is now
This is bound to end up being the largest product release announcement we've ever written, as it's the result of both fortunate and unfortunate circumstances. First, the good news: we've been very busy in the last 15 months, working both on our new product Lily, but also adding new features and improving the already rich feature set of Daisy.
People who have been in touch with us during trade shows or events over the past year heard the story already: we're focusing Daisy onto the wonderful world of techdoc, internal collaborative document/book authoring and legal/QDoc publishing, with sophisticated document models and a feature set to match that.
The bad news is that it took us 15 months to release this new version, but I can honestly testify that it's entirely worth the wait. Daisy 2.4 is better than ever, with a new build system, new features and new developer conveniencing, and we're very proud to release it today. So without further ado, I'll pass the mic to Karel, who has been shepherding this new Daisy release for a long time now, and who will introduce you to all things new in Daisy 2.4.
Thanks for all the hard work that went into this release!
Steven.
Go back in time and pick an arbitrary date: we'll show you the matching versions of your content and even better: We allow you to search and navigate facets in the complete corpus back into time. This is a feature you can't find elsewhere in the open source CMS market.
Handle higher loads and fail-safe setups through replication between multiple repository instances in master-slave mode.
Keep enjoying that next installation of Daisy.
Up to Daisy 2.3, the installation script would ask you a lot of questions without giving the possibility to change your answers without starting over. Now the installation process is driven by a configuration file: you start with a template installation file. Easy!
Customize the editing environment to match the presentation layout.
Your users can now edit the content in the familiar layout of your site. The tabbed paradigm is still the default, but can easily be modified into a true inline editing environment.
Skip the login page! Yay! Finally!
Keep your Daisy user data in sync with your own backend (e.g. LDAP or your own)
Better leverage your document handling batch processes
Because happy developers are effective developers.
We switched from maven to Maven 2 for building Daisy.
We don't just use Maven 2 for building Daisy, but for projects using Daisy. The daisy-maven-plugin allows this to be done in a very efficient and professional manner.
Using the sample-project archetype, you can give your Daisy project the best start it can get, for the complete dev team, in no time!
During your project customization project we offer the flexibility to switch and test various Daisy versions (which is important for facing the cutting edge challenges of working on top of Daisy trunk, but also could be useful in longer-term projects)
A wrapper which lets you use the popular Spring framework for developing your own wiki extensions, rather than the less-well known/used Avalon framework that Cocoon provides.
The query search page lets you set a context document. This makes it easier to test queries using the ContextDoc() function.
Optimize the full-text indexing process for your content using a custom index analyzer and get better full-text search results by using custom query analyzers. (e.g. handling custom synonym lists)
A Daisy repository can now manage multiple namespaces and decide in which namespace each document should go. Playing with multiple content repositories and reshuffling their content over time was never easier.
Various changes making configuration easier and more flexible.
By storing the version mode in a cookie, guests can also benefit from the version mode and point in time features across your customizations
This was introduced in 2.3, and got some usability fixes and general attention.
In the advanced section: publisher requests now support adding custom link-annotation metadata (available to the layout styling) based on value-expressions.
We realize there has been an exceptional long time lapse between Daisy 2.4 and the previous 2.3 release, but we are confident this exhaustive feature-list makes up for your wait.
Obviously the Point-in-Time support makes us specially proud. Again Daisy sets itself apart from the CMS-pack with a new compelling feature.
Adding this to a growing differentiator list from previous releases (remember Books, document tasks, workflow,...) makes for more persuasive argumentation to envy both end-users and project-customers. And delivering on the promises should be a breeze with the added developer support.
As always, there's our Daisy mailing list which gets your questions answered, and our professional services you can tap into if you want your project to be done with Daisy by its makers.
May all your Daisy projects be merry, and enjoy this new release!
Go and get the good stuff at www.daisycms.org.