Block Enhancements Update

We have just released a new version of EPiServer.Labs.BlockEnhancements 0.11.0  and we would really love to hear your feedback. Please find what it brings to the Editors! 

It greatly enhances the way editors have to deal with local content - which means content that is not shared accross multiple other pages but used only once.

Such local content is typically stored in `For this page/block` folders and is considered an integral part of the page. It turns out that on average more than 90% of blocks are only used on a single page which means that they either already reside in `For this page` folder or could easily be moved there.

After installing/upgrading to 0.11.0 editors no longer have to manage Local Blocks and Local Assets independently. All local contents (meaning content that resides in For this page/block folders) lifecycle will now be synchronized to its parent.

This greatly simplifies the process of creating and editing pages because editor/reviewer no longer need to deal with individual blocks or assets but can focus on the big picture.

When publishing a page all local content will be published altogether.

The same with approval workflow, when content is marked as Ready to review, Approved or Declined then the editor/reviewer will just receive a single notification about the page. There will be no need to review the block individually.

Changing a local block will create a new page version which lets the editors to review and preview what actually changed on a given page.

Please see the new feature in action:

This allows the editor to use the Compare Mode and see what actually changed:

Editor can also mark the page as Ready to review without dealing with local blocks one by one

Approving/declining is just as easy:

We also added an admin mode plugin that lets you analyze the blocks on your site:

All the blocks that are not truly Shared (meaning they are only used once) will be moved the the respective `For this page/block` folders. You can move the blocks one by one or move all the visible blocks at once. 

For performance reasons we only display the N first blocks that match the search filter.

In this version we removed two features:

• Content Draft View - it is no longer needed because version 0.11.0 makes the preview work automatically for all local content. The editor no longer needs to know that some parts of the page are not published, everything that builds a page is one entity that is saved, previewed and published at the same time. However, all shared content items (pages, shared blocks, shared media) have to be managed on their own.
• Inline Publish from Content Area - it was not popular and is no longer needed since now you can just publish the page and all local dependencies do not have to be handled separately and will be published automatically. Shared content has to be published on its own.

Additionally we disabled the `Publish Page with Blocks` aka `Smart publish` by default - the command can still be turned on via Options if you really need to because you already have many shared blocks that cannot be convert to local blocks. We would like this command to be phased out eventually. Blocks which are truly shared between multiple pages should be published from their respective context where the editor can clearly see the list of items that will be affected by the change.

Idea of linking pages with their local content seems more attractive.

Documentation and full source code is available on our github https://github.com/episerver/EPiServer.Labs.BlockEnhancements and this specific feature is available here https://github.com/episerver/EPiServer.Labs.BlockEnhancements#local-content 

If you find any issue or would like to contribute then you are more than welcome to let us know :)

We are also in the middle of migrating this Labs package to .net core. It will be available soon!