Alfresco Community 4.2 - Shiny. Fast. Awesome.

[kevinr1]

There hasn't been a release of Alfresco Community for a while, and that's a shame, but the good news is one is coming soon, very soon in fact - and it will have a lot of new and improved features! Also many, many bug fixes from all the 4.X.Y Enterprise revisions that came before it.



Here's a quick summary of the new and improved features can you expect to see when you install Community 4.2!



New Share dashboard dashlets:

• Site Search

search results dashlet that allows a user to enter fts-alfresco search and see results across all their sites (when added to user dashboard) or just within a specific site (site dashboard)

[caption id='attachment_94' align='alignnone' width='210'] Site Search dashlet[/caption]

• Saved Search

Similar to Site Search - but the query is set via the dashlet settings panel - since this panel is only accessible to Site Managers, it means that 'pre-canned' site searches can be set up by a Site Manager - great for reporting since it supports the full power of fts-alfresco search syntax. The title of dashlet can also be changed in the settings panel to make it clearer what the dashlet is reporting on.

[caption id='attachment_95' align='alignnone' width='389'] Saved Search dashlet - settings for Site Managers[/caption]

• My Discussions

dashlet to show forum posts that a user has created or replied to recently

[caption id='attachment_111' align='alignnone' width='316'] My Discussions dashlet[/caption]



Improved Share dashlets:

• Image Summary

improved liquid layout, folder path selection to show sub-set of images within a site, improved lightbox view

[caption id='attachment_107' align='alignnone' width='387'] Image Preview dashlet[/caption]

• My Tasks Dashlet

filter 'all' has been split into 'active' and 'completed', paging added.

• Content I'm Editing

dashlet converted to asynchronous loading to improve initial dashboard display speed

Document Library extendible views (see blog by Ray Gauss II)

the ability for developers to more easily add custom view modes to the Document Library

Rich Media Gallery View for Document Library

The first version of the Gallery View is now available in the Document Library - try it out to explore the shiny! More Multi-Media related views will be coming soon also. The new view supports the standard Document Library features such as multi-file select, drag-and-drop upload and also new features such the ability to dynamically change the number and size of the thumbnail images that are displayed in real-time.

[caption id='attachment_99' align='alignnone' width='722'] Gallery View 1[/caption]



[caption id='attachment_100' align='alignnone' width='722'] Gallery View 2[/caption]



Quick Share

public sharing of shortened document URLs

[caption id='attachment_120' align='alignnone' width='421'] Quick Share action[/caption]



Workflow UI improvements

delete completed workflow, show the completed tasks and workflows

iPad and Android usability fixes and improvements

HTML editing for Create Content, Wiki, Blogs and Forums (TinyMCE integration improved), drag and drop support for customise dashboard/site and rules ordering.

HTML5 multi-file upload

As well as the existing HTML5 drag-and-drop (in supported HTML5 browsers), the Document Library now supports multi-file selection in the standard upload dialog. With this change, there really is no need for the Flash based uploader any more on modern browsers.

SpringSurf 1.2:

• module-deployment features (see blog by David Draper)



• use-checksum-dependencies (see blog by David Draper)

No need to 'clear internet cache' for end users when deploying Alfresco 4.2 or any future version. This great feature means the pain of clearing the temporary files cache has gone away when rolling out Alfresco 4.2 to your users!

• optional CSS image encoding (automatic embedding of images resources into CSS files - see blog by David Draper)

a prototype feature that is not enabled by default but potentially a great way of saving resources reducing the number of files that need to be downloaded to the client

• widget refactoring and extensibility hooks (see blogs by David Draper and Erik Winlöf)

more impressive Share extensibility features for developers

• configurable RemoteClient (see blog by Kevin Roast)

timeouts, buffer sizes, http proxy settings, tcp settings, the white/black list of unsecure HTML tags for wiki editing and inline display of HTML content from Alfresco is now fully configurable

Prevent 304 revalidations for unchanged thumbnail images

a feature that means Share will no longer need to execute checks back to Alfresco to see if document or user avatar thumbnail images have changed - reduced network traffic and improved performance

Category Manager and Tag Manager fixes and improvements



Sharepoint VTI module improvements



WebDav

stability and coverage (litmus tests), range header support

Latest Activiti BPM engine

Activiti 5.10 release

Search help information

inline help for the main search page when results are found

Download as ZIP action

combined multi-file download

Forms Runtime Validation improvements

improved user feedback for invalid form data 

 



I hope this gives you a good overview of the new and improved features in Alfresco Community 4.2, as ever you can also expect better Repository and Share performance since the last release and significantly improved stability with a large number of bug fixes. Enjoy the shiny!