[ckan-dev] CKAN 1.8 and 1.7.2 released

[Adrià Mercader]

Hi all,

The CKAN team is pleased to announce the release of its new major
version, CKAN 1.8. Thanks to all the team and external contributors
who have made it possible!

This release includes new features like the ability to follow users
and datasets, and visualize their activity on a dashboard, and a
completely revamped version of the Datastore [1]. The new version of
the Datastore is powered by PostgreSQL, which avoids having to install
extra dependencies and allows us to support more powerful features,
like a full SQL query interface. Users of the previous version of the
Datastore based on ElasticSearch can contact the mailing list for
details on how to migrate their data to the new version.

Apart from new features, we are working hard on internal refactorings
to make the CKAN code base more maintainable and provide a more solid
integration for extensions, making it easier to build them and upgrade
them between CKAN versions. Some of these changes have been included
in this release, have a look at the "API changes and deprecation"
section in the CHANGELOG to see if you need to update any existing
extensions.

We have also made available version 1.7.2, which contains important
bug fixes for those users that want to stay on the CKAN 1.7 line.

Please refer to the documentation for instructions on how to install
or upgrade CKAN, either via packages [2] or the sources [3], and feel
free to contact the mailing list or the IRC channel if you have any
doubt.

Thanks,

Adrià


[1] http://docs.ckan.org/en/ckan-1.8/datastore.html
[2] http://docs.ckan.org/en/ckan-1.8/install-from-package.html
[3] http://docs.ckan.org/en/ckan-1.8/install-from-source.html




v1.8 2012-10-19
===============

Note: This version requires a requirements upgrade on source installations
Note: This version requires a database upgrade
Note: This version does not require a Solr schema upgrade

Major
 * New 'follow' feature that allows logged in users to follow other users or
   datasets (#2304)
 * New user dashboard that shows an activity stream of all the datasets and
   users you are following. Thanks to Sven R. Kunze for his work on this (#2305)
 * New version of the Datastore. It has been completely rewritten to use
   PostgreSQL as backend, it is more stable and fast and supports SQL queries
   (#2733)
 * Clean up and simplifyng of CKAN's dependencies and source install
   instructions. Ubuntu 12.04 is now supported for source installs (#2428,#2592)
 * Big speed improvements when indexing datasets (#2788)
 * New action API reference docs, which individually document each function and
   its arguments and return values (#2345)
 * Updated translations, added Japanese and Korean translations

Minor
 * Add source install upgrade docs (#2757)
 * Mark more strings for translation (#2770)
 * Allow sort ordering of dataset listings on group pages (#2842)
 * Reenable simple search option (#2844)
 * Editing organization removes all datasets (#2845)
 * Accessibility enhancements on templates

Bug fixes
 * Fix for relative url being used when doing file upload to local storage
 * Various fixes on IGroupFrom (#2750)
 * Fix group dataset sort (#2722)
 * Fix adding existing datasets to organizations (#2843)
 * Fix 500 error in related controller (#2856)
 * Fix for non-open licenses appearing open
 * Editing organization removes all datasets (#2845)

API changes and deprecation:
 * Template helper functions are now restricted by default. By default only
   those helper functions listed in lib.helpers.__allowed_functions__
   are available to templates. The full functions can still be made
   available by setting `ckan.restrict_template_vars = false` in your ini file.
   Only restricted functions will be allowed in future versions of CKAN.
 * Deprecated functions related to the old faceting data structure have
   been removed:  `helpers.py:facet_items()`, `facets.html:facet_sidebar()`,
   `facets.html:facet_list_items()`.
   Internal use of the old facets datastructure (attached to the context,
   `c.facets`) has been superseded by use of the improved facet data structure,
   `c.search_facets`.  The old data structure is still available on `c.facets`,
   but is deprecated, and will be removed in future versions. (#2313)

v1.7.2 2012-10-19
=================

Minor:
 * Documentation enhancements regarding file uploads

Bug fixes:
 * Fixes for lincences i18n
 * Remove sensitive data from user dict (#2784)
 * Fix bug in feeds controller (#2869)
 * Show dataset author and maintainer names even if they have no emails
 * Fix URLs for some Amazon buckets
 * Other minor fixes