[announce] Horde 4.0-ALPHA1

[Jan Schneider]

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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
     * 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

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

The full list of changes (from version 3.3) can be viewed here:

https://github.com/horde/horde/blob/03a543976c302ba1c7da5674580f6f2dbb76c6d5/horde/docs/CHANGES

Have fun!

The Horde Team.