CKAN 1.8 released

Adrià Mercader
22 Oct 2012
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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. 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 or from source, and feel free to contact the mailing list or the IRC channel if you have any questions.

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)