Release Notes - EPiServer CMS 6 R2 | Optimizely Developer Communi

November Happy Hour will be moved to Thursday December 5th.

Personalization

Visitor groups allow site owners to define the audience expected on the website by dragging and dropping various criteria onto the group. A criterion can refer to anything and developers can create their own criteria, although we do of course provide a lot of the basics out-of-the-box. This includes geo-ip criteria with geo-ip database out-of-the-box, visited pages, number of visits, time of day, referring search word, user profile, landing page, and much more.

Once you have defined some visitor groups (for instance “Competitors”, “Potential customers”, “People from Sweden”, “Potential employees”) you can use the groups to target content. You can simply select any content on a page, in a text-box, or a piece of dynamic content, and mark which groups should be allowed to see it. Or you can take it one step further and set up access rights for the groups, in the same way as you do with regular members and roles. The Visitor Groups Statistics gadget in EPiServer OnlineCenter also makes it easy for you to monitor how your personalized content is being viewed.

On-Page Edit

On-page editing has long been a way for occasional editors to make minor changes to a page and publish it without entering Edit mode. On-page edit has been greatly improved and now uses the same rich text editor as Edit mode. The new editing possibilities make it easier for all editors to quickly change and publish pages, not only with minor textual changes, but now also by, for example, adding images, links and dynamic content. It is also worth noting that on-page editing can also now be done in Firefox.

Changes Affecting Editors

Autosave
Autosave works so that when working with content in a browser, all your work is placed in a draft storage behind the scenes at predefined intervals. This is ideal in cases when you, for example, lose connection or the browser crashes. If this happens you’ll be presented with your draft the next time you log in. This even applies to newly created pages that haven’t even been saved for the first time yet.

Dynamic content preview
Dynamic content in the rich text editor can now be previewed both from Edit mode and on-page edit by quickly clicking an icon. This makes it very easy to see what the dynamic content will look like on your page without first having to publish the page.

Easier access to the image editor
Edit images in the Image Editor by clicking an icon in the toolbar that takes you directly to the Image Editor where you can resize, crop and transform your images and either replace the original image or save the changed image as a new image.

Upgrade of TinyMCE to the latest version

New Property Types
Standard page now have a SEO tab in Edit mode to enter basic information for the search engines.

Remember User Preferences in Edit Mode
Edit mode remembers some of your preferences so that when you add a link to a page, the link tool will open in the location that you last selected. Much in the same way when you want to add a link to a file in the file system, the file manager will remember where you last worked and open in the same folder. The saved preferences are per user, so if you log out and another user logs in, the preferences for that user will apply.

Permanent Editing
Editors may want to let others know that they are editing a piece of content even though they may have logged out or are away from their computers. This "soft lock" means that if an editor forgets to release a piece of content before going on vacation, it's not a problem. Another editor with access to the same content can still edit the page.

Template Package and Sample Site

The Alloy Technologies sample site replaces the previous public template package and the site also includes some new features. This means that developers easy can install a website and it will be up and running on the fly. The sample site contains the following templates out-of-the box:

Pages with example content. See examples of how you can use personalized content, listings, etc.

Page types. A sample of example page types ready for use is provided.

A set of predefined visitor groups and criteria. See predefined examples of visitor groups from Sweden, job seekers, etc.

Basic Search Engine Optimization (SEO). We have changed the way to display metadata for the search engines.

Mobile Support for Alloy Templates

The mobile support means that visitors coming from an Android cell phone or iPhone will be shown a different version of the site. The version will be more adjusted for smaller screens and a touch screen. We define a smaller screen to be less than 480px. Even though the iPhone 4 has an estimated 980px it will still respond to the 480px. This also means that if you make your browser the size of 480px you will see the mobile rendering. However the javascript rendering of the menu will not work unless the mobile.js file is adjusted to fit the scenario. Testing the mobile support can easily be done in either an iPhone or Android simulator, but also in the actual devices.

The mobile-specific styles are loaded in with the normal styles if the device is less than 480px in screen width. These styles are not a copy of the normal styles but override the styles where needed. The menu is hidden by default and is shown when the menu button is clicked. This is also what happens for the sub-menu which is shown underneath the main menu.

Changes Affecting Developers

Streamlined DynamicContent Plugin Development

EPiServer CMS 6 R2 includes a new class attribute, DynamicContentPlugIn, that makes development of Dynamic Content plugins easier and removes the need to manually register your plugins in episerver.config.

GeoIP

The GeoIP information is constantly changing and the company that provides our data releases a new version of the database every month. The latest update that can replace the version to be shipped with R2 can be downloaded from http://geolite.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/GeoLiteCity.dat.gz.

Release Notes for EPiServer CMS 6 R2