Release notes for EnterMedia
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
New features of EnterMedia include a new user interface, the ability to combine and customize catalogs, cross catalog searching, dynamic search query builder, saved search queries, multi-record editing, albums (collection baskets are out, albums are in!), browser based drag and drop upload, slideshow, CSV exports, PDF page previews, video and audio support, and image orientation detection and tracking of information such as success and availability of assets, user participation and versions.
With all of the new features included in EnterMedia, we needed a new, cleaner UI to support them. We have tried to focus on using screen real-estate more effectively, removing clutter, and providing straight-forward, intuitive ways to complete tasks.
EnterMedia allows you to combine more than one catalog. Each "catalog" is essentially an entire instance of the OpenEdit Archive and can be customized with its own properties, views, layouts, and more.
Specify which catalogs you want to search across with the newest version of our advanced search interface. This allows you to locate your digital assets quicker than ever by searching across all of your catalogs with only one click of the search button.
Dynamically add any field to be used in a search to build completely customized search queries tailored to your data.
Don't rebuild complex search queries: save them! You can save your custom-built search queries to quickly re-run the search anytime.
Select as many records as you want from any browsing or search results page and categorize or edit the meta-data for all of the selected records at once.
All meta-data editing can now be done directly from the details page, including categorization.
Collection baskets are out, Albums are in. Albums work similar to collection baskets. You can now add multiple records to an album using the same selection tools used for multi-record editing.
Adding records is easier than ever. Using our new Advanced Upload tool, you can click and drag files right into your browser and they will be uploaded to EnterMedia. Drag entire folders to have a record created for each file.
Preview an image directly from a search results page by clicking the magnifying glass
View any set of results, whether from browsing or searching, as a full-screen slideshow.
Export a detailed list of your search results to CSV for use in spreadsheet applications.
Uploaded videos will be encoded into a compatible format, allowing in-browser video previews
Play audio files in your browser directly from EnterMedia.
View any page of a multi-page PDF document.
EnterMedia will check for information about the orientation of your images, as well as allow you to adjust the orientation yourself.
Updates and Fixes:
Improved Video support: Video conversions now working correctly in Windows
Multi-Record Editing: Multi-record editing is now working for all input types (multi-select boxes, table rows)
Album Sharing: Album sharing is now working correctly
Album Themes: Albums now use customizable themes
Email Record: Bad input is now handled in a more user-friendly manner
Album Comments: Users may now leave comments about albums
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