Contensis R7 - the new release is now available
Posted on Wednesday 18th May 2011
Staying in front
With the release of R7 comes a whole set of exciting changes to the CMS - some changes keep Contensis at the forefront technically while others directly improve the experience of content providers.
With the increased adoption of Contensis, by organisations with high traffic-high value content, comes an increase in the activity within the CMS itself. We felt that there's so much that Contensis is skilfully handling - the uploads, edits, approvals etc. - that we decided to expose this activity as a live feed on the dashboard so that administrators have an insight into the work running through the system. For most users this live feed provides a neat snapshot of what's happened since they last logged on; their feed only contains information relevant to areas of the site that they have permission to work with.
It’s not possible to summarise everything here - it's hardly worth your time reading about the hundreds of tiny tweaks we've made. We've summarised the major changes below and as always we've been refining, testing and optimising in all the places you'd expect. Part of the work on R7 has been setting the ground work for more ambitious things to come.
Major changes
Highlights:
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Major update to the dashboard
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Move to .Net 4
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Integrated Pipeline Mode
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Upgrade from JQuery 1.4.2 to 1.5.2
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Complete re-write of JavaScript framework
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Dropped support for SQL Server 2000
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QA module re-write (now with WCAG2 / 64bit server support)
Items implemented ahead of schedule:
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Extensions to our Search including the introduction of new features such as Did You Mean and thesaurus based look-ups
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Our brilliant new forms module
New Dashboard
The new dashboard brings actions, content and usage statistics to the forefront of the application. Users can now see their current content, view other people's actions and examine their website activity. The statistics area integrates seamlessly with Google Analytics.
New Form Builder
Creating great forms is easier than ever! Our updated module enables even inexperienced users to quickly build professional forms with rich layout elements such as paging. Read our 'Setting up the Form Module' guide.
Quality Assurance
The QA Module re-write streamlines the process of checking and fixing accessibility problems, HTML validation, spelling mistakes and other errors at page level. On a technical level we've upgraded the engine to support WCAG 2.0/W3C. Project-wide scans are automatically scheduled so you can keep an overview of the quality of your website as a whole. Read our 'Setting up the QA Module' guide.
Browser Support for Internet Explorer 9 and Firefox 4
The CMS UI has been fully tested in all supported browsers which now include Internet Explorer 9 and Firefox 4. Each release of a browser is tested to ensure that users have a consistent experience using Contensis across many browsers. The full browser list now contains; Internet Explorer 7, Internet Explorer 8, Internet Explorer 9, Firefox 3.6, Firefox 4, Google Chrome and Safari 5.
New social media controls
It is now even easier to integrate Facebook and Twitter with your website. We have introduced a suite of new Facebook controls and a 'Tweet This' control that can simply be dropped into a site. Get visitors to your site "like"-ing pages on Facebook or Tweeting interesting content.
Approve and decline content from your Inbox!
Contensis email notifications now include a link that allows you to approve or decline the content that has been sent to you for approval.
Support for multiple Active Directory domains
The Contensis AD domain support has been improved to cater for integration with multiple domains.
Extensions to Contensis search
Search continues to grow as a key method of navigation on the web. Making search results more intelligent is vital and as part of this we've added 'Did you mean?' and Thesaurus look-ups to our search.