Greenstone Changelog
What's new in Greenstone 3.10
Nov 15, 2021- Bundling of Apache Tika for better support for docx files. An UnknownConverterPlugin is largely set up to use Tika for docx processing. But you will need JRE8 installed locally into your GS3 and Windows users will further need to tweak the UnknownConvertPlugin configuration: instructions for both here. Tika can also be used as a fallback for extracting text from a wide range of documents, by configuring an UnknownConverterPlugin in similar fashion for other document types as determined by file extensions.
- There has been a change to the naming of custom properties files for a collection. Instead of having resources/collname.properties (eg resources/niupepa.properties), now the file is called resources/interface_custom.properties. If you already have a custom properties file, then please rename it.
- 2 new features in GLI: exporting metadata fron GLI to a CSV file, and some graphical help setting up document or collection level security when editing the collection configuration through GLI. Described in this section.
- Better filename support in GLI:
- GLI now supports the & character in filenames.
- Better GLI support for user-assigned metadata in UTF-8 and possibly other character sets.
- GLI will now also load Greenstone extracted (ex.*) metadata for documents of a built collection whose filenames are in UTF-8 or possibly other character sets. Any nested subfolders within which such documents are contained can have folder names that are in UTF-8 or possibly other character sets also.
- This will now also work if a document type's plugin has the file_rename_method (under BaseImporter section of the plugin configuration) set to Base64.
- More robust client-gli and remote server interaction, with a number of bugfixes enabling better real-word usage. No long delay typing up format statements in client-GLI.
- Better support for running Greenstone 3 on a non-English locale, tested with Mandarin. (For the previous 3.09 release, the workaround is described here.)
- New property in build.properties on Diego Spano's request: tomcat.user.allowLinking
- Some additional work done on mapGPS.
- Expanding on GS3 customisation tutorials: incorporating Depositor and Collection Groups.
New in Greenstone 2.87 (Nov 15, 2021)
- After the GS2.86 release, GS2 was made more secure against Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities thanks to notifications on the mailing list. These improvements are now available in Greenstone 2 from GS2.87 release candidate 1 onwards.
- GS2 now implements the OAI deletion policy. The Deletion Record Policy support is of the persistent kind.
- Downloading support for HTTPS URLs
- Fixes to Downloading: improved termination of wget processes on cancelling downloads
- Better handling of internal processes launched by GLI, including improved support for cancelling actions so that they are properly terminated
New in Greenstone 2.85 (Nov 4, 2011)
- The included apache web server doesn't randomly jump to another port anymore. There is also the option to make the server merely warn you when a selected port is already in use, instead of letting it try for another port.
- There have been several bugfixes concerning Unicode characters in metadata. Especially to browsing classifiers like List, HFileHierarchy and Plugins like PagedImagePlugin and MetadataCSVPlugin.
- Better handling of spaces in the Greenstone installation file path on Windows.
- Fixes to subtle but serious bugs like sudden server crashes, such as when swapping between indexers after having once used MG.
- Linux and Mac library conflicts to do with wvware and imagemagick have been resolved: the libraries no longer interfere with Greenstone's own environment (so that Linux windowing still works when launching external applications from within Greenstone).
- Now you can relocate your Greenstone installation and run a script after that to ensure that the included Apache web server still works.
- Upon moving your Greenstone installation folder around, use a terminal to go into the new Greenstone installation location. Then run the following if you're on Linux or Mac:
- ./gsicontrol.sh reset-gsdlhome
- Run the following if you're on a Windows machine:
- gsicontrol.bat reset-gsdlhome
- PDFPlugin's use_sections option is now also available for when you're using the PDFBox extension for Greenstone.
- On Windows XP and onwards, if you have Microsoft Office 2007+or Microsoft Word 2007+ installed, you can turn on windows_scripting in the WordPlugin and Greenstone will use your Word Application's inbuilt abilities to convert docx files to html. This means that, for such situations, you will not need to install OpenOffice.
- Further bugfixes regarding the Greenstone extensions for OpenOffice and PDFBox (e.g. correctly calculates the number pages in the PDF to display as metadata).
- In Greenstone 2.84, on the Local Library Server included for Windows (server.exe) had a bug that prevented authentication and people were advised to resort to using the included Apache web server to work with the admin pages. This has been resolved since 2.85 rc1.
- The GLI applet is back to working again and a bug in the Depositor when run on Windows has been fixed too. Basing a collection on an existing one when using GLI had developed a hiccup previously, which has been fixed.
- The database has been slightly altered. (A metadata previously called srclink_file now has a new name for the same: srclinkFile. If you come across any source icons not linking to their source documents when previewing collections built with previous versions of Greenstone, then see the section #Migrating collections from 2.84 to 2.85 on how to convert collections from 2.84 to 2.85.)
- glisite.cfg and llssite.cfg have been merged into the latter, but with separate property names for those properties that need to remain distinct between when the server is launched by GLI and when the server is launched by itself.
- The new EmbeddedMetadataPlugin required additional changes to how other metadata-related plugins in the pipeline functioned and to the internal handling of the greenstone "ex." prefix.
- Plugins: More efficient file reads by Plugins. PDFPlugin automatically extract Title, Author, Subject and Keywords metadata fields and store them as ex.Metadata.
- Improved way of locating perl.