Improvements

Relaxed CND
The most significant change in version 7.6 is that you can now add and remove fields on the fly using the CMS UI. Instead of having to “update-all-content”, which could take considerable time to execute, we now have an apply-all-changes which is effective immediately. This feature makes applying changes in a DTAP environment also considerably easier since the CND stays the same. Only the configuration and content in the repository need to be transferred.

Improved Development Model
Hippo CMS version 7.6 makes use of Cargo, a well-known Java EE deployment tool, deploying both site and CMS to your favorite web container, making both applications running embedded with the repository. This way, during local development you will experience the same high performance and behavior of the site and CMS as you would experience in production. With Cargo you can still redeploy the site without restarting the repository! 
Out of the box we support Tomcat 6. If you need support for a clustered setup or other containers then please contact our Support centre.

Out-of-the-box, we support hooking up an external debugger to the deployed application. Additionally, also out-of-the-box, we support JRebel-based debugging and advanced “hot” code and resource updates directly from your favorite IDE to further boost productivity.

Automatic export
A very handy developer improvement is the automatic export. When you turn this nifty feature on then changes you make to the repository are automatically reflected on the file system. Just waiting to be checked in to version control. This means no cumbersome selection of the parts that you need to export.

Console improvements
We added a bunch of handy UI improvements to the console: auto-completion of property names, type selection, right-click menu and dirty session indication.

Images Handling
We also improved the end-user experience with respect to images. First, we added image cropping capability. As you might know, within Hippo CMS we have the concept of an image set. That is an image consisting of multiple variants with different dimensions (sizes). By default, a new image with its variants is automatically created when you upload a picture. With the new cropping feature, the user can now determine the content of a variant by selecting a section of the original image. Secondly, it is now also possible to select a variant from within a rich text editor field.

Extended Browser Support
We fixed some issues with Chrome 10, Safari, Firefox 4 and IE 9. Hippo CMS now works well with the most common browsers.

Workflow Events
Extending the default workflow in Hippo CMS is now easier than before. The workflow engine now supports events. By simply registering your method, you define a callback for workflow actions like adding or removing a document.

DataNucleus
On a technical front, we also made an improvement by removing JPOX and upgrading to DataNucleus. 

Performance Enhancements
The performance of the faceted navigation has greatly improved through rewriting many of the Lucene queries to BitSet operations, and through breaking up queries into smaller ones which are cached. Also, scoring is only applied when needed, making the queries many factors faster. The number of needed queries has also been largely reduced. For large repositories, pages that would take more than a second to load reduced to the order of 10 ms and less.

Documentation links

 https://wiki.onehippo.com/display/CMS7/Automatic+export 

 https://wiki.onehippo.com/display/CMS7/Run+and+develop+with+Cargo 

 https://wiki.onehippo.com/display/CMS7/Develop+with+JRebel 

 https://wiki.onehippo.com/display/CMS7/Create+and+deploy+a+project+distribution

 

Getting Started

To try out the new functionality of Hippo CMS 7.6 using the maven archetype see instructions on  
https://wiki.onehippo.com/display/CMS7/Hippo+Trail

Upgrade, Backward Compatibility and Known Limitations

Upgrade  
Upgrading to version 7.6 is pretty easy. Only the new relaxed CND model and the deprecated goto plugin have impact. Detailed upgrade instructions can be found at http://www.onehippo.org/cms7/documentation/upgrading/7.5-to-7.6/index.html

Backward compatibility  
Hippo CMS still supports the old strict document model, however not from the document type editor.

Something that was already the case for quite some time but worth repeating is that Hippo CMS requires Java 6. And although Maven 2 is still supported, we prefer Maven 3. Maven 2 will gradually be phased out.

Known limitations  
Besides the 7.6 issues taken from Jira, there are no issues worth mentioning specifically.

 

Final Words

Within some weeks we will make the installer for Hippo Go Green on our website publicly available. Finally, we’d like to thank everybody that gave us feedback and reported issues. 

Enjoy!

The Hippo Team