Uwazi v1.3

New features

• Now Uwazi supports document thumbnails creating beautiful and appealing user interfaces.
• Added two new field types for image and media support.
• A plain text version is now available for documents, greatly improving accessibility and search engine optimization.
• Now users can run enhanced searches with query strings.

Improvements

• This release is strongly focused in bug fixing. Dozens of malfunctions and glitches have been addressed.
• We have greatly improved the overall security of Uwazi by running our own internal security audit and implementing several strengthening strategies. An improvement you may not feel, as security is meant to be =)
• Now Uwazi supports bulk publishing and un-publishing of documents and entities.
• Entities will try to automatically fill all the user screen by arranging themselves horizontally when the space is available, making a better use of the screen's real state and improving the user experience.
• Now the metadata side panel can be opened in pages when cards are rendered in the page.
• Text and rich text fields are being included in the full text search. The visuals for the results snippets both in the side panel and in the cards have been improved.
• All metadata fields support hiding their label in their configuration. This comes handy when the label is obvious; and it unloads information in the cards improving the visuals.

Several bug fixes!

Uwazi v1.2

New features

• Our new Components feature lets you inject data visualisation such as graph bars, pie charts, total counters and other elements (search bars, embedded maps, card lists) into any page or rich text field.
• Customise your interface by adding your own CSS and media assets to adapt Uwazi to your brand.
• Expanded media support: now Uwazi supports several embedded and native media types including: YouTube, FaceBook, SoundCloud, Streamable, Vidme, Vimeo, Wistia, Twitch, DailyMotion, mp3, mp4, wave, and others.
• Live user interface translation allows admins to translate UI labels as they navigate Uwazi. When logged in, an icon on the top bar will toggle this option, highlighting translatable labels. Just click and edit to set the label for the current language.
• Geolocation: a new field type is available for data geolocation. This field is supported by a map view. When entities have this property, a map-view option is toggled in library so users can see all geolocated entities and interact with the information via library filters.

Improvements

• Nested thesauri: now thesauri support nesting items in groups. This comes in handy for large thesauri so items are organised into sub-categories. It also allows users to select all items in a group at once.
• Navigation menu supports external URLs.
• Admins now can change usernames, e-mails and passwords for other users. This eases user management particularly for locally installed Uwazis, when they have no internet access and can't send e-mails.
• Regroup relationships. A new editing tool has been added to relationships interface that lets users easily regroup relationships into hubs.
• A relationship's metadata is now displayed in the relationship view. This includes text references.
• Now filters will display a "No value" option (this label is translatable) so that users can quickly spot entities not belonging to any category. This lets admins find entities missing values and users detect how a particular category is distributed among the entities.

Several bug fixes!

Uwazi v1.1

New features

• Even better data relationships
  Check out the new interface to create meaningful connections between your data. More user friendly than ever, now it supports information hubs enabling you to put several pieces of the puzzle together at the same time.
• Make your collection private
  If you are handling sensitive information or you just want your collection be accessible only via login, you can configure Uwazi to do so in Settings > Collection. By activating this option, your information won't be crawled by search engines and users will be prompted with a login screen when trying to access your documents and entities.
• Configure default filters
  These filters are presented to the user even when no document or entity type is selected. Default filters can be configured in documents and entities metadata in settings by checking the option "Default filter". Ideally, use this option for relevant filters affecting several documents and entity types.

Improvements

• Better search: now all fields are used for full text searching, including selects and multi-selects and text fields.
• Improved Vimeo embeddings: now users can add timelinks in Vimeo embeddings.
• Better use of real state: now Uwazi will expand to full width while in library, showing more cards per row. This way users with big screens can display more information at once.
• Card rendering has been improved: now fields containing long information such as rich text properties will be limited in its height so the cards are not too big. The "Open document" button has improved so users have a better understanding of how to access the document instad of the metadata side panel.

And of course, several bug fixes!

Uwazi v1.0 released

New features

Graph visualisation for document/entity relationships

Now you can better visualise how your data elements are related to each other. Our proposal is a middle ground compromise between a graph visualisation and relational metadata. It is our first release of a series of iterations until we have a fully developed relationships feature for Uwazi.

We have turned this new view into the default visualisation for relationships, while also keeping the previous one available.

Improvements in full text search

We added relevance to sorting options and set this option as default for text searches. We also increased the amount of text in the results snippets so users have better context in which the search text is found.

Users can click “Show more” in the card to see the complete list of snippets found in a document in the right sidebar. Clicking on the page number will take users to the document view and scroll them to that particular page. The number of matching results is displayed in the top of the tab, so that users have a hint on when it’s worth taking a deeper look.

“Exact search match” has been boosted in the results, providing better results for users. We have fixed several small issues affecting full text search.

Other improvements

Improvements in performance

We focused in several aspects affecting the overall performance of the application. Now users experience a smoother interaction with the front-end and a quicker response from the server.

Blank states

Several screens have been redesigned to offer users proper blank state information. This way, first time users have directions on what to do next and links to the supporting documentation. Regular users get a better understanding when no information is available for a particular screen or tab (i.e. when there is no table of contents, they now see a message with an explanation instead of a blank placeholder).

We changed “dictionary” to “thesauri”

Uwazi users can create their own controlled vocabularies that are used to organise their documents and entities. We have decided to change the name of these controlled vocabularies from “dictionary” to “thesaurus” to be more consistent with HURIDOCS’ other resources, such as our human rights Micro-thesauri (https://www.huridocs.org/resource/micro-thesauri/).

Manually set the document language

Uwazi automatically detects the document language and uses it to offer better search results to users. While this is a desired behaviour, it can create some confusion when documents have mixed languages (written in several languages). We addressed this issue by allowing users to manually set the language for the document allowing them to override the automatic detection.

Improved the process for users to create new accounts

We have reworked part of the process of setting up new accounts (such as updating the email messages sent to new users to make them more informative), so users have a better experience when configuring their access.

Add support for Vimeo in rich text markdown fields

Rich text fields now support embedding of Vimeo videos by simply adding this code snippet with a Vimeo URL: {vimeo}(https://vimeo.com/37942739)

Improved rendering of properties in cards

Some minor tweaks to how properties are rendered in cards have been made improving the overall experience. Notably, property labels are now always displayed.

Bug Fixes

Now the Table of Contents entries are properly spread among languages when using the fallback content.
Translations now properly show all labels for the translatable elements. Previously some labels were blank for certain situations.
Fixed several bugs affecting date fields.
Fixed several bugs affecting how text is indexed and searched.

What does this mean for you?

• For those of you who have an instance hosted with us, we have already deployed this upgrade to your Uwazi instance, so there’s no need to do anything.
• If you are hosting Uwazi yourself, you will want to upgrade by downloading the latest release and run the following database migration using terminal on the root directory of Uwazi:

    $ export DATABASE_NAME='name'

by default the name is uwazi_development.
If the mongodb server is on a remote machine, then configure it by:

    $ export DBHOST='theHost'

then run:

    $ node run_migration.js ./app/api/migrations/assign_file_languages.js
    $ node run_migration.js ./app/api/migrations/fix_entity_based_references.js

• See all of our updates in our GitHub changelog
• We’re working on our user guide on GitHub and you’re encouraged to contribute.
• Contact us if you have any questions!

Uwazi v0.5.0 released

New features

API documentation

We’ve started to document API commands for Uwazi. We're currently working on documentation for the search, entities, and attachments endpoints. You can access the API for your Uwazi instance by adding /api to the end of your Uwazi URL, like this: https://yourinstancename.uwazi.io/api. Please note: this is a work-in-progress!

Google Analytics integration

We’ve integrated Google Analytics into Uwazi so that administrators can see how many visitors are accessing their public-facing Uwazi content. More information >>

Other improvements

Choose between AND/OR operators in filters

We’ve added the ability for users to choose between using AND or OR operators in the Uwazi filters. More information >>

Easier to find the target documents for your connections

We’ve improved the connections search functionality by limiting the search to document titles instead of the entire document content. This will make it much faster to find the target document for your connections.

Easier access to Downloads

We’ve moved the Downloads section (previously the Attachments tab) to the main Information tab in the side panel, making them easier to access and edit. More information >>

Automatically attach files in all instance languages

We've added functionality to attach a file to all language versions of an entity / document with the click of a button. This will speed up the process of adding downloads that are shared between languages like images or sound files, for example. More information >>

Automatic document language detection

If your Uwazi instance is in multiple languages, it is important for users to know the language of documents as they are browsing the collection. We've added the ability for Uwazi to automatically detect the language of your document, and users will see the language of the document if it does not match the selected user interface language.

Bug fixes

• We fixed a bug that corrupted metadata-based relationships when a select-type property's name was changed
• We fixed how aggregations are generated for unpublished documents in the Uploads section
• We fixed a bug that broke the “load more” button for connections
• We changed some elasticsearch configurations that were causing incorrect sorting results in connections
• We fixed a bug that caused multi-select filters to disappear when writing on a numeric filter
• We fixed a bug that broke the filters when displaying rich-text properties on cards
• We fixed the index mapping so that Elasticsearch's field amount does not go beyond the usual default settings

What does this mean for you?

For those of you who have an instance hosted with us, we have already deployed this upgrade to your Uwazi instance, so there’s no need to do anything.

If you are hosting Uwazi yourself, you will want to upgrade by downloading the latest release and run the following database migration using terminal on the root directory of Uwazi:

    $ export DATABASE_NAME='name'

by default the name is uwazi_development.
If the mongodb server is on a remote machine, then configure it by:

    $ export DBHOST='theHost'

then run:

    $ node ./run_migration.js ./app/api/migrations/assign_file_languages.js
    $ node ./run_migration.js ./app/api/migrations/fix_entity_based_references.js

Additional information

• See all of our updates in our GitHub changelog
• We’re working on our user guide on GitHub and you’re invited to contribute.
• Contact us if you have any questions!

Uwazi v0.4.0 released

Uwazi v0.4.0 released

New features

Full text search improvements

We have made significant improvements to our full text search feature using Elasticsearch. These improvements allow users to:

• see an example snippet with highlighted text from the search results,
• see a list of all the places this text is found in the document, and
• quickly jump to any of these places in the document itself.

New date property types and improvements

There are many situations in which a single date on your document or entity does not capture enough information for your analysis. You may be working with event entities that have start and end dates (or multiple start and end dates). You may have documents in which you need to capture the date for each time something happened.

For these kinds of use-cases, we have added three new date property types: date range, multi-date, multi-date range.

Additional improvements:

• Users can use the DD/MM/YYYY date input format
• We’ve added date description information to the cards in the library so visitors know what each date is referring to:

What does this mean for you?

• For those of you who have an instance hosted with us, we have already deployed this upgrade to your Uwazi instance, so there’s no need to do anything.
• If you are hosting Uwazi yourself, you will want to upgrade by downloading the latest release and run the following database migration using terminal on the root directory of Uwazi:

    $ export DATABASE_NAME='name'

by default the name is uwazi_development.
If the mongodb server is on a remote machine, then configure it by:

    $ export DBHOST='theHost'

then run:

    $ node run_migration.js

• See all of our updates in our GitHub changelog
• We’re working on our user guide on GitHub and you’re encouraged to contribute.
• Contact us if you have any questions!

Uwazi v0.3.5 released

Improvements and upgrades

Better looking URLs for search filter results

One great feature in Uwazi is the ability to save and share search filter results using a unique URL. With this latest release, we have improved the usability of this feature by making the URLs shorter and more readable. Here is an example of a search filter results URL before this improvement, and after:
Before:
https://hr-reports.uwazi.io/en/library/?aggregations=%5B%7B%22name%22%3A%22countries%22%2C%22nested%22%3Afalse%7D%5D&types=%5B%2258d06c67f53d6d50ab7495ea%22%5D&filters=%7B%7D&order=desc&sort=creationDate
After:
https://hr-reports.uwazi.io/en/library/?q=(order:desc,sort:creationDate,types:!(%2758d06c67f53d6d50ab7495ea%27))

Improvements to priority sorting

Previously the default sorting was always "Date (Recently added)". Priority sorting had a minor impact and only started influencing search results once the user had selected a custom property for sorting. Conversely, that selection was short-lived if a filtered document type was missing that property.

The changes now make priority sorting govern the default sorting the moment you access the library and uploads sections. It also changes frequently as you change your filtered document types. Furthermore, user selection is now remembered and, whenever possible due to filters selected, it uses the user-selected option.

We’ve upgraded to elasticsearch 5.4

This upgrade improves Uwazi's full text search capabilities, allowing us to build new features that will help users find specific text within their document collection. Stay tuned for the release of these new full text search features!

What does this mean for you?

If you're hosting with us:

• We have already deployed this upgrade to your Uwazi instance.
• In your Uwazi instance, you will need to update any URLs based on search filter results, such as:
  • any menus that include URLs to search filters, or
  • any embedded lists that include URLs to search filters (e.g. your homepage). See our user guide for more information on how to use custom syntax to embed lists in a page.

If you are hosting Uwazi yourself:

• You will want to upgrade by downloading the latest release of Uwazi, and

• Install elasticsearch 5.4 on the system.

  If your setup is using the default ports and database locations and names, all you need to do is reindex the elastic search index. If you have customized ports and database, configure env variables by exporting the following values:

    $ export ELASTICSEARCH_URL=elasticsearch_url (default is localhost:9200)
    $ export INDEX_NAME=elastic_index_name (default is uwazi_development)
    $ export DBHOST=mongodb_url (default is mongodb://localhost)
    $ export DATABASE_NAME=db_name (default is uwazi_development)

Then, execute the reindex script from uwazi root directory

    $ cd database/
    $ node reindex_elastic.js

More information

• See all of our updates in our GitHub changelog
• We’re working on our user guide on GitHub and you’re invited to contribute!
• Contact us if you have any questions!

Uwazi v0.3.0 released

Documentation Updates

Uwazi user guide is now available!

We’re very happy to announce that our first draft of the Uwazi user guide is now available in English on our Github wiki! If you find any mistakes, or parts that can be improved, please suggest edits to the wiki using your Github account. This guide will be a work in progress until we have a stable release. We’re currently working on translating this guide into Spanish.

New Features

Improvements to the uploads section

These improvements make the uploads section more similar to the library, including:

• Properties can be displayed in document and entity cards, just as they are in the library.
• Document and entity cards can be sorted, filtered, and searched, just as they are in the library.
• The right side panel behaves the same as the library: the user can view the table of contents, properties, connections, and attachments without opening the document.
• The Add New Entity button has moved from the bottom right corner of the uploads section, to the top right corner of the main window in this section.

Create multiple users and assign roles

Administrators can now create user accounts and assign one of two roles: administrator and editor. This feature is especially helpful if you have a team of users who are adding and organising documents and entities in your collection. More information on the permissions assigned to each role >>

What does this mean for you?

• For those of you who have an instance hosted with us, we have already deployed this upgrade to your Uwazi instance, so there’s no need to do anything.

• If you are hosting Uwazi yourself, you will want to upgrade by downloading the latest release and run the following database migration using terminal on the root directory of Uwazi:

  export DATABASE_NAME='name'

  by default the name is uwazi_develaopment.

  If the mongodb server is on a remote machine, then configure it by:

  export DBHOST='theHost'

  then run:

  node run_migration.js

• See all of our updates in our GitHub changelog

• We’re working on our user guide on GitHub and you’re invited to contribute!

• Contact us if you have any questions!

v0.2.0

New Features

Edit multiple items at once

Edit multiple items at once by selecting documents and/or entities in the library (on Windows or Linux, hold the CTRL key then click the items; on a Mac, hold the Command key then click the items), clicking edit, then applying the property field values you want to assign to all selected items. This also means you can delete multiple items at once.

Embed YouTube videos

Embed YouTube videos by adding a rich text property field to your document or entity template and then using the format: {youtube}(youtube video link). You could use the transcript of the video as the main document and attach the video for reference. This way, you can utilise our Uwazi features to connect the text to other documents, entities or paragraphs.

Improved display of entity connections

View your entity connections in the main window by opening the entity and clicking on the connections icon. This is an improvement on the previous connections display in the right sidebar. This new display is especially helpful if you have an entity with many connections, like country.

What does this mean for you?

• For those of you who have an instance hosted with us, we have already deployed this upgrade to your Uwazi instance, so there’s no need to do anything.
• If you are hosting Uwazi yourself, you will want to upgrade by downloading the latest release.
• See all of our updates in our GitHub changelog
• We’re working on our user guide on GitHub and you’re invited to contribute!
• Contact us if you have any questions!

v0.1.7

New Features

• Adopted PDF.js as document renderer. Rendering PDFs in a web environment is a great challenge. Fortunately, Mozilla has addressed this topic with their awesome library PDF.js. It is way faster and less prone to errors than our previous solution. This greatly alleviates the slowness of document reading and text selection.

• Multi-language support. Interface, metadata and content can now co-exist in several languages at a time. Currently this option lacks a front-end configuration option and requires manual setup from a developer. Please get in contact if you are interested in testing it out.

  

• Attachments tab. Now documentes and entities have a dedicated tab for files. This comes handy when we want to have several formats for the same document (Word, PDF, etc). Also makes the available documents for downloading more visible to users.

  

• Custom configuration for first order of filters. The first filters a user encounters is the list of the available documents and entities. Now this list can be configured from settings > filters, selecting which options to hide/display and allowing for the creation of groups of options. This improves the user experience for visitors, offering a rational first order navigation in the library.

  

• Now documents and entities can have an icon or flag assigned. This is very useful for countries, but also to give some records a special visual hint.

  

• Improved connections panel. Now connections are grouped by connection type which allows for expanding and collapsing groups of connections in the side panel. Also the connected cards display its metadata as in the rest of the library and can be sorted.

  

Improvements

• Title and document type in metadata side panel are now displayed with styles similar to those of the cards, this way users can quickly identify what kind of document they are looking at.
• Now entities and documents edition have a visible cancel button that will get the user out of edition mode. Previously there was only an "X" at the corner for closing which was not clear enough.
• When using an entity as a dictionary for a multi-select field, now its treated as a connection so it will appear in entities and documents connections panel.
• Sort by options have a better design now.
• Metadata titles are only shown on mouse over. This way we make better use of the space in the cards avoiding redundant labels in every card. If the users needs to know what that particular data means, a mouse over will display the label.
• Fields with blank value are no longer rendered in cards, side panel and entities. This way we don’t see anymore an optional field label without the expected value, which is misleading for users.
• Improved design of metadata forms. Better usage of the space in the screen and clarification of some functionality.
• Better styles for uploads section. While this section still needs a full revamp of its functionality, we’ve expended some time trying to make it more appealing. Particularly, this section now shows the document type when assigned, making it easier to locate, edit and publish pending documents.
• Better styles for pages and rich text fields.

Bug fixes

• Now entities do not show a "download" option in their actions.
• Default A-Z sorting in library is ascending (from A to Z) instead of descending (from Z to A).
• Now multiple option properties based in dictionaries are correctly filtered.
• Fixed a bug in text reference deletion that would prevent a reference from being deleted when the referenced text was too long.
• Now select options appear in alphabetical order. This was particularly annoying when working with longs lists in selects.
• Improved performance in metadata edition. A flaw in the implementation was causing the interface to consume too many resources rendering the metadata edition very slow.
• Improved performance of template configuration. Previously some server side processes were affecting the speed of the UI.
• Fixed a bug that would allow users to select text for tagging and cross-referencing when a subscript was present in the page. This was related to how the PDF to HTMl conversion worked.
• Fixed a bug that prevented uploaded documents from being saved when a required multi-select was present in the template.