Jiglu 15.1 release notes

Highlights

  • New ability to easily locate content for a broader subject where it may use a variety of different, more specific terms. The new Topic area tag type lets you group together common tags. Everything then tagged in one of the child tags will also be tagged with the parent topic area.
  • Many improvements to the management and presentation of tags, including suggestions for associated tags and consistent access to all of a contribution’s tags.
  • Standardised presentation of instant messages and status updates throughout the system.
  • In monitors, new options to help with the efficient spidering of external web sites and to enable the processing of pages that use JavaScript content generation. There is also now more feedback about what happened during spidering.
  • In monitors, new export options for tags and source items.
  • In monitors and spaces, new OPML import and export options for feed sources.

For end users

Authentication

  • Jiglu now uses the terms ‘log in’ / ‘log out’ instead of ‘log on’ / ‘log off’ to match more common usage. If you use the old URL for logging on you will be redirected to the new URL for logging in.

Radar

  • When a tag, trend or alert is selected, for any matching instant messages you can now carry out the same actions as you can when viewing the My talk stream.
  • If you click on the link to the parent instant message or choose the View thread option from the instant message pop-up menu then the radar stream will now change to view that thread with the message highlighted. Previously you would be taken to the thread page in the space.
  • When a tag, trend or alert is selected, instant messages and status updates are now shown with the same presentation as in the rest of the radar.

Monitors

  • When the URL is known for where a spidered source item was found, then selecting the View siblings option from the dropdown menu next to the item’s name will show you all the items found at the same parent page. A link to that parent page will be shown in the Related section in the sidebar.
  • If you have permission, you can now export to a CSV file the details of source items matching the current search on the Sources, Tags, Links and Domains view pages by selecting the Export items option in the Actions sidebar section.

Blogs and spaces

  • In the Talk section of a space, if you click on the link to the parent instant message or choose the View thread option from the instant message pop-up menu then the message will now be highlighted on the thread view page.
  • In the Talk section of a space, when viewing an instant message thread the responses are now paged.
  • When editing a blog post or knowledge entry, if you choose Pick tags and then the Popular tab in the tag selector, you will now see the tags most often assigned by users. Previously this would also include tags that the system used during automatic tagging.

Tags

  • There is a new Topic area tag type. This lets you group together common tags in a higher-level concept. For example, a Sports topic area could be associated with tags for Football, Tennis, Baseball and Rugby. Whenever a contribution is tagged with one of the associated tags, it will also be tagged with the tag with the Topic area So, if a contribution was tagged with Football, then it will also be tagged with Sports, even if the word ‘sports’ never appears in its content.
  • Previously, the tag selector used in adding or editing tags and in assigning them to blog posts, knowledge entries and source items let you expand tags to see their associated tags by selecting the expander + button to the left of the tag. This has now been removed because the complexity in determining whether to show this button made the tag selector too sluggish when scrolling through tags.
  • In lists of tags for a contribution, only the top five will be shown by default. However, throughout the system you will now always be able to click on an expander + button to see all the tags. Previously some pages had support to see all the tags and others didn’t.
  • In lists of tags for a contribution, those that have come from document or source metadata are now shown in italics.
  • When you view a tag, in the Related sidebar section only the five most popular associated tags are now shown, with those manually-chosen first. You can view all the tags by selecting View all associated tags. This will open a sub-window on the page showing them, organised by the type of association.
  • When you view a tag, choosing the View tags elsewhere option will now open the details in a sub-window, rather than adding these tags in the sidebar.
  • When you edit a tag, the tag selector for associated tags will now suggest other tags that you may want create an association with.
  • When you add or edit a tag, the associated tags are now listed beneath the tag selector rather than to the right and their presentation has been improved.
  • A legacy system setting to have a Key tag type created in each new group along with a home page section showing those key tags has been removed. This can be accomplished manually if required for any new groups.

Other changes

  • When viewing a status update from a user’s profile, the responses are now paged.
  • If you go to the log on page when you are already logged on then you will now be given a notice telling you, in case this wasn’t what you wanted.

Fixes

  • From some sources, publication dates for source items were not including the time when a site used a slightly non-standard format. A wider range of date and time formats is now supported.
  • Performance improvements have been made to the monitor home page when using charts.
  • Some inconsistencies with punctuation in the names of tags from metadata and automated analysis have been resolved. This mostly affected the different characters that can be used for apostrophes.
  • A number of minor issues have been fixed.

For group administrators

Tags

  • You can now export a CSV format file of the tags in a group by selecting the Export tags action from the tags index sidebar.
  • Some minor improvements have been made to the automatic tagging algorithm so you may see changes to these tags the first time that tags in a group are assessed after the upgrade.

Monitors

  • You can now export a CSV format file of the source items in a monitor by selecting the Export items action from the sources index sidebar.
  • When adding or editing a source, the form has a new Follow links in new items option. This will only be available if you are not spidering existing content and are either adding items from a feed with the Download full content option selected or are monitoring a page for new URLs. This new option can be useful in conjunction with the Download non-HTML documents option when you want to retrieve documents listed on a new item page.
  • When adding or editing a source, the form has new Page must contain pattern and Page must not contain pattern options. These will only be available if you are spidering existing content, adding new items from a feed with the Download full content option selected or are monitoring a page for new URLs. If an HTML page that’s been spidered doesn’t pass these checks in its content then it will not be turned into a source item and will not be processed for any further links to spider.
  • When adding or editing a source, the form has a new Run JavasScript option. This will only be available if you are spidering existing content, adding new items from a feed with the Download full content option selected or are monitoring a page for new URLs.

Instead of just processing the HTML returned by the site, with this option on the spider will also run any JavaScript it contains. This allows you to spider sites where the HTML from the request contains no content and JavaScript needs to be run to generate it. If you have specified an Article text selector then the spider will wait until a script has added this element to the HTML DOM. If you do not specify a selector, then the spider will instead wait until it thinks the scripts run on loading have completed running.

  • You can now import and export sets of feed sources using the standard OPML file format. On the sources settings page you will find new import and export actions in the actions section of the sidebar.
  • On the Sources settings page, if you choose the Source download status action for a source that involves a spider then the details will now include a summary of how many requests there were for each download status and for each content processing status.
  • If the spider downloads a page which has a canonical URL in the HTML metadata but that already exists as a source item then a new item won’t be created for the duplicate.
  • The source filters form instead of a suggestions column now has autocomplete when you start typing a phrase. There are also some presentation improvements.

Other changes

  • On the members index, the Download a CSV file of members action has been renamed to Export members and requires the member / export permission.
  • On the activity log index, the Download a CSV file of activity action has been renamed to Export log and requires the activity log / export permission.
  • On the Resource permissions forms there is a new Export operation which can be used to control who is allowed to export resources to a CSV file. On the resource types that support it, this is set by default to the group moderator and group administrator roles.

For system administrators

  • On the users index, the Download a CSV file of users action has been renamed to Export users and requires the user / export permission.
  • On the activity log index, the Download a CSV file of activity action has been renamed to Export log and requires the activity log / export permission.
  • On the Resource permissions forms there is a new Export operation which can be used to control who is allowed to export resources to a CSV file. On the resource types that support it, this will by default only be the system administrator.

For operations engineers

Upgrade

  • There is a new jiglu.external.runJavaScript property in the sources section in the bootstrap.properties configuration file. This controls whether spidered sources are allowed to run JavaScript from downloaded pages. The new property will need to be manually added during the upgrade.
  • Because of an upgrade to the search system, search indexes will need to be rebuilt. See https://support.jiglu.com/spaces/installation/knowledge/rebuilding-search-indexes for instructions on how to do this if you host your own system. Note that this process has changed and is now simpler.
  • Notifications for Confirm identity request and No log in warning will have their text updated to replace ‘log on’ / ‘logged on’ with ‘log in’ / ‘logged in’.

Other changes

  • A number of performance improvements have been made.
  • Further improvements have been made in reducing the memory overhead for bulk operations such as merging tags and changing the status of discussion threads.
  • Third-party libraries have all been updated to their latest recommended versions.

Security

  • Jiglu Java API methods to retrieve whether the system content quota has been hit and to get all the role names in the system were not checking for a currently valid authentication token. This has been resolved. These methods were not externally accessible and the pages where they are used require prior authentication.
  • An issue in a third-party library used to interact with AWS services could allow resource exhaustion. The library has been updated. (CVE-2020-36518)
Written by Stephen Hebditch. Published on .
2.0.0
Product changes in version 15.1.0.