What's new in 6.6.1?
Mobile Unleashed! And More

New Features and functional improvements 

Mobile in-context page and template building

Thanks to a new channel switcher, Editors and Template developers can now choose to work directly -in Edit Mode or in the Studio - on the desired channel / device as easily as they do with standard web pages.

Multichannel integrated in preview window

A channel / device selection is now available in the Preview window for previewing pages “in device/channel context” before publication.

Multichannel customizable providers

The list of channels/devices can be extended at will. For each device/channel, its capabilities can be defined in order to tailor the best customer experience.

Channel fallback mechanism

Channels are organized as a tree with an integrated fallback mechanism, so the most relevant rendering will always be served even if the calling device is not explicitly listed and known by the system.

Point and click content assignation to a channel

Any content item can be included (forced to be displayed) or excluded (completely removed for the rendering, not only hidden) from a channel with a simple click. This zero-code feature dramatically accelerates customization of multi-devices sites and web applications.

WURFL engine integration (optional)

The mobile device capabilities of Jahia 6.6.1 can optionally use WURFL as a provider, an Open Source framework that compiles a huge set of data about each device available on the market.

Password change

Users can now change their password from their personal profile page.

Terminate user session immediately when blocking user account

When a user account is blocked (in the Administration, Users Management panel) the user session is automatically and immediately terminated and the user is not able to log in the system anymore.

New search options in Managers and Selector

The search tab in the Selector (Edit Mode) and in various managers has been extended with search options : by date (from/to), by range (since 1 day, 3 days, etc.). The list of searchable content types has been extended to portlets. The searchable content types list is now sorted correctly in all languages.

URL Rewriting improvements

1. The “/cms” part of URLs delivered by Jahia can be removed from the URL (an option needs to be activated in jahia.properties to enable this removal)
2. Allow consistent (w.r.t. caching and redirects) access to a live site with a non-canonical hostname, i.e. with a hostname (or just IP address) that is not configured in the site settings. Quite useful in development/test/pre-production environment where the "real" hostname is not "mapped".
3. Solved some inconsistencies in language resolution

Actions items permissions

We’ve added configurable permissions for components to make usage of those permissions more coherent and more complete.

• “Create permission” allows users to create new content with that particular type
• “Edit permission” allows users to modify existing content with that particular type

Create, delete and copy-paste actions are linked under the “create” permission : if the privileged role has “create” permission, users with that role can create, delete, copy-paste content items of that type.

Edit, permissions : if the privileged role has not the “edit” permission users can not edit items of that particular type.

Installation of Jahiapps in default workspace

Since Jahia 6.5, Jahiapps dealing with User Generated Content were installed by default in live workspace and were not able to run in default workspace (staging). Starting with 6.6.1, Jahiapps can be installed in any mode/workspace in order to answer any customers uses cases.

Simplified access to modes

Shorter urls can be used to associate a mode and a workspace at a time.

For instance “/live/” can replace “/render/live/” and “/edit/” can replace the current URL in Edit mode.

Hierarchical category faceting (improvement on Facets mechanism)

Hierarchical facets allows to refine a faceted search result following a tree-based classification. Only facets located under the selected facet are displayed and can be selected.

Contribute Mode

The “Contribute Mode” was heavily refactored in order to solve issues and make its usage more flexible and coherent with other Jahia interfaces. Previously built in jquery, the “Contribute Mode” is now based on GWT, as is the Edit Mode. In fact, the Contribute Mode is really a light Edit mode now, with the same usage principles (double-click, drag and drop...) but with a more reduced feature set - which has always been the goal of the Simplified, business user friendly “Contribute Mode”. The ability to create pages from the Contribute Mode has also been added (a new permission that must be granted to the “contributor” role if you want to provide that capability), which was not possible in the previous version and was requested by many customers.

New JSON default views (base.full.json & base.nodetype.json) available

• Provides access to all properties including multivalued ones (excluding binary)
• Provides direct access to children in order to reduce number of HTTP requests
• Can request deeper trees using URL parameter
• Access to node types (primary & mixins) as well as supertypes
• base.nodetype.json provides full access to node type registry, including querying for a specific nodetype

Ergonomic improvements

Selector, first tab (page tree)

The second column, displaying the lock status, used to be sortable which was confusing for most users as sorting a tree doesn’t provide an understandable result. The sort option has been removed.

Selector, other tabs

Two tabs, portlets and recent items, has been removed by default from the Selector in order to simplify day to day work for Editors. Those tabs were underused. A simple configuration change can restore these tabs if desired. At the same time the recent items tab has been optimized, it now renders only the editorial-content node types and the scope is reduced to the current web-site (full JCR previously).

Files Manager, upload window

In the Files Manager the Upload Window height has been increased to reduce usage of scrollbars when uploading several files. Previously after 6 files, using scrollbars was necessary. the new height allows to select up to 15 files without using any scrollbars.

More detailed workflow review

Metadatas and taxonomy information are now accessible during a Workflow process, allowing reviewers to control those information and make better decisions.

Mouse focus on first field in Edition Engines

In order to reduce mouse usage and accelerate typing, the focus is now automatically placed on the first editable field.

Moved the “title” field in CK Editor when adding a link

In the CK Editor pop-up window, the “title” field is now available on the same tab where the link is declared, reducing the risk that this field is not filled by users causing WCAG errors.

Compare Engine auto-refresh

When a version is restored in the Compare Engine, the right panel is now immediately refreshed to display the restored version.

New entry in Edit Mode right-click menu to access through webdav on folders

Make some actions synchronous in Edit-Mode

Before Jahia 6.6.1, actions launched by editors that were not background jobs were asynchronous: the user was able to launch actions immediately after one another, whatever the processing time and load of his previous action and the editor had nearly no information about the task execution. Now the Edit mode is greyed-out until the processing is finished. This will make editors aware when the requested action has been effectively launched, is under execution and has been finished, and will prevent the same user to launch several very heavy tasks at the same time.

Technical improvements

 WebSphere Application Server (WAS) 7 compatibility status

A complete testing and compatibility effort has been made with Websphere 7 for Enterprise Jahia 6.6.1, included updated documentation and support for portlets. Please note that Websphere 6 is not supported as it is reaching end of life (EOL) late 2012.

 Distant Server publication

New options and optimization for large transfers and first-time site publication.

Improved performances with thousands of pages

Code optimization

Improved performances with thousands of groups

Cache optimization

GWT optimizations

The amount of Ajax calls has been significantly reduced and calls between browser and server have been optimized to improve performances of GUI based on GWT (Edit Mode, Studio).

 CAS 3 upgrade

Jahia 6.6.1 now fully supports CAS 3

Allow passing custom CKeditor options from CND to be used in the editing engines.

Improved default image generation libraries

• Significantly improved thumbnail generation quality
• Improved support for transparent images
• 2x speed improvements

Note that for maximum speed & compatibility, it is still recommended to install the external ImageMagic tool and declare it in jahia.properties configuration file.

Import forced as background jobs

To avoid the case where several users would launch heavy imports at the same time with instant processing option activated, that can cause performance bottlenecks, all imports will now be treated as background jobs (sequentially) and the checkbox to choose immediate processing has been removed from the import window.

Activities

The Social Activities mechanism has been refactored in order to improve scalability and now support a larger amount of activities. A migration script must be run on the previous Jahia version before upgrade to keep previous activities.

Pickers : removed duplicated configurations

Code cleaning

Cache added to geo-tagging module

In the module named ‘Location’, when latitude and longitude has been entered or returned by GoogleMaps based on the address field, those data are now cached to avoid requesting GoogleMaps each time; this is useful, especially considering GoogleMaps limits the number of requests.

Import jobs optimization

The import code has been optimized in order to use lower CPU and Memory by reducing the number of nodes saved at a time. The default value has been changed to match average server configurations. The value can now be changed in jahia.properties to optimize processings depending on available memory / cpu / db capabilities.

In Jahia Tools

Improved support for removing unused versions and deleting completely version histories for already removed nodes (orphaned histories).