Release notes for EnterMedia

May 2011 entermedia-server build 7.532

* EnterMedia server is now focused exclusively on Administrative actions.
* EnterMedia applications such as EMTube, OpenEdit, EML and MediaLab applications available
* Rhozet Carbon Copy integration for converting video assets
* Aspera integration available for download acceleration
* SmartJog integration available for broadcasters
* FTP and SMB publish destinations for publishing converted assets automatically or when exporting
* New Asset Type support within a single catalog. Allows groups of metadata handling within a single catalog
* New User Profile support. Allows preferences and security levels to be defined on a per catalog basis
* Event Manager now uses sub-folders with groovy scripts for all major export and publish types
* Additional REST services and XML escapes. Hits per page is now maintained

Nov 2010 build 7.286

Created new OpenEdit CMS plugin with online editing of html
New OpenOffice PlugIn that allows Microsoft formats to be rendered.
Full text search Word, Excel and Power Point documents
Created new style and script tags for xconf's
Plugin Manager allows 3rd party plugins
Now use Groovy scriptingFix bug with tags causing a rotation in the image
Improved import performance
Added optional way to hide thumbnails that are not yet created
Moved to SVN for source code repository

Aug 2010 build 7.178

Added entermedia.key support
Unify login screen
Big IE CSS clean up
Enable emtube facebook share
fix bug with password notification

Aug 2010 build 7.160

Moved generated assets to the /WEB-INF/data/catalogid/generated folder tree
To moved your generated files Settings | Server Maintenance | System Event: "Move thumbs to /WEB-INF/data"
Added WEB-INF/bin/exiftoolthumb.bat for creating INDD thumbnails
Crome now works with Upload Applet
Added Amazon S3 Content prefix for playing videos over content distribution network
Fix hover on videos so they show previews
Added new stockem front end
Major changes to Asset Details area
Added delete original asset option deleteoriginal=true
Added new category picker
Added metadata input for upload screen
Speed up advanced search

June 2010

This month we have been focusing on stability and refinement within the admin area and innovating in other areas.

Top 10 Changes include:

1. EMTube is HERE! Major progress made on the new EnterMedia front end called EMTube. It is now being deployed to the demo site. The goal is to create a clean HTML front end that can be more easily customized for a customers needs. The architecture also allows for multiple front ends using a shared admin area within the same web server. For example /emtube1 and /emtube2 can both use the /media/catalogs/videos folder for storage of their assets
2. Improved content sync tool for Dave
3. Changed folder import to not re-import attachments. It drills down into the folder structure until it find an asset. Once an asset is defined it assumes all other files in folder are attachments
4. Upgrade Flowplayer video player
5. Migrated videos to now use h.264 by default for all video playing
6. multi-edit was not working
7. Major improvement to PDF and EPS thumbnail quality. Especially for small PDF's such as business card size
8. Fixed thumnail genometry when auto-rotating jpgs to account for the rotation. Now tall images fit in nicer within a gallery
9. Upgraded tracker, events, blog to use EnterMedia
10. Made video resizer smart about maintaining aspect ratio that will allow the player to letterbox non 420p ratio
Note: We now depend on the h.264 tools within ffmpeg. For Linux users you may need to reinstall ffmpeg: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=786095 Note: On Windows we now use Ghostscript indirectly by way of ImageMagick. Make sure you have recent versions of these in the path until we get a chance to update the bin folder

May 3, 2010 - EnterMedia v.7.0

• Major reorganization of data storage. All user created content is now stored in /WEB-INF/data/... To migrate from 6.0 you can run the upgrader located within Settings | Server Maintenance | System Events | Upgrade
• New admin area: more understandable, complete, improved user manager and permissions editor
• Automatic translation - The browser language determines how to render the application in the language of choice. If the language does not exists the pages will auto translate using Google's translation API.
• Improved rest api - Feature sponsored by NY client.
• Cleaned up old javascript code (removed old calendar, prototype, script.aculo.us)
• Plugins no longer depend on openedit-editor

March 12, 2010 - EnterMedia 6.706

User Interface

The application has a new nicer looking header and easier navigation. In an effort to simplify our results page, we have removed all of the icons displayed under thumbnails. This gives a cleaner appearance and allows us to fit more thumbnails on a single results page. All of the actions that were previously available via icons below thumbnails are not available on the Media Viewer page, which is accessed by clicking on any thumbnail.

We also changed our image hover functionality. Previously the enlarged hover image would follow your mouse around until your pointer left the thumbnail. Apparently people found this irritating, so we changed it! The hover will now stay centered above the thumbnail and shows the item name and selection groups. For anyone who is still annoyed by the image hover functionality, you can set your preferred view to "Gallery-No Hover". See "View Settings" below for information on setting your view preferences.

Security Improvements
Catalogs now has asset and folder level security enabled by default. Also improved the security editor on the catalog settings page.

Collections
Assets can now be added to groups of collections. A collection gives you a way to show off your best or most recent assets.

View Settings
We also removed the hits-per-page, view, and sorting dropdowns from the results header. These settings are now accessible from the "view" button in the results header. This button will give you a pop-up which allows you to set your results view preferences based on the type of results you are seeing: Category (browsing), Search, Album, or Selection.

New Video Player
EnterMedia is now using FlowPlayer (flowplayer.org) to better support previewing of video assets. If you upload a video, EnterMedia will now generate:
1. A series of still thumbnails to be displayed on results pages. If you hover your mouse over the thumbnail of a video, it will begin to
cycle through this series of still images.
2. A flash version of the video for previewing. By clicking on the thumbnail you will be taken to the Media Viewer page where you will be
able to watch the entire flash version of the video!
3. Ability to import from YouTube or external URL to an asset or video file

Note: Generating thumbs and flash versions of videos requires ffmpeg (ffmpeg.org) to be installed and configured correctly to work with EnterMedia. For more information on this, see our installation
instructions here: http://entermediasoftware.com/docs/ApendixA/index.html

Selecting Improvements
The new clipboard groups are designed to help users sort their media. Once you have added a group of similar items into a clipboard group, you can then categorize or keyword all of those items at once using multi-edit, or you can add the items to a posting to share it with your friends. We have tried to make these clipboard a little easier to use so that everyone can take full advantage of their capabilities. To that end, we have added Drag and Drop functionality! From a results page, you can now drag and drop a thumbnail into a clipboard group box to add that item. You can also add a single item to a selection group using the check boxes that appear in the hover image, or you can add an entire page of results to a selection group by clicking the "Clipboards" button in the results header.

Share with Facebook
We have added a button on the Media Viewer page that will share an item with Facebook!

Voting
From the MediaViewer page, you can now click the star button to indicate that you like that photo/video/whatever. You can even see a list of other users who like a given item.

New Uploader
We have a new, fancier-than-ever upload applet. You can now upload multiple items, or even an entire folder, all at once. EnterMedia will immediately create assets for each item being uploaded, allowing you to begin sorting or editing the meta-data associated with your uploads. You will see an indicator in the top-right corner showing your current uploads. You can click on this indicator to see the progress of your current uploads. Thumbnails will be created for your new assets as the uploads complete. (You will need to be navigating around the site, or at least refreshing your page before you will actually see the images.)

December 15, 2009 - EnterMedia v.6.536

Social Networking Features:
We have added several new features bringing social networking capabilities to EnterMedia. Each user will now have their own user page, from which they can Upload a portrait, add or remove friends, and create, view, or share their albums.
We have also redesigned the Home page to help you keep track of recent activity from your friends. Currently you will see notifications when a friend creates or comments on an album.

New Album Interface:
We've cleaned up our album interface and included album comments on the main album page.

New Events System:
We have implemented a new system to allow you to create your own events that can run java code or scripts. These are stored as _site.xconf files within subfolders inside of the "events" folder. You can then schedule these events to run on a timer or have your pages call these events. Events are managed from their own tab in the catalog administration area (Choose a catalog from the "Edit Catalogs" dropdown in the admin/settings area).

Mounting/Importing:
We have simplified the process for importing new assets from your server. From the import screen in the admin/settings area, you can select a catalog and enter a local (server-side) path and import your assets without having to worry about configuring the mount yourself.
For users that are using mounting for other purposes, you can still access the mounting tool, also in the admin/settings area. This area has been simplified to reflect the separation of mounting and importing.

Clear Invalid Assets:
A new feature that goes hand-in-hand with mounting and importing. This action will check all of the assets within a catalog and remove any assets whose original file no longer exists. This will allow you to keep your catalogs synchronized with your importing folder.

 

October 15, 2009 - EnterMedia v.6.378

Important Upgrade Info:
We have moved the catalog fallback directory up one level (outside of the "tools" directory).  Any preexisting catalogs will need to have their fallback reconfigured.  This is located in the _site.xconf in the root of the catalog.  For example: To update the photo catalog in the included sample webapp, you would need to edit /media/browse/photo/site.xconf and change
"<property name="fallbackdirectory">/WEB-INF/base/entermedia/tools/catalog</property>"
to
"<property name="fallbackdirectory">/WEB-INF/base/entermedia/catalog</property>"

Audio Support:
EM will now play audio types other than mp3s by generating an mp3 version that will work with the embedded audio player.  This is verified to work on wav files but should work for any type supported by LAME (lame.sourceforge.net).
   
Generated Image/Audio/Video Storage Changes:
All EM-generated versions of original files are now stored in the assets directory along with the _site.xconf containing the record's metadata.  This includes image thumbnail, medium, and  preview sized versions, mp3 versions of audio files, and flash versions of video files.  This has elminated an entire unnecessary directory structure (assets/images/generated/...) and should also make it simpler to keep backups of your data.

Album Backend Changes:
Albums are now Lucene based, making it possible to search and sort within an album.

New Datepicker:
We have a new date picker tool that uses jQuery and generally works and looks better.

Importing Fixes:
We have separated the mounting and importing screens.  Both are accessible from the EnterMedia Admin (Settings) area.  Importing will now remove records for original files that are no longer there.  This will keep your records synchronized with your originals folder.
 

September 17, 2009 - EnterMedia v6.285

We have extended the available options for viewing results sets with the addition of two new views:

Audio View: This view is designed for use with audio catalogs and includes an mp3 player for each result on the page.
Download View: This view is primarily designed for use with albums/galleries but can be used for any result set.  It allows users to select all/none/some of the results set by clicking checkboxes, and then download those assets in bulk.  It also allows for downloading type and size converted versions of assets directly from the results page.

We have also added a new interface for adding/removing assets from albums.  This can be accessed by the actions menu in the icon bar for each asset in a results set.  This allows you to add or remove assets from albums without navigating away from the results page.

Users can now also add an entire page of results to an album through the Results menu.

On the backend, we are changing from Prototype to jQuery and have begun changing all of our code to use this new library.

Previously we used both lightbox and thickbox for pop-up dialog areas.  We are now using only Fancybox for displaying preview images and other screens that needed to be in their own pop-up windows.

Our logging system has been improved to log more types of events including multi-record edits.  These improved log
reports are now searchable from the Reports tab if you are using the "darktabs" layout.

The themes concept has been expanded to allow custom themes to apply to areas outside of the EnterMedia webapp, and we have
added more example themes based from old OpenEdit layouts.

We have improved and expanded CSS use for many of the pages in EnterMedia.  This should make it easier for users designing custom themes to find and alter style properties for their site.

For those wishing to use a database backend instead of XML, SQL support has been updated and reimplemented to work with the newest version of our code.

August 31, 2009 - EnterMedia v6.142

This release comes with a bunch of new features and bug fixes.

Our most valuable new feature is the "Photographer" theme. Its focus is on albums so users can now easily browse albums in the front page, comment them, share them or edit them.

We are including a new "viewer" tool for viewing basic asset information and preview without having to deal with the whole asset editor tool interface.

Base code for results view type has been changed to allow users to select different view types for each catalog in a multi-catalog search. Also, new view types have been added, including a "download" view making it easier for users to select, resize and download assets at once.

Themes have been simplified by only including layout files, images and CSS files. File names are much more intuitive. All the CSS used by entermedia are now combined into one file, customizable for each theme.

We started to use Java 5 and 6 capabilities in our code to make it more easy to read, maintain and improve.

July 15, 2009 - EnterMedia v6.0

Lots of new features as well as some big back-end changes and the usual bug fixes for this release.

Most notably we have removed EnterMedia's dependencies on the old Cart and Archive projects.  This involved major refactoring of all of our EnterMedia code, followed by weeks of bug fixing.  This will allow us to move EnterMedia forward without being encumbered by legacy support code.  It will also allow us to maintain the old projects independently of our new product, to better support our legacy users. 

Many more customizable files have been moved into the Themes area, allowing users more flexibility when designing their own custom themes.

In replace of the view toggle button, we have added a view drop-down.  This allows users to select from four different view types for search and browse result pages: Small Thumbnails with Hover Image, Larger Thumbnails, Table (List) View, and a slide-show-like lightbox view.

We have improved our thesaurus (search suggestion) functionality.  We are now displaying recommended, related search terms at the bottom of the results page after a search.  Also, when typing  in search terms, EnterMedia will now try to auto-complete your search query for you.  This auto-completion is based on a saved history of successful (meaning that results were found) searches on your system.

We have also added the beginning of support for InDesign files.  We are now able to create thumbnail/preview images for .INDD files.  Improved support for more formats is on the way!

We have made some improvements to our album system. Users can now share albums with other users, or even invite guest users to view their private albums.

Albums can now also be configured to use a customized album theme.  This configurable on an album-by-album basis, so one of your albums can have a different layout than another album.

It is also now possible for users to leave comments on albums.

Users with permissions to view reports are now able to search for specific reporting data by entering a date range or a username to search for.

EnterMedia can now write keywords (tags) back to an original asset as XMP data.  This is done by clicking an action from the details page.

We have also added WEBDAV support for EnterMedia.  This allows users to drag and drop files directly from their desktop into EnterMedia and have records created for them.

June 15, 2009 - EnterMedia v6.0