Join the DSpace 7.0 Testathon & Try Out Beta 5!

From April 19 – May 7, 2021, we are running a Community Testathon of the DSpace 7.0 Beta 5 Release.  As this is the final Beta before the 7.0 release, Testathon is an opportunity for anyone to test the Beta 5 release, and report their feedback.

DSpace 7.0 Beta 5 is now available. To try out DSpace 7.0 Beta 5 immediately, see Try out DSpace 7.

Full (manual) installation instructions are also available at Installing DSpace.

For more information on the upcoming Beta and Final release schedule see DSpace 7 Release Goals

Included in Beta 5

  • Support for custom theme(s) in UI & accessibility cleanup of base theme. See early information at DSpace UI Design principles and guidelines and the “themes” section of the environment.common.ts
    • Updated the “base” theme (default Bootstrap look & feel) for consistency and better accessibility. (Additional accessibility analysis will be performed during Testathon)
    • Added a simple “dspace” theme (this is the new default theme, and primarily shows an example of customizing color scheme & homepage)
  • Added a “custom” theme folder with all necessary files. These files can be directly modified to create a completely custom theme.
  • Major performance improvements to UI by making better use of caching & smart reloading
  • Video/Image Content Streaming (Kindly donated by Zoltán Kanász-Nagy and @dsipos-dev): When enabled, DSpace can now stream videos & view images full screen, using a third-party viewer. See the new “mediaViewer” settings in the environment.common.ts to enable. Sample screenshots of the feature can also be found at https://github.com/DSpace/dspace-angular/issues/885
  • New Administrative Features
    • Add ability to modify Community/Collection resource policies (i.e. permissions). Edit a Community or Collection and look at the “Authorizations” tab.
    • Add ability to edit/delete user Groups.
    • Add private/withdrawn item badges for Administrators to quickly see which Items are private or withdrawn. These are viewable throughout the browse/search when logged in as an Administrative user.
  • Configurable Entities Improvements
    • Entities now report their Entity type in the URL path (e.g. Person entities use URL path /entities/person/[uuid] and Publication entities use the URL path /entities/publication/[uuid])
    • Each Entity type now has a custom Submission form.
      • These can be most easily seen in the Demo site. Submitting to the “People” collection uses the “Person” Entity Form. Submitting to the “Articles” collection uses the “Publication” Entity Form. The full list of Entity-specific Collection submission mappings can be found in the example in item-submission.xml (this example is enabled on our Demo Site)
    • General performance improvements for Entities. Introduction of “tilted” relationships for Configurable Entities that may have hundreds or thousands of relationships.
  • Improvements to Upgrade process
    • Added a new Submission form migration script to help DSpace 5/6 institutions migrate their old Submission configuration files to the new/updated format for v7.
  • Security fixes
    • Added CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery) protection to REST API. UI (and any other clients) now must be trusted to login to the REST API.
    • Improved permissions checks/validation in UI for Administrator, Community/Collection Administrator and Submitter roles.
    • Fixed several other security issues auto-reported by LGTM
  • Many bug fixes
    • Fixed issue where mapped items were not appearing
    • Fixed issue where Handles were not redirecting
    • Fixed issues with Sherpa and ORCID integrations
    • Fixed several small issues with OpenAIRE v4 support in OAI-PMH
    • Fixed many bugs in MyDSpace and Submission UI
    • Fixed several bugs in CSV import/export process.
    • Fixes to search/browse pagination & breadcrumb trail
    • Improved performance of Browse by Community/Collection hierarchy
    • LDAP Authentication support is working again
    • Many dependency upgrades
    • Upgrade UI to Angular v10
    • Upgrade UI to Node v12 or v14 support
    • Upgrade Backend to Solr v8 support
    • Upgrade to ORCID v3 support
    • Upgrade to SHERPA v2 support
    • Removal of obsolete features
    • Removal of the old BTE framework in favor of Live Import Framework (features of BTE have been ported to Live Import)
    • Removal of Traditional/Basic workflow in favor of Configurable Workflow (default workflow is still the same as in DSpace 6)

Changelog