v1.6

New features

• CSV import. Adding data in bulk to your collection now is easier than ever. Uwazi will intake a CSV or a .zip file also containing your PDF documents along with all the metadata values.
• Two factor authentication. 2FA gives you an extra security layer protecting your data from stolen passwords and other hacks. You can use either Authy or Google Authenticator.
• Activity log. Now administrators can track who and when information was created, updated or deleted. You'll find a complete log in settings > activity log.
• Public forms. If you need to collect data or feedback from your users, now you can quickly create a public from based on the metadata definition of an Uwazi template. The submitted information will appear in your uploads section for revision.
• Bar charts with arbitrary data. If you need to show a bar chart in your pages and the data is not coming directly from Uwazi, you can now feed a json to a chart.
• Privacy cookie pop-up. Informing users that your site uses cookies is now required by EU's privacy legislation. You can activate this option in settings > collection > "Show cookie policy"
• Custom sorting in thesauri. Now administrators can define an arbitrary sorting in their thesauri instead of Uwazi's default alphabetical sorting.
• Inherit properties. There are times when it is useful to display a property on more than one entity. Instead of duplicating the property and collecting the same data twice, Uwazi supports the ability to inherit a property from one entity type to another, via a relationship.
• Better management of document languages. Uwazi now supports documents in languages not configured as UI languages. Also, users can read these documents without switching UI language.

Interoperability with other tools

• Integration with Digital Evidence Vault. DEV is a browser plugin that allows you to capture information on different internet sources (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Wikipedia, or any website) along with a vast quantity of metadata oriented towards preservation (keep a copy in case the media disappears) and usage as evidence in a legal process (capture metadata that helps support the piece of media as valid evidence). This new feature allows you to keep a copy of any media (including videos) in your Uwazi instance with just one click. For more information, read our case study on how this integration is being used to document air strikes in Yemen.

Technical improvements that will impact system administration

• Metadata object/API. Our internal architecture for storing metadata has changed in order to be used as the based for a series of performance refactors that are under production. This has impacted the API introducing some extra validation and specs, meaning there may be breaking changes.
• We upgraded Elasticsearch to version 7.4 and MongoDB to version 4.0.3. Please check the dependencies and upgrade section in case you are self-hosting and need to upgrade your infrastructure.
• Custom JavaScript in pages. Uwazi pages now supports adding JavaScript code to be executed on the client side. Since this code can access the API of the instance, this allows developers and administrators to create rich pages with complex functionalities such as custom graphs and data visualization or interactive functionality.

Many bug fixes!

Make sure your Uwazi dependencies are up to date and follow the upgrade instructions to get the latest code up and running.

v1.5

New features

• Support for right-to-left languages, administrators can manage languages via Uwazi UI.
• Data synchronization between Uwazi instances.
• Even more security: Uwazi has been audited by a third party and patched, along with several security improvements such as end-point validation, optional MongoDB password, better password encryption and account locking after multiple failed login attempts. We will be sharing the final security audit report on https://www.uwazi.io once it is available.

Improvements

• "Link" field type. Meant for external links mainly, it will display a label instead of the URL as a text string. The label will be clickable and will open a new browser window.
• Contact form for pages as a component.
• Private documents show a badge indicating they can only be accessed by users with privileges.
• Changing a entity template will now keep the values of the fields that have a matching field name and type in the other template.
• Simplified "documents" and "entities" into one template. Now, the only difference between a document and an entity in Uwazi is whether they have a main document.
• Added an extra pagination link for more results.
• Improved performance of text references.

Several bug fixes!

Make sure your Uwazi dependencies are up to date and follow the upgrade instructions to get the latest code up and running.

v1.4

New features

• Now Uwazi supports managing languages via UI.
• Added support for Matomo for web analytics.

Improvements

• Improved load speed and database usage of relationships.
• Now your collection can be sorted by numeric and select fields.
• Now the metadata side panel will also be opened when clicking on map markers for maps embedded in pages.
• UI translation tool is now always available for administrators, even if you have a single-language instance.
• Several SEO related improvements.

Several bug fixes!

Make sure your Uwazi dependencies are up to date and follow the upgrade instructions to get the latest code up and running.

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!