zope3 issues, Grok issues, SchoolTool , and has been the development hub of the dLCMS (dynamic Learning Content Management System, developed at ETH Zurich ) for the last year. Many Silva users have used Launchpad to translate Silva’s interface languages. Translations are linked with 2,700 other projects on Launchpad, and the website offers suggestions of possible wordings from those projects. This inter-connecting of open source communities is a prime example of the potential of the Launchpad service. Infrae News kit blake 2007-04-03T10:43:31Z PTProfiler 1.2 Released, Updated for Five & Zope 2.10 http://infrae.com/newsitems/ptprofiler_1_2_released 28 march 2007 – A new PTProfiler has been released thanks to Godefroid Chappelle and the Sorrento sprint. This new version profiles Five Browser views of Zope 2.8-2.9 and has been ported to Zope 2.10. What is PTProfiler? PTProfiler is a simple profiling tool for TAL expressions within Page Templates. It monkey-patches Zope’s TAL machinery to time all the expressions, and provides a web frontend to view both total rendering time of all page templates and the time each individual TAL expression (path, string, or python) takes. This makes bottlenecks in page templates easy to find. Download The package can be downloaded from http://www.infrae.com/download/ptprofiler . Or: http://plone.org/products/ptprofiler . Infrae News kit blake 2007-03-29T04:21:21Z Silva 1.6 Final Released http://infrae.com/newsitems/silva_1_6_final_released 27 march 2007 – Infrae has released version 1.6 of the Silva content management system. This release brings a range of improvements and several key new features, such as automatic PDF and Word file fulltext indexing, Atom/ RSS feeds from containers, ‘classic’ list-based menu rendering, and additions to the documentation. Performance has been significantly improved by changing how containers are published and optimizing calls to the metadata service. Silva Find The Silva Find extension has been renovated to take advantage of the PDF and Word file fulltext cataloging. It now supports search by all metadata fields, including those in your custom sets. The search and result views can be extensively customized. Silva Find is included in the silva-extra tarball. Infrae News kit blake 2007-03-26T07:03:35Z Silva 1.5.10 Released http://infrae.com/newsitems/silva_1_5_10_released 20 february 2007 – Infrae has just released version 1.5.10 of the Silva content management system. This is a maintenance release that includes default layout performance improvements, additions to the documentation, and fixes for various minor issues. Changes in Silva and related products A list of the most important changes follows. For complete details of the fixed issues see HISTORY.txt in the packages. Silva Added an explicit base tag to the layout template, so that it no longer includes a trailing slash which Zope adds for all container-like objects, which Silva Documents are. This means that linking to anchors now works like you would expect it to. Users should add a base tag to their own layout templates. Default installations will have the html meta tags and accessibility links skipped in the layout macro to have better out of the box performance. Site managers can turn them on as needed. Changed css styling of the preview publisher buttons, making it easier for users to integrate the publisher into their own layout. Renovated the TOC/AutoToc rendering, replacing the ancient, legacy, Netscape4 compatible image-based indent, with CSS based indenting. Users should update frontend.css with the new selectors for the TOC levels. Solved problem with trailing slashes in relative Links (thanks to Benno Luthiger). Infrae News kit blake 2007-02-20T17:54:04Z Tramline 0.5.1 Released http://infrae.com/newsitems/tramline_0_5_1_released 22 january 2007 – Infrae has just released version 0.5.1 of Tramline. This version has improved installation and configuration, an example of setting up Tramline with Zope3, and various bug fixes. What is Tramline? Tramline is an upload and download accelerator that plugs into Apache using mod_python . Its aim is to make downloading and uploading large media to an application server easy and fast, without overloading the application server with large amounts of binary data. Only a small configuration change in Apache is necessary to enable Tramline. The application server remains in complete control over security, page and form rendering, and everything else. Minimal changes are necessary to any application to enable it to work with Tramline; in fact it’s just setting two response headers in a couple places in the code. Infrae News kit blake 2007-03-20T11:51:10Z Silva 1.5.9 Released http://infrae.com/newsitems/silva_1_5_9_released 12 december 2006 – Infrae has just released version 1.5.9 of the Silva content management system. This is a maintenance release that improves performance, exposes Firefox spellcheck capability, and fixes various minor issues. Changes in Silva and related products An abridged list of changes follows. For complete details of the fixed issues see HISTORY.txt in the packages. Silva Changed calls from getMetdata to getMetadataValue where possible, resulting in a significant performance gain. Fixed unicode bug in Indexers. Fixed a number of minor bugs. SilvaMetadata Bugfix for empty strings in aqcuirable metadata fields blocking acquisition. Thanks to Nico Grubert for the bug report and fix. Kupu When images exist in a document and the author scales one, the display in Kupu can be cached by the browser and doesn't update properly. The editor frame is now reloadable with the right-mouse button so authors can force a reload. Previously Kupu had a right-mouse button menu. This has been disabled, with the intention of exposing the spellcheck functionality that is built into Firefox 2.0. This means, if you are using FF 2.0, text in Silva is automatically checked. Dictionaries for all major languages are simple to install. Infrae News kit blake 2007-01-14T18:22:26Z Silva Static Released http://infrae.com/newsitems/silva_static_released 28 november 2006 – Infrae has just released SilvaStatic, a Silva extension that allows users to export a static copy of content maintained in Silva to an external website. This allows an organization to run Silva internally to manage content, but export the content to a simple external web server, for instance at an internet provider. The only things the web server needs to support are the serving of static files and FTP access so content can be uploaded. In order to install SilvaStatic, you also need to have either wget or httrack installed, and the ftputil python package (download it from http://ftputil.sschwarzer.net/trac ). We would like to thank Antropia ( http://www.antropia.nl ) for making SilvaStatic possible. Infrae News kit blake 2006-12-11T18:08:56Z Silva Find Extension Released http://infrae.com/newsitems/silva_find_release 6 october 2006 – Infrae is pleased to announce the first public release of the SilvaFind extension. SilvaFind is a highly customizable search solution for use with Silva. It allows defining searches in both public sites and the Silva Management Interface. For developers of Silva Extensions, it is easy to define new search schemas so that custom metadata sets or other properties of their content can be made searchable. See README.txt for more information on how to achieve this. Download SilvaFind can be found (heh) at: http://www.infrae.com/products/silva/extensions/silva_find . Credits Many thanks to the people at the ETH Zurich for making this extension possible. Infrae News kit blake 2006-12-11T18:08:35Z