The main drivers for ShadoCMS 8.0 release are:
- New User Interface to make editing and working with Shado for general users easier
- Multi-language site management updates
- Multi-language SOF - this is a new feature
- Lucene search indexing which will depricate Verity going forward
- FMS bulk upload function
- ZoomFlex Cairngorm architecture port
- Small bug fixes
New User Interface
A key feature of this build have been numerous UI updates to Shado. With so much functionality the challenge has been to ensure the key tasks and most used functionality is the most predominant and also the fastest to achieve. This has seen a range of improvements including:
- New tabs against sections and page
- Preview directly into edit mode instead of needing to preview in a new window then select 'edit' on the front end editing tool bar
- A new option of previewing content as it will appear without the container handlebars so we now have Edit, View Published Site and Preview Site (unpublished content)
- Highlighting in red the page/section/container you are viewing in the Site Tree
- Tool tips added to the fields of the page/section and other general areas of Shado to provide inline help where it is needed.
Multi Language - Translation Management System Updates
More and more clients are wanting to utilise the Shado Multi Lanaguage functionality and we have improved the Translation Management System as well for managing content that needs translating from the primary language to secondary languages. If you are interested in this functionality please contact us. We are also working on integration with a number of translation service vendors who can translate your content by human translation by integrating with Shado.
Multi Language SOF
The SOF is a very powerful feature of Shado but unfortunately it was not multi language capable. This has been rectified in Shado 8 and is a great new feature for clients that require multi language content.
Lucene Search
With Shado 7.7.1 we started work on incorporating Lucene as the search engine for all new sites and depricating the Verity search engine. For existing clients Verity still functions but it is Lucene that we will continue to work on and enhance for future builds. A new round of features in relation to Lucene have been included in Shado 8.0.
FMS Bulk Upload
The ability to upload a zip file and download and unzip into a specified FMS directory making it easy to work with a large number of files for users without the ability to drop files directly into the file stores.
ZoomFlex Cairngorm Architecture Port
In September we started work on the porting of ZoomFlex from our own custom Flex framework to Cairngorm. When ZoomFlex was first developed Cairngorm was exceptionally complex and we did not think met our needs. However, with updates to Cairngorm and with the expertise of Universal Mind one of partners and leading experts in Cairngorm we have made this transition. We believe this will further extend the power of ZoomFlex for Flex application development.
More detailed release notes can be found in the Straker Issue Tracking System.