5.1 Specific Upgrade Instructions

ASP & PHP Pages Require Changes Before Upgrade

Prior to the 5.1 upgrade, <PRESERVE> tags will need to be added to ASP and PHP pages. This is needed to preserve any server-side code. As an example:

<% response.write("Hello World!") %>

</PRESERVE>

These tags need to enclose any PHP or ASP code in the CMS. With the introduction of 5.1, all links are now managed within the CMS. This was implemented to to prevent broken links within the system (there are more details about this below). In order for this process to work, the <PRESERVE> tags need to be added so that the managed link process does not conflict with any server-side code.

Server.XML

The 5.1 upgrade process may overwrite the server.xml in your DTS installation. Before you upgrade, it is recommended that you either make a backup of this file to a location outside of the Percussion installation directory, or open the server.xml and save it, updating the modified date. The server.xml file can be found in %DTS%\Deployment\Server. Once the upgrade is complete, it is important to make an addition to the server.xml in order to hide the software version used on the DTS. To do this, add xpoweredBy="false" to each connection string. I.e:

Enhancements

Staging

CM1 now supports the addition of a separate Staging server, allowing you to present draft or edited versions of your site to external parties without granting access to CM1 itself. With Staging you can publish your site using the standard Full, Incremental and Publish on Demand functions. It does not affect the workflow state of a published item, and permission to publish to Staging can be delegated to roles that do not have regular production publishing permissions. For more information on Staging, see the section on Publishing with a Staging Server.

Known Issue: Staging on Demand with .XML files

If you use Staging to publish an XML page on demand, it will be published as an HTML file. Similarly, if you attempt to remove an XML file from Staging, the system will attempt to remove an HTML file rather than XML. Please note this issue only affects Publish on Demand: Full and Incremental will correctly publish XML files to Staging.

Known Issue: Shutting down Staging DTS on Standalone Server (Linux)

If upgrading (i.e. not a new install), and installing DTS on the same server as CM1, the shutdown script StopServer.sh will fail to shut down the Staging DTS. The workaround is to shut down the Staging DTS manually by running the TomcatShutdown.sh .

Ignore Unmodified Assets

A new option has been added to Full Publish to ignore any assets that have not changed since the last full publish. Previously, all assets were published on a Full Publish, regardless of when they were last updated. With this option, you can drastically reduce your Full Publish time if you have a large number of assets on your site that aren't regularly updated.

Managed Links Checker Process

CM1 now includes a process that will scan for and then fix any internal links on your site that are not set as Managed Links. This is useful if you have problems or concerns with broken links on your site after content is moved, due to the links not being managed.

After upgrading/installing 5.1, there will be two files in %PercussionRoot%\upgrade\processedlinks: Assets.json and Pages.json. To run the Managed Links fix, delete these files and restart CM1. The Assets.json and Pages.json files will be recreated in the same location. These files will have a list of processed assets and page summaries and one of four statuses: SUCCESS, FAIL, UNPROCESSED, or NOTQUALIFIED.

SUCCESS and NOTQUALIFIED are considered "good" results
FAIL and UNPROCESSED are considered "bad" results

Next, re-run the fix by moving the Assets.json and Pages.json to %PercussionRoot%\upgrade\processedlinks\savedlinks. Note: this directory is not present by default and will have to be created manually. Re-running the fix will only process assets that are in Assets.json and pages in Pages.json with a status of FAIL or UNPROCESSED. To re-run the fix against all assets, delete the Assets.json and Pages.json from %PercussionRoot%\upgrade\processedlinks and from root/upgrade/processedlinks/ savedlinks.

For more information on Managed Links, see the sections on HTML and Rich Text Widgets.

Percussion CM1 available as a SaaS offering

Percussion now offers its award-winning, easy-to-use web content management system as an “in the cloud” software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering, allowing customers to start developing their website fast without the need for extensive technical resources to get their content management system and website live.

What’s included?

Percussion CM1 installation and configuration - be ready to start building your web presence the very first day on the system
Full usage of Percussion’s award-winning content management system, including Page Optimizer and Social Promotion
Website hosting on Amazon’s S3, the most reliable web platform available anywhere with 99.99% availability
Redirect management service with support for vanity URLs
Automated upgrades to the newest release, with access to the latest features as they are released by Percussion.
Access to Percussion Technical Support during support hours
Unlimited user accounts
Generous allowances for bandwidth and storage in the Amazon cloud

What’s not included?

Intranet support or other password-protected pages or folders on your live website
Server-side includes (for PHP, .NET or similar applications) - browser-side/javascript applications are fully supported, however server-side applications are not supported on the Amazon S3 web server*
LDAP, Active Directory, or SAML directory services integration - all user accounts are stored within CM1
Database/XML publishing and FTP publishing - Percussion’s CM1 offering has been designed from the ground up for direct integration with Amazon S3 web services, and does not support publishing to other web servers or cloud services
Staging is not available in SaaS at this time.

* If a customer has custom apps on their website, discovery will be needed to determine whether these can be migrated or whether the customer will need to continue to host their custom apps separately from the website.

If you are interested in migrating to Percussion's SaaS offering, please contact Customer Success for more details.

Log File Relocation

The location of log files has been consolidated so that all logs are in the same directory. The new log directory structure is as follows:

<cm1Root>/logs/AppServer/boot.log
<cm1Root>/logs/AppServer/server.log
<cm1Root>/logs/AppServer/console.log
<cm1Root>/logs/velocity.log
<cm1Root>/logs/tableFactory.log
<cm1Root>/logs/derby.log
<cm1Root>/logs/wrapper/ps-controller-wrapper.log

Social Promotion Post History

The Social Promotion Manager now displays a history of social media postings to Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn. Users with access to Social Promotion Manager will be able to see a full list of posts for all accounts that are managed using Social Promotion. This allows users to not only see posts that are upcoming but to validate that posts that were scheduled did in fact go out as planned.

Customer Incidents

The following customer incidents were addressed in 5.1:

API

Using the asset API to copy shared asset to a page failed. This was resolved.
The Page API GET method did not return a page summary which was edited in the UI. This was resolved.
Using the page API to update the page summary and post date was failing. This was resolved
The Asset API was updated to handle spaces in a folder or asset name.

CM1

When creating the copy of a copied site and choosing to copy assets, the "copy of the copy" did not use its assets folder, but the original assets. This has been fixed.
The use of certain words in the widget field name caused the widgets to crash. This was due to the fact that these words were reserved words used for database management. The UI has been updated to disallow use these words. The full list can be found here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms189822.aspx
Saving a Rich text widget that contained a shared asset generated a validation exception. This has been resolved.
The Blog Archive List Widget was not showing the date format using the system locale
A memory leak was addressed in the version of JEXL used in CM1
Typo found when editing a custom widget and closing without saving.
Ampersand (&) in an asset path or title was preventing the system from creating a managed link.
When using the perc-managed option in a Rich Text field in the Widget Builder, Managed Links were not being created.

Secure Sections

Secure Sections was not configured to support Active Directory as an instance of LDAP. This has been updated to now support Active Directory.

Social Promotion

Editing or Approving post with image removed the link to the image so that it was not viewable in the Social Promotion Manager. This has been resolved.
There was a problem with Social Promotion Manager showing wrong time zone data. This has been resolved.
Post Previews have been updated to more accurately reflect how they appear on the different social networks.

Known Issues

Google Analytics Authentication

Due to a change in the supported authentication methods, Google Analytics will fail when trying to authenticate in CM1. Existing connections to Google Analytics will still work unless a change is made, which will require re-authentication. This problem affects all versions of CM1, including 5.1. If you have Google Analytics configured within CM1, it is recommended that you do not make any changes to the Google Gadget until this issue is resolved. This page will be updated once a fix has been issued.

CM1 5.1 Release Notes