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Contacts
Hours: 8:30am - 5pm M-F
Phone: 217-244-6300
Address:
424 Library, MC-522
1408 West Gregory Dr.
Urbana, IL 61801
Urgent server problems can be reported at other times to the
Information Desk (333-2290)
CMS upgrade status report
Apr 28, 2008
By J. Weible
The multipart upgrade to our OpenCms system is now previewable on a parallel installation.
We have not yet upgraded the production CMS. All this work was required to plan and
verify the problematic upgrade could be completed successfully.
As has been
reported previously (without
all the horrid details you really don't want to know), we've had a lot of problems getting our
OpenCms system upgraded. I'm happy to report significant progress that is now
demonstrable.
We want you all to have a chance to help us locate any new problems before we do this upgrade to
the production system. At this point, it looks like a good time to upgrade the production
system is May 16-18.
If you already have a CMS account and want to preview these coming changes, you
can log into the upgraded test system at
https://130.126.32.121/cms/system/login/adlogin.jsp.
The ISD and WTCC units will be working on updating the CMS documentation to reflect the notable
functional changes. If you discover a problem while trying out the new system, please
submit a report to
ISD.
The improvements and changes that will be of widest interest include:
- When you are creating links to other CMS pages, the file browser now works correctly!
- As
reported previously the image
gallery is disabled in favor of a file browser that limits to only images.
- The new "Employee Bio" structured document type & template (a collaboration with Barry
Bailey)
- Multiple simpler "modes" for the TinyMCE editor depending on what sort of content is being
edited.
- We've redesigned how we launch and serve TinyMCE to improve the speed of the editor.
- The incredibly annoying "disappearing-spaces-after-using-backspace-key" bug in TinyMCE is
fixed.
- There's now a full-screen mode toggle when editing content in the TinyMCE editor -- very useful
for longer pages.
- There are numerous fixes for issues with file locking, and it's easier for us (ISD staff) to
force locks to release if needed.
- The notification popup that appears after you publish file(s) can now be switched off in the
user preferences.
- Our new custom XML content processor was installed and (partially) enabled. This allows
us to correct invalid markup in targeted cases to address problem areas caused by limitations of
TinyMCE and by user behavior. This will let us achieve 100% validity and accessibility on an
even greater percentage of pages.
- We can now grant WTCC personnel the "Account Manager" role so they can promote users'
permissions within the CMS.
- Numerous security fixes.
Here's a summary of how we got to this point:
- I made a new temporary virtual server based on a copy of the production system on 4/22.
- Successfully upgraded that new virtual machine from version 7.0.1 to 7.0.4 of OpenCms (all
problems that occurred were to non-essential areas, which we'll avoid when upgrading production for
real).
- System configuration changes were implemented.
- Exported the newer installation of the TinyMCE editor from the CMS development system and
installed it on the upgrade test system.
- The customizations we've made to the system in Java and code were integrated with the source
code for 7.0.4 and recompiled.
- The Faculty and AP employee bios that were built on CMS-devel have been imported.
The detailed release notes (feature changes and bug fixes) for the products can be found here,
in case you want to see what the differences are:
