Main Navigation
The major change this release was the Marketpath CMS management navigation overhaul. We spent a significant amount of time and effort trying to get every detail just right - working our way through iteration after iteration in order to provide you with the best user experience possible.
We feel pretty good about these changes, but if there is something else you would like to see - or something that you would like to be different - please let us know.
Before
The previous version of the navigation was simple and effective, but left ample room for improvement:
- Almost the entire "User" menu was duplicated in other places and users did not care about these menu items much.
- Most users also do not care about the items under the "Site" and "Develop" menus.
- There was no way to skip straight to a particular content list (eg: blog posts, datastore items) without having to go through the same series of steps every time.
- There was no way to collapse the entire navigation to make more room for the specific content you were viewing - which is not a big deal on a big screen but makes a difference when working with a smaller viewport.
- The styles were "old" and our designer particularly dislikes using +/- signs to expand/collapse navigation sections.
After
While the latest version of the navigation still tries to keep things simple, it includes some updated styles, some reorganization, and customization options that were not previously possible:
- Moved "Search" and "New" options to the top of the site navigation, along with "My Dashboard", which allowed us to remove the "User" menu entirely.
- Show all "Content" by default, hiding the "Site" and "Develop" sections for most users. These sections can still be accessed using the "Full Menu" link.
- Allow users to customize the links that are available without having to go to "Full Menu". Links are customized per site, making it easy for users to show and hide links for sites that do or do not use those features.
- Allow users to add their own custom "shortcuts", which could be links to specific content lists (Blog Posts, Articles in a specific folder, etc...), links to specific items (home page anyone?), or even shortcuts making it easier to add new items with specific information pre-filled - such as authors, tags, and folders.
- Allow users to share their own shortcuts with other users on the same site. If other users do not want to see your shortcut they can always hide it.
- Allow users to customize shortcuts with a custom name, color scheme, and even using their own image.
- Allow users to collapse the entire site navigation so that only a single column of icons are visible on the left side of the window.
For more information on how to use the new navigation, including how to customize links and shortcuts in the menu, read the Marketpath CMS Navigation Tutorial
Bugfixes
There were a number of "bugs" that were squashed during this release:
- UI: Fixed an issue managing URL fields when the link type was "URI"
- UI: Corrected asynchronous form validation - eg: for unique names
- UI: Fixed {{errorMsg}} in import upload dialog
- UI: Fixed issues with domain verification interfaces
- Management: User profiles are read-only for restricted users
- Management: Fixed publishing site domains without having to republish site
- Management: Fixed issues with adding account and agency users
- Exports: Fixed ability to select custom site settings, error pages, image presets, javascript, and redirects for export.
- Templating: Fixed bug with {% img %} tag that was displaying an empty anchor tag
- Templating: Fixed display issue for "Label" form fields
- Templating: Fixed issue with conditional form fields being displayed when they should have been hidden
- Templating: Updating an included SCSS partial now more reliably updates any parent stylesheets.
Other Changes
As with most of our releases, we focused strongly on a single feature but still applied a number of additional improvements elsewhere. The following changes were also implemented during this release:
UI
- Login: Minor tweak to the button style on the login form
- Auto-Complete: attempted to disable browser auto-complete everywhere except for the login forms
- Site Selector: Made sites right-clickable (or middle-clickable, ctrl-clickable, etc...) to open in new tab
- Site Selector: Recent sites now work even when you attempt to navigate to sites that do not exist or you do not have access to
- Forms: Major overhaul of form submissions dialog with significantly improved functionality and usability. This is now in line with our standard grid view functioanlity across the manage UI except with the added ability to select the columns to be displayed and the order that they should be displayed in.
- Generic: Created "emails" field type to make it simpler and more intuitive to enter email addresses to receive notifications (eg: on form submit or import/export completion)
- Generic: Minor style improvements for a few fields and for the "New Import" dialog
Features
- Forms: Added ability to preview a form while editing its fields. Note that this will not look the same as viewing the form on your live site - it exists only to give you an idea of what the form could look like when it is published.
- Forms: Added ability to view form submissions using the current form definition. This has the same limitation as previewing a form while editing its fields with one additional limitation: You will view the submission using the fields that are currently defined for the form (including unpublished fields) and not the fields that would have been present when the form was initially submitted.
- Calendars: Filtering calendar entries by "End Date" now returns events that either start or end prior to the date specified (which is typically the desired behavior)
- Exports: Dramatically increased the maximum file size that could be successfully imported into Marketpath CMS. This makes it much easier to copy an entire site if desired.
Management
- Trash: better log messages when cascade trashing child objects
- Domains: Updated domain verification process to perform lookup directly on domains servers, dramatically decreasing the time it may take to verify DNS records after they are changed.
- Accounts & Agencies: A number of miscelaneous improvements to the account, agency, terms and conditions, and billing dialogs.
Templating
- Custom Fields: Select and radio custom fields now return false for is_valid if the value is not one of the defined options (edge case)
- Collections: Added is_valid to collections, which returns true if the collection contains at least one item.
- Documentation: Better (and more consistent) templating documentation
- Objects: Removed "date_created" from live objects - after confirming that it was never being used
And More
Yup - this isn't even the complete list! That would be way too long. But we've covered all of the important changes. Happy coding! Or editing, if that's your thing.
