Gnizr 2.4.0 Milestone 2 Release

Gnizr 2.4.0 Milestone 2 is now available for download.

• Download: gnizr-2.4.0-M2.zip
• How to install or upgrade
• Configure gnizr-config.xml for 2.4.0
  
• What has changed
  

Note: This release is intended for evaluation and testing, and it's not suitable for any serious deployment.

See also: Gnizr 2.4.0 Milestone 1

UI Cleaning and Polish

Users should notice some UI changes in this release. Improved the layout of bookmarks. The display of bookmark information is more compact. Clicking on the bookmark title will take you to the description page of the bookmark. We've also updated the layout of the login page and the registration page. Depending on how the registration policy is configured, different information is shown to users who don't already have an account.

We also added more instruction text in different "settings" pages. This should help new users and new admin to get started with the system.

Search Term Suggestion

To improve users' search experience, we have added the Search Term Suggestion function. As you entering text in the search box, a drop-down menu will show you search suggestions. You can read more about its design and implementation on the wiki page.

Improved Bookmark Search

In the past release, queries entered in the search box are matched against only the "title" of the saved bookmarks in the system. In this release, we've improved the index and search algorithm. Texts entered are automatically matched against "title", "tags" and "notes" of the saved bookmarks.

Also, the OpenSearch engine implementation for "bookmarks saved by you" and "bookmarks saved by others" have distinctive behavior. If a user is logged in, searching in "bookmarks saved by others" will search within bookmarks saved by all users in the community, but automatically exclude those saved by the logged-in user. On the other hand, the "bookmarks saved by you" search engine only searches within those bookmarks that are saved by the logged-in user.

Field-based search (add a prefix term to the search query):

• "title:" -- search within bookmark titles
• "tag:" -- search within tags
• "notes:" -- search within bookmark notes
• "text:" -- search within all the above fields (default)
  

Gnizr 2.4.0 Milestone 1 Release

Gnizr 2.4.0 Milestone 1 is now available for download.

• Download: gnizr-2.4.0-M1.zip
• How to install or upgrade
• What has changed

Note: This release is intended for evaluation and testing, and it's not suitable for any serious deployment.

New Features

Super Faster Bookmark Search. We've added Lucene search engine to power gnizr bookmark search. The result is an significant performance gain in bookmark search.

Improved OpenSearch logic. We've simplified the search interface by collapsing all search functions into a single OpenSearch function. A single search box is displayed on the top of the page. A user can search his/her bookmarks, bookmarks saved by other users, and one or more third-party OpenSearch engines on the Web.

Firefox Browser Search Plugin. Users can add a search plugin to the Firefox or IE 7 browser. They can quickly search bookmarks in gnizr without needing to go to the gnizr main page.

New 'icon' Machine Tag. Users can label bookmarks with colorful icons using a new machine tag called 'gn:icon'. Users can use this machine tag to express their personal opinions about the bookmarks or explicitly describe the kind of media content that is described in the bookmarks. On the "add bookmark" page, we've implemented a Machine Tag Helper UI for adding these 'icon' machine tags.

Upgrading from Gnizr 2.3.0

If you want to try out gnizr 2.4 on the top of your existing gnizr 2.3.0 database, follow these instructions:

1. Backup your existing database.
   
2. Follow the standard upgrade procedures, except that you don't need to upgrade your database. Skip all steps described in the section "Upgrade database tables and stored procedures". Gnizr 2.4.0 M1 runs on the same database schema and store procedure as gnizr 2.3.0.
3. After copying the gnizr webapp into your Tomcat, edit gnizr-config.xml using these instructions. Note that new configuration parameters have been added in 2.4.0.
   
4. Start Tomcat.
5. Go to you gnizr web application and login as 'gnizr' the super user.
6. Manually create a search index database for bookmark search. Go to "settings". Under "Administration", click on "Rebuild search index". Follow instructions on the page.
7. Done.
   

Questions. Send them to the gnizr discussion group.