Welcome to Release 7.0, the next major release of the DSpace platform.  Any previous version of DSpace may be upgraded to DSpace 7 directly. For more information, please see Upgrading DSpace.

7.0 Beta 1 Release Notes

New features to look for

• A completely new User Interface. This is the new Javascript-based frontend, built on Angular.io (with support for SEO provided by Angular Universal). This new interface is also via HTML and CSS (SCSS). For early theme building training, see the “Getting Started with DSpace 7 Workshop” from the North American User Group meeting: slides or video recording.
• A completely new, fully featured REST API (provided via a single "server" webapp backend). This new backend is not only a REST API, but also still supports OAI-PMH, SWORD (v1 or v2) and RDF. See the REST API's documentation / contract at https://github.com/DSpace/Rest7Contract/blob/master/README.md
• A newly designed search box. Search from the header of any page (click the magnifying glass). The search results page now features automatic search highlight, expandable & searchable filters, and optional thumbnail-based results (click on the “grid” view).
• A new MyDSpace area, including a new, one-page, drag & drop submission form, a new workflow approval process, and searchable past submissions. (Login, click on your user profile icon, click “MyDSpace”). Find workflow tasks to claim by selecting “All tasks” in the “Show” dropdown.
• Dynamic user interface translations (Click the globe, and select a language).  Anyone interested in adding more translations?  See DSpace 7 Translation - Internationalization (i18n) - Localization (l10n).
• A new Admin sidebar. Login as an Administrator, and an administrative sidebar appears. Use this to create a new Community/Collection/Item, edit existing ones, and manage registries. (NOTE: A number of Administrative tools are still missing or greyed out. They will be coming in future Beta releases.)
• Optional, new “Configurable Entities” feature. DSpace now supports “entities”, which are Items of a specific ‘type’ which may have relationships to other entities. These entity types and relationships are configurable, with two examples coming out-of-the-box: a set of Journal hierarchy entities (Journal, Volume, Issue, Publication) and a set of Research entities (Publication, Project, Person, OrgUnit). For more information see “The Power of Configurable Entities” from OR2019: slides or video recording. Additionally, a test data set featuring both out-of-the-box examples can be used when trying out DSpace 7 via Docker.  A deep-dive into Configurable Entities can be found in the DSpace 7 Configurable Entities early documentation (Google Doc) (FULL DOCUMENTATION COMING SOON)
• Support for OpenAIREv4 Guidelines for Literature Repositories in OAI-PMH (See the new “openaire4” context in OAI-PMH).

Additional major changes to be aware of in the 7.x platform (not an exhaustive list):

• XMLUI and JSPUI are no longer supported or distributed with DSpace. All users should immediately migrate to and utilize the new Angular User Interface.  There is no migration path from either the XMLUI or JSPUI to the new User interface.  However, the new user interface can be themed via HTML and CSS (SCSS).
  
• The old REST API ("rest" webapp from DSpace v4.x-6.x) is deprecated and will be removed in v8.x. The new REST API (provided in the "server" webapp) replaces all functionality available in the older REST API. If you have tools that rely on the old REST API, you can still (optionally) build & deploy it alongside the "server" webapp via the "-Pdspace-rest" Maven flag.
• The Submission Form configuration has changed. The "item-submission.xml" file has changed its structure, and the "input-forms.xml" has been replaced by a "submission-forms.xml".  For early documentation see Configuration changes in the submission process (FULL DOCUMENTATION COMING SOON)
• ElasticSearch Usage Statistics have been removed.  Please use SOLR Statistics or DSpace Google Analytics Statistics.
• The traditional, 3-step Workflow system has been removed in favor of the Configurable Workflow System. For most users, you should see no effect or difference.  The default setup for this Configurable Workflow System is identical to the traditional, 3-step workflow ("Approve/Reject", "Approve/Reject/Edit Metadata", "Edit Metadata")
• Apache Solr is no longer embedded within the DSpace installer (and has been upgraded to Solr v7).  Solr now MUST be installed as a separate dependency alongside the DSpace backend.  See Installing DSpace.
• Some command-line tools/scripts are enabled in the new REST API (e.g. index-discovery):  See new Scripts endpoint: https://github.com/DSpace/Rest7Contract/blob/master/scripts-endpoint.md
• DSpace now has a single, backend "server" webapp to deploy in Tomcat (or similar). In DSpace 6.x and below, different machine interfaces (OAI-PMH, SWORD v1 or v2, RDF, REST API) were provided via separate deployable webapps.  Now, all those interfaces along with the new REST API are in a single, "server" webapp built on Spring Boot.  You can now control which interfaces are enabled, and what path they appear on via configuration (e.g. "oai.enabled=true" and "oai.path=oai"). See https://jira.lyrasis.org/browse/DS-4257 (FULL DOCUMENTATION COMING SOON)
• Configuration has been upgraded to Apache Commons Configuration version 2. For most users, you should see no effect or difference. No DSpace configuration files were modified during this upgrade and no configurations or settings were renamed or changed. However, if you locally modified or customized the [dspace]/config/config-definition.xml (DSpace's Apache Commons Configuration settings), you will need to ensure those modifications are compatible with Apache Commons Configuration version 2.  See the Apache Commons Configuration's configuration definition file reference for more details.
• DSpace now has sample Docker images (configurations) which can be used to try out DSpace quickly.  See Try out DSpace 7 ("Install via Docker" section)

A full list of all changes / bug fixes in 7.x is available in the Changes in 7.x section.

6.0 Acknowledgments (TODO: Update for 7.0. This list is from 6.0)

The following individuals have contributed directly to this release of DSpace:  Tim Donohue, Mark H. Wood, Pascal-Nicolas Becker, Kevin Van de Velde, Ivan Masár, Hardy Pottinger, Terry Brady, Andrea Schweer, Philip Vissenaekens, Peter Dietz, Jonas Van Goolen, Tom Desair, Dylan MEEUS, Luigi Andrea Pascarelli, William Welling, Christian Scheible, Andrea Bollini, Aleksander Kotyński-Buryła, Ondřej Košarko, Jozef Mišutka, Chris Wilper, Ilja Sidoroff, Roeland Dillen, Bram Luyten, Marsa Haoua, Claudia Jürgen, Kim Shepherd, Art Lowel, Ivo Prajer, Petr Karel, Mini Pillai, Facundo Gabriel Adorno, Luiz Claudio Santos, Robin Taylor, Tim Van den Langenbergh, Arnaud de Bossoreille, Bill Tantzen, Tiago Guimarães, Oriol Olivé Comadira, Àlex Magaz Graça, Anne Lawrence, Brad Dewar, Bruno Nocera Zanette, David Baker, Ed Goulet, Mateusz Neumann, Monika Mevenkamp, Pablo Buenaposada, Patricio Marrone, Petya Kohts, Eike Kleiner, Antoine Snyers, Bjorn Jaspers, Chris Herron, Dan Scott, David Cook, Davor Cubranic, José Carvalho, Jozsef Marton, Juan Manuel Catá, Panagiotis Koutsourakis, Pantelis Karamolegkos, Pedro Príncipe, Philippe Gray, Rodrigo Prado de Jesus, RomanticCat, Saiful Amin, junwei1229, Keith Gilbertson, Nicolas Schwab, Pablo Buenaposada, Michael Marttila, samuel, tmtvl , and others who reviewed and commented on their work.  Many of these could not do this work without the support (release time and financial) of their associated institutions. We offer thanks to those institutions for supporting their staff to take time to contribute to the DSpace project.

A big thank you also goes out to the DSpace Community Advisory Team (DCAT), who helped the developers to prioritize and plan out several of the new features that made it into this release. The current DCAT members include: Augustine Gitonga, Bram Luyten, Bharat Chaudhari, Claire Bundy, Dibyendra Hyoju, Elin Stangeland, Felicity A Dykas, Iryna Kuchma, James Evans, Jim Ottaviani, Kate Dohe, Kathleen Schweitzberger, Leonie Hayes, Lilly Li, Maureen Walsh, Pauline Ward, Roger Weaver, Sarah Molloy, Sarah Potvin, Steve Van Tuyl, Terry Brady, Yan Han and Valorie Hollister.

We apologize to any contributor accidentally left off this list. DSpace has such a large, active development community that we sometimes lose track of all our contributors. Our ongoing list of all known people/institutions that have contributed to DSpace software can be found on our DSpace Contributors page. Acknowledgments to those left off will be made in future releases.

Want to see your name appear in our list of contributors? All you have to do is report an issue, fix a bug, improve our documentation or help us determine the necessary requirements for a new feature! Visit our Issue Tracker to report a bug, or join dspace-devel mailing list to take part in development work. If you'd like to help improve our current documentation, please get in touch with one of our Committers with your ideas. You don't even need to be a developer! Repository managers can also get involved by volunteering to join the DSpace Community Advisory Team and helping our developers to plan new features.

The Release Team consisted of:

• Tim Donohue (DuraSpace)
• Kevin Van de Velde (@mire)
  
• Pascal-Nicolas Becker (Technische Universität Berlin)

Additional thanks to Tim Donohue from DuraSpace for keeping all of us focused on the work at hand, for calming us when we got excited, and for the general support for the DSpace project.