New CKAN version 2.8.0 released, patch versions for 2.5.x, 2.6.x and 2.7.x available

The CKAN team is happy to announce the release of the latest CKAN version, 2.8.0. We have released patch versions for CKAN 2.5, 2.6 and 2.7, which as ever users are strongly encouraged to apply.

CKAN 2.8

This is a release that comes packed with lots of fixes and improvements to make CKAN more flexible and stable. The first one that users will probably notice are the completely revamped templates, updated to a newer version of Bootstrap (special thanks to Goce Mitevski and Aleksandar Jovanov for their work on that), but there's lots more under the hood. There's improved support on DataStore queries, custom groups and organization types, search results display etc. And of course dozens of bug fixes! Thanks to the more than 25 contributors that have submitted patches since the last release, and special thanks to Konstantin Sivakov for his work on the release process. From this version we have also started to remove old features that were holding CKAN back and that have much better alternatives in place. Most notably this version completely removes version 1 and 2 of the API (known as the REST API, accessible at /api/rest/*) in favour of the much more powerful Action API, which has been the standard for many years now. The old Celery-based tasks have also been removed, replaced by the new library for building background jobs introduced in the previous version. In the same modernizing trend, several parts of the code has already been ported as part of the migration to Flask. For a full list of changes and fixes, including information on how to maintain compatibility from extensions with the old templates, check the CHANGELOG.

CKAN patch releases

These new patch releases (2.5.9, 2.6.6 and 2.7.4) fix important bugs and security issues, so users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to the latest patch release for the CKAN version they are using. The latest patch release is the only one supported by the CKAN team. For a list of the fixes included you can check the CHANGELOG.

Upgrading

For details on how to upgrade, see the following links depending on your install method: Upgrading CKAN. If you find any issue, you can let the technical team know in the mailing list or the IRC channel.