6.0.0-git
2024-03-19
Last Modified 2011-03-29 by Jan Schneider

Release Notes for Horde 4 Beta 1

After more than two years of development, the Horde Team is pleased to announce the first alpha release of the Horde Application Framework version 4.0.

Description

The Horde Application Framework is a flexible, modular, general-purpose web application framework written in PHP. It provides an extensive array of components that are targeted at the common problems and tasks involved in developing modern web applications. It is the basis for a large number of production-level web applications, notably the Horde Groupware suites. For more information on Horde or the Horde Groupware suites, visit http://www.horde.org.

Notes

IMPORTANT! This is a preview version that should not be used on production systems. This version is considered feature complete but there are likely to be bugs. You should not use this preview version with existing production data. Migration of data from earlier versions has not been fully tested yet and is not supported.

We encourage widespread testing and feedback via the mailing lists or our bug tracking system. Updated translations are very welcome, though some strings might still change before the release candidates are prepared.

Installation

The installation method for Horde 4 has been changed to use the PEAR installer. To prepare your local PEAR installation to install software from Horde's PEAR server, run the following commands from the command line:

pear channel-discover pear.horde.org
pear install horde/horde_role-alpha
pear run-scripts horde/horde_role

The last command will ask you for the filessystem location for your Horde installation. This should be some path in your web server's document root, e.g. /var/www/horde. These commands only need to be run once. You are now prepared to install, upgrade and uninstall Horde packages. To install the alpha release of Horde, run the following commands:

pear install horde/horde-alpha

Configuration

Just go to the config/ directory of your Horde installation and copy conf.php.dist to conf.php:

cd /var/www/horde/config/
cp conf.php.dist conf.php

Then point your browser to the installation location, go to the Administration/Configuration screen and start configuring. You probably want to:

1. Configure a real authentication backend!
2. Configure a database backend (Horde configuration, Database tab)
3. Install the database tables ("Update all DB schemas" button)
4. Configure any other applications you installed

For more detailed installation and configuration instructions, e.g. how to install Horde from PEAR into a location other than the system default, please see https://github.com/horde/horde/blob/master/horde/docs/INSTALL

Changes

The major changes compared to the Horde version 3.3 are:

  • Completely refactored component library for PHP 5
  • Much easier installation through PEAR installer
  • Simplified configuration process
  • ActiveSync support
  • Frameless layout
  • Grouping into advanced and simple user preferences
  • Improved caching and reduced session sizes
  • Much faster Share library
  • Better Share support for large user basis
  • Improved Image library
  • Reduced dependency on external libraries
  • Lots of improvements in all library components

Known Issues

Please see our issue tracker for a list of open bugs on this release: http://bugs.horde.org/query/showstoppers4