Announcements of new sympa release

[Olivier Salaün - CRU <>]

Development of this version started in April 2006. It includes many new features that have been tested by many sites who have installed alpha and beta versions of Sympa over the last year. We'd like to thank the beta testers, the contributors who have either developed a new feature, or extended existing ones, the translators.

• Downloading Sympa 5.3 : http://www.sympa.org/distribution/sympa-5.3.tar.gz
• The complete Release notes : http://www.sympa.org/distribution/sympa-5.3/NEWS

We've created a new subversion branch to apply bug fixes of this new Sympa version. In the future, we will release 5.3.x versions from this branch, along with significant changes. Note that we won't maintain the 5.2.x branch anymore.

New features :

• New SOAP features allow remote list creation, ADD and DEL of list members (see documentation)
• Automatic list creation : this is a contribution from the A.Amrani (French Ministry of defense) that allows to trigger list creation when a message is sent for the list. (see documentation)
• DB logs (developed by A.Bard) : each operations that changes the status of messages/subscriptions/list config is now logged in a structured DB entry. Both listmasters and list owners can search this events DB using the Sympa web interface. (see screen shot
• Picture upload (developed by A.Brard) : List members can upload and share their pictures via the REVIEW web page. (see screen shot)
• Blacklist : list owners can manage a blacklist for their list, via the web interface (see screen shot)
• New user and admin web documentation (provided by V.Paitrault). In French version only, the English version will be available in next version. (try it)
• Accessibility of the web interface has been enhanced (work done by A.Brard)
• Generalization of UTF-8 : Sympa now uses Unicode for its web interface, thus making it easier to mix different characters encodings
• Custom scenario conditions (S.Amrani) : you can use a Perl package of your own to evaluate a custom scenario condition (see documentation)
• SQL named filters (S.Amrani) : listmasters can now define SQL search conditions in authorization scenarios see documentation)
• Added support for NFS locking, using File::NFSLock CPAN module. [K. Moriwaka] (see documentation)
• New sympa.pl –purge_list option to remove a closed lists.
• Added an alias_manager that is MySQL enabled. [Bea, Cartables.net]

Changes :

• All service messages are now UTF8 encoded. Conversion is automated with sympa.pl –upgrade for all custom files (mail_tt2, web_tt2, scenario files, configuration files, list templates) and also for shared document filenames. The conversion process will keep a copy of original files.
• ‘include’ mode is now obsolete. Now performing a mapping while to ‘include2’ while loading the parameter.
• Updated Polish translations. [L. Zygmanski] (try it | translate)
• Updated Japanese translations. [S. Ikeda] (try it | translate)
• Updated Brazilian translations. [Prof. P.E.M. Almeida] (try it | translate)
• Updated Spanish translations (try it | translate)
• Updated Italian translations (try it | translate)
• Updated Occitan translations (try it | translate)
• Revised version of English translations (J.Gemmill, Univ. Alabama at Birmingham) (try it | translate)