Announcing the release of FenixEdu 3.0

Greetings!

FenixEdu Project is pleased to announce the release of FenixEdu 3.0. This is one of the biggest change sets ever made in FenixEdu and makes huge changes, both for users as for developers.

New look and theme support

This new version of FenixEdu brings a lot of changes in what a installation can look like. First of FenixEdu has a new look. The old FenixEdu 2 look is almost equal to what FenixEdu looked like 10 years ago.

The new theme is called Ashes, is the new look for FenixEdu. Our new theme is a work in progress and will change in the future. Right now we are developing the key aspects for the components we already have. In the future we are thinking about exploring how FenixEdu should look as well feel. Your input is always welcomed.

Second, FenixEdu now supports themes. We are using Bootstrap to define the themes. If you want to make a theme for your school, you can just change our Ashes theme to better fit your school ethos, create a new one from scratch from the Bootstrap scaffold, or use one of many commercially available themes for bootstrap.

Incredible performance

FenixEdu 3 screams speed. Our internal tests yield over 70% speed ups over key areas. To achieve this, the internal filter chain was reworked to provide faster response times. One of the key culprits for slow performance, RequestChecksumRewriter, is now restricted to the internal body of a Bennu Renders functionality and it was reworked to provide even better performance. With the introduction of Bennu Spring we are in the process of removing this piece of technology altogether and replacing it with better access control solutions.

Moving to Bennu Groups

The FenixEdu groups that were marked as deprecated, were removed and replaced with Bennu Groups. These groups provide better performance for FenixEdu and are easier to maintain, while being fully uniform throughout all the applications in the FenixEdu Ecosystem.

Management configuration and flexibility

Administration on this version is way easier. First, the Administration portal was broken into small pieces, making management easier to do and to delegate. Second, some of these new pieces have been reworked and have updated interfaces that.

Bennu Portal

The old functionality system that was attached to the CMS is being deprecated in favor of the new Bennu Portal. Not only is easier and faster, as it is easier to maintain and administrate.

The new Space Management Module

The Space Management was rewritten as a new separated module. This new module has served as a test bed to all the new technologies we were introducing in this release of FenixEdu.

Parking and card management modules extracted

As a beginning for the long process of separating FenixEdu into smaller modules, the parking and card management were extracted into separated modules, as a test for our modularization process.