MyDMS

MyDMS 1.7.2 is now available and has been uploaded onto SourceForge. Numerous user interface improvements have been made, including a new menu layout, new chooser dialogs and CSS work-arounds to accommodate problems encountered with IE6.

There are also 2 new translations, Czech and Slovak, and a minor alteration to the LDAP authentication code to allow for ldaps:// connections.

MyDMS 1.7.0 is now available and has been uploaded onto SourceForge. This release is primarily intended to address a fundamental limit on the scalability of the storage subsystem and is essential for all systems that intend to store tens of thousands of documents on MyDMS.

Also included are various small changes to the stylesheets to improve the user interface, as well as a Drupal theme that matches MyDMS.

Last, but not least, a Hungarian language translation has been included and there are one or two little bug fixes, mostly to do with properly parsing escaped characters.

The first beta release of MyDMS 1.6.0 is now available and has been uploaded onto SourceForge.
This package has been extensively tested on two production systems over the last 4 weeks and many bug fixes and enhancements have been made. All of the  languages files have been populated with the new phrases, but are incomplete — where there are gaps, the english language phrase has been used as a default. Can I ask that users of the other language packs review the content and submit patches to me via SF.net.

Once 1.6.0 has completed beta testing and is released, I will be re-organising the CVS repository to make way for MyDMS 2.0. This will be a major departure from MyDMS 1.x as I intend to re-work the entire database structure so that I can take better advantage of the newest stable release of MySQL 5. The user interface and user experience will be essentially unchanged (except where an improvement can be made, of course) but the system will be made more robust through proper use of transactions, simplification of the table structure, and so on. Performance and scalability will also increase beyond even the improvements in 1.6.0!
Lots of work. This means that the databases for MyDMS 1 and MyDMS 2 will be incompatible. As a result, there will be a huge focus on migration tools. Also, development on MyDMS 1 will not stop — features will continue to be back-ported into the MyDMS 1 branch and new releases made. I’m not about to isolate users!

Work on MyDMS 2 will commence in January 2007.

Has it been quiet here lately? Yes, I think perhaps it has. Just shows you how busy I’ve been .

A new CVS snapshot (20060920) has been packaged and made available. There is a new feature that allows the user to view historical information from previous document revisions. This information includes the list of reviewers/approvers and their comments. Also bundled into this release are some bug fixes and new styles. That’s right: MyDMS now is now available in the traditional blue and a slightly more unorthodox green.

After some extensive internal testing, it looks like most of the bugs have been fixed. What’s missing are updates to the languages files (currently only the English language file is up to date). The test strings have been expanded upon in order to be able to capture all of the output text in a way that can be localised. This means that the lang.inc files are now much bigger, and I could use some help in getting them up-to-date.

I’ve created a new snapshot, based on feedback and some user acceptance testing carried out over the last 2 weeks. Found some bugs, fixed some things, etc. I’ve also put together the basic installation / upgrade procedure for MyDMS 1.6.x, which is one of the last prerequisites for 1.6.0 beta. Based on my current work-load, I think you can expect the first real beta in the next week or so.

I guess I’d better write some documentation for the release as well.

CVS snapshot is available, as always, from SF.net.

A minor update to the development snapshot. LDAP support has been added in as an authentication option. I’ve also taken this opportunity to separate the CVS snapshots from the stable release on the SourceForge repository.

A feature complete preview of the upcoming 1.6.0 release has been packaged and is being made available for users interested in trying out the brand new document life-cycle management component. Also included in this release is a brand new user interface and theme system.

Release Notes

I’ve just uploaded new packages for the 1.5.1 release to fix a problem with file corruption in both the tarball and the zip archive. I don’t know how this happened, although I am prepared to believe that it is an error on my part. Having said that, my first attempt to rectify the problem met with the same results. *shrug* I’ll take it on the chin this time. Thanks to Anton for reporting the problem to me.

It all seems to be working now — the first few mirrors have the files and they are downloading properly.

Very sorry about this. I will make sure from now on to properly check that any releases have successfully uploaded and not leave it to trust.

Right. Onwards to 1.6.0!

I have discovered a bug in the keyword editing code which was preventing users from adding default keywords into global keyword categories. This is not a widely used part of the system, so the impact is believed to be small. New packages are now available for download from SourceForge.net.

I am pleased to announce the formal release of 1.5.0. This release incorporates the changes made during beta testing, although I have also fixed a problem with the ZIP archive where the icons were being corrupted by the compression program. CVS and Tarballs were unaffected by this problem.

Downloads are available from SourceForge.