eZ Platform "Alpha4" available for testing

Quick links

Installation instructions
Requirements (currently same as eZ Publish Platform 5.4)
Upgrading: As this is a alpha release, there is no upgrade instructions yet, this is planned for Beta.
Download: See share.ez.no/downloads, or see Install for how to install via composer.

The fourth alpha release of eZ Platform,15.07, builds upon the 15.05 July release. It most noticeably adds support for Solr, as well as many UI enhancements and additions. It also contains most improvements and fixes that are part of the 5.4.3 and 5.4.4 enterprise releases.

Highlights

With the many improvements and fixes listed at the bottom, the main changes are:

RichText editor improvements

The active element is now highlighted (EZP-24769)
The contextual toolbar now works on the following elements:
- Headings: change level, or remove heading (EZP-24725)
- Paragraphs: change alignment
The native Alloy Editor "append content" can be used to add a new heading or an embed element (EZP-24768)

Content language display selection

On Content that has translations, a dropdown will now list the available languages. Selecting one of them will display the Content in that language instead. The Edit button will now use the currently active translation.

Stories: EZP-23765, EZP-24549

TECHDOC > eZ Platform 15.07 Release notes > Platform 2015.07 - choose translation.PNG

Translate content

When there are multiple languages configured, translations can be added and edited.

Story: EZP-23766

TECHDOC > eZ Platform 15.07 Release notes > eZ Platform 2015.07 - add translation.gif

Roles management UI prototype

An UI to manage Roles and Policies has been started, and can be previewed.

It is currently limited to listing, creating and deleting roles, without policy management, even though policies can already be viewed.

Epic: EZP-24071

As can be seen in the epic, this feature is being worked on, and will quickly evolve over the next weeks.

TECHDOC > eZ Platform 15.07 Release notes > Platform 2015.07 - roles UI.PNG

Other UI changes

Details of locations can now be viewed from the backoffice: content id, creator, modification date, remote id... (EZP-24512)
Interactive confirmation messages as well as notifications can now be triggered by server side admin pages (EZP-24652, EZP-24536)
AlloyEditor has been updated to 0.5.x (EZP-24712)
Section Management has been reworked, and moved from ezsystems/platform-ui-bundle to ezsystems/repository-forms (EZP-24380)
Configuration can now be sent to the PlatformUI JS app (EZP-24129)

Native Solr support

Until now, the SearchService was using the Legacy database search implementation. It was quite limited, and performed very badly. The Solr implementation has been worked on since last summer, and finally made it into the product.

After configuration and setup, Solr will be used by the SearchService for all of your Location, Content and ContentInfo queries. It has very advanced multilanguage capabilities, and will offer great performances whenever you need to grab Content or Locations from the Repository.

Note that as it is lifts off many limitations, this feature will also be made available to Enterprise customers eZ Publish Platform 5.4 via a specific update.

Documentation: https://doc.ez.no/display/EZP/Solr+Search+Engine+Bundle
Source: ezsystems/ezplatform-solr-search-engine
Epic: EZP-22944

TECHDOC > eZ Platform 15.07 Release notes > Solr_Logo_on_white.png

Other Platform changes

Locations returned by the REST API will now include the ContentInfo. This should avoid quite a few calls only to get the name, or basic info about the Location's Content (EZP-24672)
The REST API will now let you search for Location in addition to Content. While the existing resource remains valid, note that /views should be used instead of /content/views (EZP-24671)

Changelog

Changes (Stories, Improvements and bug fixes) can be found in our issue tracker: (some are still pending additional documentation changes)

Known issues & upcoming features

List of issues specifically affecting this release:

General "Known issues" in Platform stack compared to Legacy:

Epics tentatively* planned for first stable release:

Epics tentatively* planned for first LTS release:

'* Some of these features will not be in the stable releases, the once we first and foremost will aim for having in the release are those mentioned on the Roadmap.