Escenic Content Engine 4.3-3 released
Escenic Content Engine 4-3.3 contains some major enhancements and a long list of improvements and bug-fixes. Major changes include a new article list implementation, support for thousands of sections, deploy configuration in the EAR, updated third-party libraries and improvements to the XML import and export.
Highlights
The article list, also known as the latest articles list, has been rewritten for improved performance. Web pages frequently include such lists to automatically display the most recent headers of a section. Some sites use this quite intensively and performance becomes an important issue. The new article list implementation uses a new database index to simplify the database query and it improves the ability to cache the query result. The index is automatically installed and updated, and will improve performance with no modification to the templates.
The section handling has been rewritten to support a larger number of sections. Sections may now be used more liberally as a grouping mechanism. Escenic Content Engine now easily support operating with more than 100.000 sections.
Escenic Content Engine 4.3-3 takes the concept of file system independence further by allowing the configuration files to be deployed as part of the EAR (Java Enterprise ARchive). This will make it easier to install the product and configuration changes will be effective at the time that the application is deployed.
The Escenic XML Import and Export Guide has been updated with more examples and the section on XML export has been improved. The import and export sub-systems has been extended and improved.
These, and a long list of other improvements will be available from the download matrix on Escenic Technet. The list of supported third-party products (operating systems, application servers, databases, etc) is also available: http://technet.escenic.com/engine/43/releasenotes/article4356.ece
Updated Plug-ins
Several plug-ins are scheduled for release during the next few days.
The Forum Plug-in is used for creating stand-alone user discussion forums and to allow comments on the published articles of a web site. The new version, Forum 1.4-5, simplifies the tasks of a moderator and fixes several issues that will improve usability.
The Lucy Plug-in provides efficient and feature rich search capabilities to an Escenic site. The new version, Lucy 2.1-3, fixes several bugs, most notably, it now properly updates the search indexes when an article is deleted.
The Escenic Analysis Engine, a core component of the Statistics plug-in, gathers usage stats from visitors to a web site and provides real-time reports on the traffic pattern. Statistics version 2.1-4 improves the performance of the Escenic Analysis Engine component.
The Category Plug-in version 1.2-8 provides UTF-8 support to the Web Studio Category Admin module and adds database constraints to avoid inconsistencies in the database.
Finally, the Ad Manager and Agreement plug-ins are now available for Escenic Content Engine 4.3. The Ad Manager module provides editorial control over the placement of ads. The Agreement plug-in integrates with the Payex payment service to allow for a subscription to be required for viewing selected pages.
With the exception of Agreement, all the plug-ins are compatible with previous Escenic Content Engine 4.3 releases. The Agreement plug-in depends on 3rd party libraries that have been upgraded in Escenic Content Engine 4.3-3 and requires that the engine is updated.
Availability
The Escenic Content Engine 4-3.3 download matrix is available at Escenic Technet: http://technet.escenic.com/technotes/article3978.ece
