[Dspace-general] DSpace 1.4 Released

[Richard Rodgers]

The DSpace committers are happy to announce the release of DSpace 1.4.
In addition to a variety of exciting new features developed by members
of the DSpace community, this stable release contains important
improvements in security and performance. For this reason,
we strongly encourage upgrading to 1.4 as soon as it is practical. If
extensive customization or other reasons make this difficult, we advise
you to contact the DSpace tech list for recommendations
on how to bolster the security of your installation.

A sampling of new features:
 
* Content verification through periodic checksum checking 
* Support for branded preview image 
* Add/replace Creative Commons in 'edit item' tool 
* Customisable item listing columns and browse indices 
* Script for updating handle prefixes (e.g. for moving from development
to production) 
* Configurable boolean search operator 
* Controlled vocabulary patch to provide search on classification terms,
and addition of terms during submission. 
* Add 'visibility' element to input-forms.xml 
* Browse by subject feature 
* Log4J enhancement to use XML configuration 
* QueryArgs class can support any number of fields in advanced search. 
* Community names no longer have to be unique 
* Enhanced Windows support 
* Support for multiple (flat) metadata schemas 
* Suggest an item page 
* RSS Feeds 
* Stackable authentication methods 
* Plug-in manager 
* Pluggable SIP/DIP support and metadata crosswalks 
* Nested groups of e-people 
* Expose METS and MPEG-21 DIDL DIPs via OAI-PMH 
* Configurable Lucene search analyzer (e.g. for Chinese metadata) 
* Support for SMTP servers requiring authentication 

The documentation for this release is bundled within the package. 
 
DSpace 1.4 can be downloaded from the files area at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dspace/ or from CVS using the tag
dspace-1_4. 
 
Please use the mailing lists available at
http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=19984 to provide feedback on this
release. 

An important caveat regarding Oracle:

After much deliberation, we have chosen to release DSpace version 1.4
without complete Oracle support.  Since 1.4 has been delayed already,
we felt we could not hold the release indefinitely for this feature.

DSpace is an open source, community-developed and maintained project;
none of the committers have access to an Oracle platform with which to
test Oracle support, and so we have to rely on wider community
participation to maintain that functionality.

As soon as some volunteers to develop and test Oracle functionality
step forward, we can soon release a version 1.4.1 with full Oracle
support.
 
Those wishing to do development work with DSpace are strongly encouraged
to obtain the source code using CVS. This is very straightforward and a
guide to doing this is available here: 
http://wiki.dspace.org/ContributionGuidelines 
 
We would also like to take this opportunity to invite you all to 
participate in the DSpace development process. Extra developer 
hands are always welcome, but there are other ways you can help: 
 
- Test the system and report bugs 
- Provide documentation (for end users and institutions, as well as
technical) 
- Share your deployment experiences 
- Donate content and metadata for testing and research 
- Share your technical experience and ideas 
 
Please visit the DSpace Wiki to see the various resources and 
collaboration tools available to the DSpace community: 
http://wiki.dspace.org/DspaceResources 
 
With thanks to all who contributed to this release,
 
The DSpace Committers