uPortal 4.2.0 Milestone 1

A first milestone release towards uPortal 4.2.0. Not a general audience release or even a release candidate. Not intended for production adoption.

See also:

• The uPortal 4.2.0-m1 release page and news item on www.apereo.org
• The uPortal 4.2.0-m1 page in the Confluence wiki, which includes reports from the issue tracker.
• A blog post detailing what’s in this release

uPortal 4.2 is uPortal 4.1 except better.

• Better Marketplace, something much closer to feature-complete than that shipping in uPortal 4.1. You might even be willing to put this Marketplace in front of real users.
• Better APIs. Especially JSON web service APIs. Also improvements to Java APIs modeling users and to plugin points in the rendering pipeline and for user profile selection.
• Better experiences. A user-facing dialog inviting session extension when session timeout expires. Better messaging to users when portlets are taken out of service for maintenance.
• Better tools. A much more attractive Portlet Manager and Permissions Manager. Command line conveniences and a better command line build implementation.
• Better logging for better troubleshooting.

Pull requests that were merged for inclusion in this release:

• Marketplace with asynchronous cache population, layout adding, enforcement of BROWSE permission on related portlets and client-side screenshot validation.
• A much nicer Portlet Manager, with tooltips in the UI and better documentation to disambiguate portlet names, titles, and fnames. Other administrative UIs got better too. And a new Maintenance portlet lifecycle state.
• Fixed Google Analytics integration.
• A session timeout dialog
• Inline portlet configuration
• Better search results for Simple Content portlets.
• App Launcher portlet type with a handy six column layout to place them in.
• Better JSON APIs including fnames. Better IPerson API.
• Better handling of access to portlets not in one’s layout, also for unauthenticated users in transient layouts no less
• Filters Respondr regions out of mUniversality and adds Google Analytics in.
• Handy administrative access to dynamic skin configuration
• Saving a layout change as one AJAX call rather than two
• Updated PostgreSQL dependency
• A SmartLdap group store that’s less weird. Still smart.
• Use of CSS animation rather than jQuery animation, with the added bonus of working. Better showchrome = false styling, again with the workings.
• Sticky profile selections, in transactions, with a fancy createOrUpdate DAO API, but not for the guest user, and with graceful failure and logging.
• MarketplaceEntry, MarketplacePortletDefinition, and PortletDefinitionImpl nicities, with keywords, launching better URLS to specified target windows.
• Better portlet failure logging and logging on DLM fragment audience determination.
• Better tools for schema update generation and deploying XSLT and LESS files, and you can even run them under Ant 1.9.3+
• Rendering pipeline tricks to conditionally terminate in a redirect.
• Better Groovy compilation implementation in a build process without focus stealing
• Unit testing that respondr.xsl compiles, now that everyone is adopting it.
• Updated guidance for contributing. You should.