CWIS beta version 3.9.1 has been released, and is now available for download on the Scout Site.
While primarily a bug fix and maintenance release, getting ready for 4.0.0, it does include a few enhancements worth noting:
- You can now search for when a field was last modified, using the "@" operator. (See the Advanced Search Tips box at the bottom of the Advanced Search page for examples.)
- User fields can now be configured to be automatically updated when records are changed.
- There's a new Piwik plugin, that automatically inserts the header code required for use with the open source Piwik web analytics package.
And there were a couple of new additions intended to make development with CWIS easier:
- The Developer plugin now supports a developer.ini file, that can be used to force plugin configuration settings to specific values and force plugins to be enabled/disabled. (See install/EXAMPLE-developer.ini for more information.) It can come in very handy when copying a database from a production site to a development or test installation.
- There is a new "cwis" command line utility, that can be used to perform some common operations directly from the command line. (The utility can also be found in the install directory – you'll need to copy or link to it to somewhere in your PATH to use it, and possibly also check that the first line points to the correct directory for PHP, if you have PHP installed in a non-standard location.)
As usual, more information about additions and fixes can be found via the CWIS Revision History option on the Administration menu. As a beta release, this version is not recommended for use on live production sites. If you are going to run it on a production site (which, to be fair, we’ve been doing at Scout for months), please test and monitor your site carefully.
The minimum PHP version for CWIS 3.9.1 is 5.4, which came out in 2012. If you’re running PHP 5.3 or earlier, this might be an excellent time to upgrade to 5.6 or even 7.0, as support from the PHP team (including security fixes) for PHP 5.5 and earlier has ended. At Scout we have moved to PHP 7.0 on our production sites because of the significant performance increase it brings.
As always, after installing the new version we ask that you use the Register with Scout feature on the Administration menu to let us know you're using the new version of the software. It really helps us determine what kind of operating environments the software is running in, and where to go next with development.
We look forward to your feedback on this new version of CWIS.