Arches v5.0 released (now using Python 3!)

[Alexei Peters]

The Arches team is happy to announce the release of v5.0 

This is a major release of Arches and it will require several updates to the dependencies upon which Arches relies.

To upgrade from a previous version please review the "Upgrading Arches" section of the release notes for v5.0 in its entirety before you begin the upgrade process.

Here some of the release highlights:

• Dependency Upgrades - Arches now uses:
• Python 3.7
• Django 2.2
• Elasticsearch 7.4
• Postgres 12
• PostGIS 3
• Task Management: Arches can now be configured to delegate background tasks using Celery
• Notifications: Arches can notify users when a task is complete and developers can add custom notifications
• Search Export: Users can export search results to CSV or shapefile formats.
• Search Components: Developers can now override search components to customize the search interface, or add their own search components
• Package Ontologies: Ontologies can now be loaded from a package
• The default ontology has been removed to better accommodate instances without ontologies or custom ontologies
• Workflows: Developers can design workflows to simplify data management operations for their users
• The tile server (TileStache) has been removed in favor of storing vector tiles directly in Postgres
• A grouping card component has been added to cards into a single card
• A map component has been added to manage multiple geometry nodes in a single map interface.
• The map widget has been upgraded with an improved interface
• Custom indexes have been added to allow developers to add their own indexes

As always the documentation can be found at <http://arches.readthedocs.io>

[Chris Dolby]

Thanks to everyone who's worked on it - there are a lot of useful things here, and also it helps solve the necessary support changes relating to Python.

We'll be putting this release into use on our projects very shortly.

I did have one question about the last point on the release notes - is this the ability to add custom indexes for both searching and exporting, including for future use in dashboards? I think I understand based upon discussions, but it's a bit unclear!

Best wishes,

Chris Dolby

Project Manager

Historic England