Due to the change from Oracle Text to Apache Solr/Lucene 1.4 in DC-X a long time has gone and the software is old. Indeed it is a very stable version and on our customer DC-X systems are very successful. Solr 1.4 has been succeeded by the 3.x branch. The current release 3.6 contains a lot of improvements. Starting with major bugfixes affecting some DC-X systems and enhancements in memory allocation and minor performance improvements forces the using of Solr 3.6. One highlighting are better index segment merge strategies, which prevents from time consuming optimizations. That means merges of segments has to be optimized and the index won’t be fragmented so fast. This is an impact on systems with many movement such as DC-X with agencies and RSS-Feeds.
As a new functionality will be the JOIN feature which is similar to a database join. This can help to get relevant information depending on the particular queries. Such as a list of themes for a specific publication. One main reason to move to Solr 3.0 will be the fact, that Solr itself only supports the index version from one before. And DC is planing to moving very soon to upcoming Solr 4.0 for DC-X were we expects major performance improvements. So it can beware from reindexing which stresses system and personal.
So we hope that will help you to decide to upgrade your DC-X
My brother, an ambitious hobby photographer, asked me to set up a website for him showcasing his photography. He had already bought XML Photography Template, a Flash app configured through (usually static) XML files. (No, I’m not a friend of Flash-only websites, I hope we can fix this later…)
Photos are best handled by our Digital Asset Management system DC-X – which might be overkill for a few hundred images, but this felt like a great test case. So I uploaded his photos into my DC-X instance and set up a publication for his website, along with three sections: “People” and “No People” (these are the categories you can choose on his website), and “Background Slideshow” for the images that the home page background loops through. Now he just has to add a “Usage” entry for each photo that is to appear on the Flash website. Looks pretty standard (click for a larger image):
Now all I had to do was replace the static XML files loaded by that Flash thing with PHP code that dynamically fetches image URLs and metadata from the DC-X database. Thanks to the powerful DC-X PHP API, this was a matter of just a few hours.
And here’s what the final website looks like. If I hadn’t told you, you wouldn’t have guessed that it’s powered by DC-X 
To see it in action, visit: www.strehle.de/elias
Our Digital Asset Management system DC-X has a powerful user interface that works fine in modern web browsers. Still, it’s almost unusable on the iPad and other mobile (i.e., smartphone) browsers: They often don’t match the minimum recommended screen width of 1280 pixels. Elements are too small and not optimized for touch. And the initial load time of the DC-X user interface is too long for casual or mobile users, because it has been designed as a rather heavyweight Ajax web application for the “power user”.
My current side project is to build an alternative, tablet-friendly user interface for DC-X. It’s still a prototype, but basic stuff (searching, browsing results, downloading files) is already working. (I built it using the wonderful Bootstrap framework, open sourced by Twitter.)
Here’s a few screenshots. If you switch to “Presentation” mode, the background turns dark and most elements are hidden, helping you focus on just your content:
How do you like it? This being a prototype, I cannot promise any features or a date when it will be finished. But you could speed up its development by sending me a new iPad
The new version 1.7.8.0 of our Digital Asset Management software, DC-X, is now available. The interesting stuff, aside from the usual bugfixes and minor improvements:
- The new HTML5 based browser upload supporting drag&drop from the desktop, which we introduced in 1.7.4.0, is finally production ready. We added a nice feature: You can specify metadata requirements by upload/hotfolder, so that users see a warning sign if required fields are not filled in.
- The Solr fulltext search engine used by DC-X has been upgraded from version 1.4.1 to 3.6, laying the foundation for new search features (stay tuned, left truncated searches like “*ending” should soon be possible).
- A first, experimental implementation of Packages shows that it will become a lot easier for partners, and us, to package code and configuration for re-use in other DC-X installations.
Our partners can download 1.7.8.0 now, and read the full ChangeLog in our Wiki.
While the last release announced in our blog has been 1.7.4.0, we’ve been sticking to our 4-weekly release schedule. DC-X has arrived at version 1.7.7.0 and can be downloaded by our partners.
The changes since 1.7.4.0 consist mostly of bug fixes – we fixed some cross-site scripting (XSS) problems, for example – and tiny enhancements: You can now delete comments, use custom lists in simple search forms, search for file variants, and export topic map items in the XTM XML format.
An interesting new feature: DC-X can finally send e-mails when an “agent” (a saved search) has found new documents. The count and notifications displayed in the DC-X user interface are great if new documents arrive while you’re working in DC-X, but if you’re out of the office, an e-mail update can be very helpful.
Things seem a bit quiet because we’re working on larger stuff that takes a while until we can officially release it: The new administration interface and some other interesting stuff that we’ll talk about later!
Our partners can now download the latest DC-X version, 1.7.4.0. It contains the usual bug fixes and minor improvements – for example, you can now find out who is editing a document directly from the search result view:
Thesaurus hierarchies are also better supported now when searching and displaying metadata.
The greatest improvement is the first iteration of a new browser-based upload tool, which is not production-ready yet but which you’re welcome to test! It supports HTML5 drag & drop into the web browser, with live feedback during upload and import. (Requires Firefox 4, Safari 5 or Google Chrome 7.) See it in action in this short screencast:
Thanks to Sebastian Tschan for the open source jQuery-File-Upload project on which we built this feature!
This is going to take a few months and several DC-X versions, but we have started replacing the existing Flash-based administration interface (built with Adobe Flex) with a new HTML interface. The new one is going to look much nicer, will be easier to understand, load and respond faster and can be accessed from your smartphone or iPad.
The nice looks are thanks to the Bootstrap toolkit open sourced by Twitter. The JavaScript code is powered by the open source jQuery library.
Here’s a before/after comparison of the list editor functionality for the DC-X topic map. The current Flash/Flex UI:
And the new HTML UI:
I hope you like it. Stay tuned for more good news!
Some of us are getting a little less sleep than usual, and not because of late-night coding sessions: Four babies in less than three weeks is not bad for a company with just over 20 people in our Hamburg office…
From left to right:
- Anna-Marie + Ben-Jannik (Sep 29th)
- Nic Hugo (Oct 8th)
- Emil Linus (Oct 14th)
Welcome to this world!
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Today we released a version 1.7.3.0 of our media asset management system DC-X, which is available for download for our partners.
Like in version 1.7.2.0 not so many gui features are shipped with this version, as we are still working on the all new task/assignment module and its features. We also are working on enhancing the administration interface, trying to keep the administration tasks as short and compact as possible.
Still one neat functionality has been introduced, which was requested by several customers recently: By clicking on a tab on the right side, a refresh of the current tab is triggered. One use case for this feature is very relevant in the Content-X context. For example if an editor is waiting for images being linked to a story by an archivist. The editor does not have to leave the the story editor context and the new images are only one click away.
Also the rights capabilities of DC-X have been enhanced. It is now possible to add date limits to certain special agreement rights:
Adding special agreement right to image using time limits
Which can in turn be viewed by any other user who may view rights of assets:
Time limited special agreement rights
We’re currently in Vienna, at IFRA Expo 2011, booth A645. White is still our favorite color:
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