Release Notes

As of the release 2023.6, the following internally used software has been updated.

• ASM (library for analyzing and modifying Java byte code)
  Updated from version 9.3 to version 9.5
• Google Guava
  Updated from version 27.0 to version 31.1
  

In FirstSpirit logging, the “Log4j 2” version branch of the “Apache Log4j” logging framework is used starting with the FirstSpirit version 2022.5.

With the current FirstSpirit release, “Log4j 2” configuration files in XML format are supported, as well. The sample configurations are located in the <FirstSpiritROOT>/conf/conf-all folder (fs-logging*.xml.default.txt) after the FirstSpirit server is updated.

The new “Log4j 2” configuration has priority over the old “Log4j 1” configuration.

For FirstSpirit servers with the FirstSpirit version 2023.6 or newer, “Log4j 2” is used by default. For FirstSpirit servers with an older FirstSpirit version, the configurations must be adjusted to switch from “Log4j 1” to “Log4j 2”.

Note: Mixed configurations are possible. For example, DEBUG logging can be configured with “Log4J 1” and INFO logging with “Log4j 2”.

Important: In a future release, support for “Log4j 1” will be permanently discontinued. Crownpeak recommends changing the configuration to “Log4j 2” early.

For more information, see Log4j 2 Configuration.

For better server performance, the current FirstSpirit version compresses the repository of new projects with the LZ4 compression algorithm by default. The smaller size of the compressed repository database requires fewer filehandles and more data can be cached in the compressed database cache.

The default value can be configured with the new repository.defaultCompressor parameter in the fs-server.conf configuration file.

Possible values are:

LZ4 (default value):

repository.defaultCompressor=de.espirit.firstspirit.storage.backend.LZ4Compressor

Deflate

repository.defaultCompressor=de.espirit.firstspirit.storage.backend.DeflaterCompressor

[none]

repository.defaultCompressor=

Server administrators now can download modules that are installed on the FirstSpirit server under “Legal notices” on the homepage:

Note: It is not possible to download system modules here.

FirstSpirit 2023.6 supports the following module versions for “FirstSpirit Content Experience Tools”.

During an upload to FirstSpirit, images are initially stored in the project without changes concerning the format and resolution (resolution “Original”). However, for certain actions (based on the original image data), new image files are automatically generated by FirstSpirit, for example:

• when generating a preview image
• when generating new resolutions
• when using an automatically generated resolution
• in case of an image crop (in the FirstSpirit ContentCreator or SiteArchitect)

ImageWriteParams

(FirstSpirit Access API, package de.espirit.firstspirit.access.project, interface Project, Method setCustomProperties). For example, you can configure the compression rate of images to generate a better image quality or smaller file size.

With the current release, it is now also possible to discard the metadata of the original image (e.g. EXIF information) using the discardMetadata parameter. By default, these are taken over.

In the following example, the property is configured to discard metadata for all images expect for PNG files.

project = context.getProject();
project.lock();
properties = new java.util.LinkedHashMap();
properties.put("default.discardMetadata", "true"); 
properties.put("default.png.discardMetadata", "false"); 
project.setCustomProperties("ImageWriteParam", properties); 
project.save(); 
project.unlock();

For more information, see documentation to ImageWriteParam.