Concerto 2 Beta – IndiaIbex Release

Hi Everyone!  I’m usually excited when we’re announcing a new version of Concerto, but this version has me extra excited.  We’ve managed to pack more bug fixes, improvements, and features into our 0.7.0.IndiaIbex release than the previous couple releases we’ve put out.  If you’ve been ignoring these updates, or Concerto 2 in general, this is definitely the release to check out.  To get started quickly, you should download the latest concerto_server VM here and fire it up to follow along.

This release added some much needed security for screens with the addition of screen authentication.  Screen security, something that Concerto 1 lacked, is something we (and by we I mean Mike) spent a lot of time thinking about for Concerto 2.  I couldn’t do it justice in this short form, so we’ll dive into the details in a full post after we’ve tidied up the last few bugs.

We also added support for Capistrano-based deployments if you’re into that sorta thing.  Our external error-reporting has been fixed in this release so we should get those bug reports automatically streaming in if you’ve check the box during setup.  If you’ve tried to visit that settings page and gotten an error, we’ve fixed that as well.  The config / settings as a whole should be a lot easier to navigate as well.  The VM is properly writing logs now so you can see what’s going on in logs/production.log and the dynamic content updaters are running in the background like they should be.  Behind the scenes this release also includes some improvements to our JSON / XML API that we’ll be including in V2, it’s not quite ready for mainstream yet but we’re making progress.

You can find a full diff of the work we did here.  Our installation instructions should be up to date, but you should really just download the VM and run it for a fast start.  Alternatively, you can check out our instance running this release @ http://nightly.concerto-signage.org.  Do let us know what bugs you run into or features you’d like by writing to our Google Group or opening Github Issues.