What happened with the next release?

... you might ask. Well, we postponed it to mid of January (actually, January 19th 2011). Basically, there are two reasons for that: we have construction works going on at our institute that caused some trouble and we migrated BibSonomy's authentication to Spring Security - an authentication and access-control framework.

This migration to Spring Security will be noticed by you - our users. The most obvious change will be the new "remember me" cookie that allows you to stay logged in for a longer time than the session timeout (which is 30 minutes of inactivity).
When the new version of BibSonomy is released, your old cookie is no longer valid and you need to login again. Hopefully, this causes not too much trouble. In any case - with this post we want to inform you about this change such that you are prepared. Of course, the password reminder functionality will be available such that you can reset your password in case you forgot it.

Some more background information about this change: Currently, you always got such a cookie when logging into BibSonomy. Beginning with the next release, you can choose whether you want to stay logged in after using BibSonomy or not:

Although we always recommend to logout on computers which are not your own, not enabling the "remember me" functionality ensures that a forgotten logout not necessarily allows other users of the computer to access your account. After a timeout of 30 minutes of inactivity your session is closed and you need to login again.

Besides the new cookies, Spring Security brings improved compatibility with OpenID providers, support for other authentication schemes (e.g., for the PUMA project we need LDAP authentication), and in general a cleaner and more widely tested authentication implementation.

There will be some other changes included in the next release that we will present with the accompanying blog post.

Since Christmas is coming, I am happy that I can announce that some features from our wishlist (see my last blog post) are now going to be implemented: an OpenSocial API and a TeXlipse plugin for BibSonomy. Finally, the new document upload is almost finished. It allows you to upload the documents (yes documents - not just one) for your publication while editing the post. I have tried this on our development system today and really liked it. I hope you will enjoy it, too.

Last but not least, we want to thank our users for using BibSonomy and our funders for giving us the opportunity to develop such an amazing system.

The whole BibSonomy team wishes you a merry Christmas and a happy new year.

Happy tagging!