What's New?

A frequent request by htdig users is how to generate a "What's New" page
showing recently created or modified documents.  The whatsnew.pl script
was contributed many years ago, and had the ability to extract information
from the db.docdb database produced by the 3.0.8b2 release of htdig.
It was since updated to handle the Berkely DB format databases introduced
in the early 3.1.0 betas, but was never adapted to handle the database
format changes in later betas, let alone the later 3.1.x stable releases.

A more recent version of whatsnew.pl can be found, along with a Perl
Berkeley DB package, at ftp://ftp.ccsf.org/htdig-patches/Contrib/
That version should work with later 3.1.x stable releases, but not
with the 3.2.0 betas because of even more changes in database format.
Some users have complained that the newer whatsnew.pl from ccsf.org is
very tricky to get working.

A better approach has been implemented for 3.1.6, which incorporates
two new features in htsearch which makes this possible: date restricted
searches (including support for relative dates), and a feature to match
all documents.  Combining theses two features, it's easy to get htsearch
to spit out a list of all recently changed documents.  The whatsnew.html
search form here gives a simple example of how to do this.  You may
want to get fancier with custom header, footer and result templates,
and a custom configuration file to put it all together, but this is a
starting point.  See http://www.htdig.org/FAQ.html#q4.2 to learn how to
customize search results.

These features will eventually make it into 3.2.0b4, some time after
3.1.6 is released.

In summary:
- whatsnew.pl is pretty much obsolete
- a newer whatsnew.pl from ftp.ccsf.org works with 3.1.x (with effort)
- whatsnew.html will work with htsearch version 3.1.6