ACS 3.3 Release Notes

This release of the ArsDigita Community System is the first step in a major improvement in the core architecture. With ACS 3.3 we are introducing the following key changes:

Package Management, which has caused a number of structural changes to ACS startup, the file system, and more
Request-Processing Pipeline

We highly suggest that anyone upgrading to ACS 3.3 read ACS 3.2 Developer's Guide to ACS 3.3 and Beyond, which discusses the many fundamental and far-reaching changes to the ACS architecture.

Both installations using a clean database and upgrades from ACS 3.2.3 have been tested using Oracle 8.1.6, AOLserver 3+ad2 in a chrooted environment, and Tcl 8.3. With ACS 3.3 we have dropped all backwards-compatibilities with AOLserver 2. We do not guarantee that ACS 3.3 works with AOLserver 2.3. This release marks the first time that we used a formal QA process, which included internal alpha and beta releases, dedicated testers, and daily fresh installs and upgrades of the latest version of the code tree. For the next release, we plan on opening this process to the ACS community, with a dedicated ticket tracker and postings of alpha and beta releases of ACS. In the meantime, please email bugs@arsdigita.com with any critical bugs (along with any patches you may have), including a description of the problem, the file(s) that exhibit the problem, and any other information that you feel is relevant.

Other new features, enhancements, and changes:

Reorganized, updated, and more user-friendly documentation
a Database API
a preliminary version of the Documents API
the dynamic publishing system (not an ACS standard yet, but available for those who wish to use it)
support for WAP
Many, many bug fixes, including the following fixes you may want to apply to your older ACS installation, even if you don't want to upgrade the entire installation:
- fix for the server clustering module (older version causes huge load on servers due to thread issues)
- fix for return commands inside procedures (fixed with the introduction of ad_script_abort; see programming with AOLserver for details). Note that using ad_script_abort in older ACS implementations (pre-RPP) is non-trivial because you will need to implement some mechanism to catch the error thrown by ad_script_abort.
- replacement of ns_returnredirect with ad_returnredirect
- the entire ACS now uses the abstract URL system
ns_register_filter and ns_register_proc have been obsoleted and disabled; they are replaced by ad_register_filter and ad_register_proc as documented in the Request Processor documentation

Known issues:

Nuking user groups and users doesn't work. This will be fixed in a future release of ACS. Meanwhile, we suggest that you ban users instead of nuking them.
Users who have saved their authentication information in a cookie will need to relogin to the web site, since cookies are not backwards compatible.
top requires access to /proc and /dev/kmem in order to operate; this is a security risk in a chroot environment. One possible way to maintain chroot security and enable the top monitoring page is to create a separate user that writes the results of top to a text file, and have the page read that text file.
Users running InterMedia 8.1.6 and using UTF-8 encoding will need to obtain a patch from Oracle support in order to get Intermedia to work.

ron@arsdigita.com