Software Update: WebGUI 6.8.0

A new version of WebGUI has been released on the Plain Back Software website with a version number of 6.8.0. With this program, a website can be easily managed and set up without having to possess extensive technical knowledge. For more information it is useful to the description of the programme. The version 6.8.0 announcement looks like this:

We have some good news and bad news. The bad news is that 6.8 doesn’t include the workflow system. The good news is that it includes a whole lot of other stuff. Unfortunately due to some development scheduling hiccups we’ve had to split the original 6.8 release into 6.8 (this one) and 6.9 (workflow). 6.9 will be out around April or next year. This release includes some really huge new apps including Dashboard, Matrix, Stocks, Weather, In/Out Board, a Style Template Wizard, and some massive performance improvements.

This new release also ups the requirements for WebGUI. You now need Apache 2.0 with mod_perl 2.0 and MySQL 5.0 in order to run WebGUI. If you’re a WRE user, WRE 0.6.0 was just released and includes all of these components.

Version 6.8.0:

• Switched Date::Manip to DateTime for better performance and more functionality. See gotchas for details. In our benchmarks DateTime runs about 13 times faster than Date::Manip. Depending upon how intensive your pages are, you will see a 2% to 100% performance increase from this change.
• Added RandomThread macro thanks to Wouter Vijvers.
• Switched from Apache::Registry/CGI to a pure mod_perl2 interface, which increased performance by over 70% to the entire system, and in some cases as much as 100%. See gotcha.txt for details. This increase is not seen in raw speed, but rather capacity. You can serve 70% more requests per second.
• Changed macro API which cuts macro memory consumption in half. See migration.txt for details.
• Added automated code testing framework.
• Added code skeletons for the various plugins WebGUI supports.
• Added template to Collaboration RSS feeds.
• Added page.isContainer and page.isUtility template variables to Navigation templates.
• Added Matrix assets.
• Added In/Out Board asset.
• Page not found page returns a 404 error code now.
• Added more error trapping in caching system.
• Fixed some layout and control bugs in the color picker form element.
• Added a simple Style Wizard.
• Removed $session{os}{slash} since it is no longer needed.
• Reworked the form system to use inheritance and added a new master form class for lists called List. See migration.txt for details
• Updated preload.perl to automatically preload all WebGUI related modules, which increased shared memory usage by 30%.
• Added StockData asset.
• Added WeatherData asset.
• Added MultiSearch asset. Will eventually be re-merged with the existing search wobject for the release of 6.9.0.
• Extended the Shortcut asset to allow fully extensible admin overrides, which can be pulled from user preferences also attached to a Shortcut.
• Added Dashboard asset, which uses personalized Shortcuts to allow personalization of any asset on your site to create a “portal” or “dashboard”. You can create more than one dashboard per site. See the help documentation for how to use Shortcut overrides and the new user preference fields.
• [ 1361669 ] editUserProfileField causes huge memory consumption, loop
• [ 1354464 ] Dynamic Field does not work correctly
• [ 1354467 ] WebGUI::Form::Group is implemented incorrectly
• [ 1372045 ] Required user profile field not show when create login
• [ 1371873 ] edit/manage buttons in Template form control disappeared
• Added an option for multiple IP addresses (space separated) for debug output