September Release has Launched

We’ve just released a round of new features, fixes and enhancements for Agility!

It’s been a long summer of development - here’s a summary of what we’ve been up to:

• Features and enhancements: 31
• Bug fixes and tweaks: 189

Holy Moley!  Where did we come up with that many fixes and tweaks?  Well, we go through every email, every server log, every customer call and everything we’d ever had report for Agility, ever, and put it through our bug fix process.

It took a little longer than we thought, but it was a worthwhile activity, because it made us focus not so much on what we wanted to do, but what our customers want us to do, and how we can best help them day to day.

So what’s in the box?

Change a template on a page.  Finally.

From any page, click “Change Template” and you’ll get the dialog below, which allows you to drag and drop the modules from this page to a new template.

Any default modules on the new templates will show up in green.

If you move more than one module into a zone, you can re-order them here before you save the change.

Super Fast Workflow Actions

The publish, unpublish, and other workflow actions have been re-worked to work way, way faster.  This is most important on a content item or module with a lot of fields or rich text editors.

And, once you do publish the item, you can keep on working on it while it synchronizes out to all your web servers without having to wait.

Super Fast (Client Side) Save

There is a new option on every content and module definition that enables a new feature we call “client side save.”  This means that the data in the input control can be saved without having to reload the current item. 

The result is that items which might take a few seconds to save can now be saved in less than one second.  Add it all up, and makes for a huge productivity increase.  And it feels nice, too - especially with big rich text items and attachment lists.

This feature has to be enabled on existing module or content definitions, but any new ones will take advantage of this automatically.

Publish Recent Changes

There now a “Publish Recent Changes” button on Pages and Content when you don’t have a page selected.  This takes you to the recent changes report to the pending publish view.

Why is this important?  From this report you can see everything that needs to be published from anywhere in the website.

Big fields for Meta Tags and Scripts

We've added a zoom action on the Meta Tag and Script fields on page settings.  This will open the same field in a large dialog to allow you to see more of the text at a time.

This is especially useful if you have a custom analytics script you need to add to a page and you need to see everything at one.

Performance

We’ve been monitoring the performance in Agility from every possible aspect.  From the content manager, working with lists, syncing content to multiple domains, to previewing complex sites, to running reports, to developing sites, we’ve made tweaks and fixes that will make these things faster.

In some case WAY faster.  Yep, bold and in caps. 

But we also know it’s just the tip of the iceberg, since nothing is ever fast enough.  It’s our little obsession that things should always get faster and not slower as features are added.

Handling of Agility.Web API versions

One of the biggest complaints we get from our developers is that they don’t know when they missed an update to the website API.  This happens mostly on local sites or sites that are in development mode. 

In these cases, if the site is using an outdated API, the option to automatically download and install the updated API DLL will be displayed.  If the site is in development mode, the developer will be able to download the DLL file to update their website project references.

Other stuff that starts off small and ends up big

• “Save and New” button when adding fields to a module or content definition.
• New version of the Telerik HTML Editor. 
  • Honestly, is there ever not a new version of this?  This one is much faster, though, and caches your spot in the image of file manager.
• Edit the editor CSS directly in the browser.  An optional checkbox to output the css as a file in the website.
• Double prompt for “Unpublish List.” 
• Double prompt for “Delete Folder.” Enough said about that :)
• Better zip file handling for Mac users.
• Show the user role in the UI beside the user name. 
• “Publish” from the list of shared content views.