Episerver World updates

Anything going on with Episerver World? Our Episerver community site has been around for some time, supporting more than 30,000 developers worldwide working with the Episerver platform. Our web development team continuously work to improve the functionality on World, based on feedback from our community. This article summarizes the latest enhancements, and what is in the backlog for the future.

About World

First some background. Like many other websites, World is a complex site which has been added to and built on by multiple developers during the years. It contains both legacy code, as well as newer parts based on recent functionality. A large part of World is the community sections with blogs and forum posts. World is also the home of most of the technical documentation for the Episerver platform, as well as other product-related information.

World is based on the latest Episerver CMS and Find, and is regularly updated to include recent features and fixes as part of the continuous release process. This way, World also acts as a "guinea pig" for instant testing of new features, and is an important channel for collecting feedback about the Episerver platform. 

The site runs in a load balanced staging environment with multiple web servers both in the stage and in the production environment. World also has integrations with other systems, for example our CRM system, and the issue and project tracking system we use in software development. This integration also provides the source for auto-generated release notes for our weekly updates, and for the bug list where you can monitor status for bug fixes.

Working with World

Our community members create much of the content on World, and some of our great EMVPs help us monitor and answer forum questions. We also have quite a few editors working with content. So who are they? Well, you might be surprised to know that most editors are actually Episervers' own developers, working with developer guides. And of course they get to use as much as possible of the functionality they built themselves. Eating your own dog food, that is...

Projects

Whenever we have releases with associated documentation changes, we use the Project feature. This lets teams collaborate on content items using notifications, and at release time, instantly publish everything related to the release.

Filtering

Some of the content filtering you see on World is based on the good old built-in category functionality in CMS, but we also use Find to filter out information, like in the filtering of release notes by product, packages and versions.

Search optimization

We also use the built-in search optimization possibilities in Find, to ensure that certain popular content we know visitors are frequently looking for, is properly displayed when searching using different keywords. 

Personalization

We also use personalization on some sections on World to present selected content to a targeted group of visitors, for example specific content that is only for Episerver partners.

Add-ons

In addition to add-ons like the Spellchecker and Google Analytics for Episerver that we use on the site, we recently added the new block-based Episerver Forms add-on, to take advantage of the more advanced possibilities provided with that.

Recent enhancements

• In case you haven't already noticed, the Manage your blogs feature is now publicly available. This lets you conveniently manage your blog posts, if you are blogging directly on World. See blogging on World for available blogging options.
   
• There is now a Recent documentation updates block, which lists new updates to for example system requirements and developer guides. The block can be seen on the Documentation and Start pages.
   
• Other recent fixes based on your feedback:
  • Subject titles on new forum postings are now mandatory, so no more empty posts without titles...
  • All forums are checked by default (may need to click Go to populate the list).
  • Clearer indication of forum posts with solutions to questions (marked as answered).
  • Not possible anymore to add a post with a heading that is too long.
  • Hidden views and ratings for syndicated blogs.
  • Fixed issue where you cannot edit the first forum post.
  • Improved search with added product and version numbers for hits.
  • Improved print output for pages (useful if you're studying for a certification).
  • Fixed issues with ordered lists in forum posts.
  • Improved password resetting procedure.

In the backlog

Work continues to make World even better. We have a list of improvements within areas like search capabilities, content tagging, layout and design, and documentation presentation. Please continue to send us your feedback, to ensure that we are doing the right things!

Useful hints

How do I find...

• Status for a bug - see the bug list under Support (requires login)
• Most recent features - check the feature list, or go to world.episerver.com/features
• Most recent updates - see the weekly updates list, or go to world.episerver.com/releases
• Release notes - see release notes, or go to world.episerver.com/releasenotes

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