EPiServer features - April 2015
What's new in EPiServer? This document summarizes new features added through update 60 of the EPiServer platform, including Projects for CMS, Commerce catalog enhancements, and a new user interface with added functionality for Find. Check out all the new features supporting both end-users and developers in their daily work.
What is new for..?
- CMS users
- CMS developers
- Commerce users
- Commerce developers
- Find users
- Find developers
- Add-on users
- Add-on developers
- Other features
Features for users
CMS users
Projects
This feature allows you to manage multiple content items such as pages, blocks, images (and products if you are using Commerce), and publish them simultaneously, for instance as part of a campaign. You can work with multiple content languages in a project, and the project can be previewed and scheduled for later publishing.
Compare
A new compare view lets you compare and edit different versions of content such as pages, blocks and images (and products if you are using Commerce). The compare view also provides convenient access to language versions when translating content on multi-language websites.
Other
- Improvements to the link dialog with language selection support, and search when linking to pages and media, as well as products on Commerce sites.
- Enhanced user experience with a floating editor when editing content in the on-page editing view.
- Improved naming flow when creating new pages and blocks.
Commerce users
Catalog enhancements
Functionality has been added to create, edit and delete catalogs from the Catalog user interface. Thumbnail images are displayed for catalog listings (optional), and in the Catalogs and Media gadgets. Variants related to a product are displayed in an expandable relation view in the catalog listing.
A new tab (Belongs to) clearly displays relations between a variant and associated categories, products, packages and bundles.
Other
- Improved price editing, making it easier to add new price information.
- Ability to administrate dictionary types from the Commerce user interface.
Find users
New user interface with added features
Find has a new user interface with easy access to search statistics and optimization taks, and built-in help. Optimization possibilities include new and enhanced functionality for working with best bets, related queries, synonyms, and editorial autocomplete. Optimization listings can be searched and sorted.
Other
- Integrate content from other websites into search using connectors for crawlers and RSS.
- Weight configuration for content properties.
- Notification feature, including when index is close to being full.
- Best bet support for catalog content on Commerce websites.
Add-on users
New add-ons
- Content Collaboration extends CMS with collaboration tools such as commenting, real-time chats and notifications, when working with shared content.
- Connect for Marketing Automation enables marketers to automate marketing activities based on site visitor behavior, with providers available for Silverpop and Marketo.
- Visitor Group criteria pack with additional criteria such as display channel and IP range, to use when creating visitor groups.
- Powerslice allows editors to "slice" large content structures into manageable pieces when working in edit view.
Other
- Enhanced Google Analytics for EPiServer, with support for Commerce and the possibility to extend the add-on with custom tracking.
- Integrations with third-party add-ons Perfion, InRiver, Optimizely, Celum, and GlobalLink.
Features for developers
CMS (core and UI) developers
Development general
- New API for interacting with system content roots.
- Ability to define tab settings in code to group content types and properties.
- Added typed interfaces for ContentReference.
- Enum value types automatically registered as PropertyNumber.
- Improved testing through simplified mocking for UrlResolver, TemplateResolver and ContentAssetHelper.
- Ability to link to actions and parameters in controllers and track links to other content in custom properties.
- User interface support for managing typed property settings, including constant strings for built in Tiny MCE plug-ins.
- "Classic" link stage removed in the API; only permanent links are used.
- New API for synchronization of internal and external IDs.
SEO
- Support for identifying different language versions for the same content.
- New API for rendering of canonical URLs (MVC and Web Forms).
- Ability to modify host redirect settings from the Admin view.
Security and access
- Easier to define AllowedRoles when using ComponentAttribute or a derived attribute.
- Ability to limit which blocks can be added to a content area using AllowedTypes attribute.
- Permission to functions made extensible using the PermissionService API.
- Support for Federated Security and ADFS/SSO.
Performance
- Improved performance for category management, and when using PropertyDataCollection.
Installation, upgrading and deployment
- Default URL set based on current project when installing EPiServer.Search through NuGet.
- Support for automatic import of content during first-time initialization.
- Improved installation procedure and database and configuration upgrades, when deploying to production environments.
- Workflow Foundation disabled to simplify Azure deployment.
- Support for blobs inside Visual Studio project (App_Data).
- Add baseline configuration when adding EPiServer.Cms.Core to project.
Other
- Ability to hide selected visitor group criteria from user interface.
- TinyMCE upgraded to 3.5.11 to support IE 11.
- New Logging API, which can be used by any third-party product or implementation.
- New Task Scheduler API to enable the running of trackable tasks in the background.
- Upgrade of Dojo to 1.8.8 and dgrid to 0.3.16.
- Added support for Json.NET v6 (Newtonsoft).
Commerce developers
Development general
- ContentReference property support, allows linking between catalog and CMS objects, such as pages and blocks.
- Re-added support for custom price types.
- Full multiple shipment support and updated shipping properties for catalog entries.
- Updated workflows to take advantage of the inventory tracking changes.
Security and access
- ADFS/SSO support for Commerce.
Performance
Enhancements in the following areas:
- Loading and saving of catalog content.
- Catalog content versioning and management of large categories.
- Content synchronization and catalog caching.
- Order loading and saving.
- License checking.
Installation, upgrading and deployment
- Simplified installation of Commerce through Visual Studio, and improved upgrading procedure.
- Commerce Addons Manager and Addons UI available as NuGet packages.
Other
Find developers
- Behavioral and "content freshness" parameters added to search engine.
- Ability to fine tune indexing and exclude media types when crawling documents.
- Improved Norwegian stemming.
- Improved HTML handling in the Find API.
- Support for applying best bets to typed search.
- Added compound word splitting.
- Autoboosting with calculation of decay and number of clicks.
- Support for multi-word synonyms and special characters.
- Support for .NET 4.5.
Add-on developers
- Improved installation procedures for add-ons using NuGet.
- LiveMonitor based on Javascript; Silverlight dependency removed.
- Possible to deploy add-on/modules files as zip archive.
- Support for protected modules inside a Visual Studio project.
Other features
EPiServer Service API
- Released in October 2014 with update in February 2015.
- Split out of CMS functions from the service API, to be able to use the service API to import media for websites without Commerce.
- New custom properties added to resource links to provide more information without using href.
Related information
- EPiServer Service API
- Breaking changes in CMS 8
- Breaking changes in Commerce 8
- Breaking changes in Find 9
- EPiServer User Guide
- Latest EPiServer releases
- Installing EPiServer updates
Last updated: Apr 15, 2015
