XperienCentral R37

Release overview

For all our contacts, the newest XperienCentral release is available from the 8th of August. In R37, you can see countless improvements - some of them too technical to describe here. As a rule of thumb, you can consider this a release that contributes to the 'quality of life'. For instance, but not limited to Tag Ordering, Hyperlinking content overviews, Custom metadata in bulk changing, saving in the Edit Link panel, Indexing of Modular Content properties, and Personalization Tags in External links. 

Hyperlinking (dynamic) content overviews

(Dynamic) content overviews are mostly used on large websites with a lot of content. Often you will see them accompanied by a read-more link or alike. You used to create those links manually - an uninspiring repeatable job. We have made it easier and more convenient to achieve this linking principle. From this current release on, you can create your (read-more) links from within the (dynamic) content overview. It saves a bit of time and feels more natural. 

Tag Ordering

Content is structured by using tags, among other things. So, using tags should be easy and prompt. We have improved this slightly but noticeable. In the early days, it looked like the tags were put in order randomly. Of course, there is a logic behind the scenes, but an editor did not experience that. Especially when there are many different options, it could be a hassle to find the correct term. That bothered us too, so now we organize the tags more logical: alphabetically.  

Support custom metadata when bulk changing

Sometimes you want to convert pages to media items and the other way around, to have a bit more flexibility, for instance. But depending on your configuration, there is a chance that you also have custom metadata. Before, this custom metadata got lost during the process of converting one into another. That was not the intention, so we fixed it. Now there is a mechanism that ensures the custom media-item metadata (or custom page metadata) is retained. 

Saving in the Edit Link panel also closes the property panel 

Earlier, there was some unwanted behavior when you saved configuration in the link editing panel. So, we prevented this from happening when using R37. From now on, this action doesn't trigger a close action of the parent property panel. 

Modular Content properties are indexed even if the search index is set to disabled

It goes without saying you want your content to be adequately found by search engines. But sometimes you just want specific parts not to be indexed. Therefore, recent versions of modular content offer some choices. There are options to index properties in the content index based on what you configured at the 'search index'. One of these options is 'Disabled'. When going for that option, you expect your property not to be indexed. But what surprised us, that the opposite seemed to be the case. The 'Disable' option should do what it says, so we changed our code accordingly. 

Supported personalization tags in external links

Personalization is one of the main reasons large organizations choose XperienCentral. Therefore, you want to use this feature at its most. We encountered a situation in which the save button remained disabled after entering a personalization tag. This happened at the input field for an external (web)link. As a result, it was not possible to save your action, which is why we fixed this.

And much more!

All the improvements we mentioned above are just the highlights of which we know that our valued customers appreciate the most. It is not an exhaustive list. If you are curious about all our improvements, we have listed them below:

Improvements

• Add a hyperlink to dynamic and content overviews
• Improve IAF security by default escaping user input
• Support custom metadata in bulk type change action
• Tags should be ordered alphabetically when editing Modular Content properties
• Filtering on integer values by range is not supported
• Retrieve JSON concurrently to improve performance 

Bugfixes

• Personalization tags are not supported in external links
• Friendly URLs of media items are not always trimmed
  Inline styling options can't be combined with default alignment options
• IAF doesn't check whether submitted value is one of the provided options
• Active/inactive users can be accidentally mixed up in the Authorization panel
• The supported servlet spec is not in line with the hardware/software specification
• The save action in the Edit Link panel also closes the parent property panel
• The page path of pages in the non-default language is always indexed with page titles in the default language
• The focus point for a content item image is not shown
• The Solr configuration files overrule from the config_directory doesn't work for all files
• An incorrect status is shown for some comments in the Discussion panel
• There is a memory issue when using large images
• Form Export fails with E-mail handler with attachment
• All pages and media items are indexed with the metadata of the homepage
• IAF step navigation does not work when placed on a mediaitem
• The helptext property is not added when migrating from versions 2.0.4 and lower
• The language for Modular downloads is not indexed
• Modular Integer fields are not indexed in the content index
• Modular Content properties are indexed even if the search index is set to DISABLED
• The Connector API history shows more than the maximum 100 items