Welcome to Percussion CM1
If you’re just beginning, take a look at our system requirements and make sure you’re ready. If you’re installing Percussion CM1 for the first time, read the Getting Started section and view our step-by step tutorials.
What’s New in Percussion CM1 3.0?
Percussion CM1 3.0 is ready and you can download it today! Release 3.0 includes the following enhancements:
LiveFirst
In 2.10, Percussion first introduced our patent-pending technology and process for transforming a website's information architecture (design) without the need to rebuild from scratch. LiveFirst is generally available now with the release of 3.0. LiveFirst provides tools that allow a customer to import their existing site, build templates from existing pages, and apply template changes that cascade across existing pages.
For more information on LiveFirst, see the LiveFirst Overview.
Importing content
Site Transformer provides users the ability to point to an existing website and to import all content into CM1. Pages are imported, CSS, javascript and background images are converted to assets, links are managed, pages are parsed to create page and template meta-data, and content is placed in an HTML widget on each page.
Managed links in HTML
During the process of importing pages using Site Transformer, each internal link that is found on the page will be converted to a managed link. In 2.13, this was limited to <a href> links; however in 3.0, this has been extended to all <img> tags. By opening the HTML widget on the page you can see that each link has an additional attribute of perc-managed=true. As a result, after import pages can be moved in the finder to reorganize your imported content without the fear of links being broken. This enhancement is not only for imported content. Links can be managed in any HTML widget simply by adding the perc-managed attribute.
Note: In 2.13, support for managed links in an HTML widget conflicted with customers who have developed server-side code. As a result, Percussion has made it such that if there are no managed links in a given HTML widgets, any server-side code is ignored. If a customer wishes to have managed links in an HTML widget with server-side code, the customer will need to surround their custom code with <PRESERVE> tags. The practical consequence of this is that a customer can upgrade to 3.0 without needing to touch any pages that have server-side code.
Creating Managed Links in an HTML widget
Site Import Report
To assist customers in identifying problems with their site after import, there is a Site Import report that administrative users can access from the Design Manager. The Site Import report provides summary statistics about the site that was imported, including the number of pages, style sheets, and assets. It also identifies the number of internal links that are now managed as a result of the import process. The second section of the Import Report abstracts all of the errors that were found during the import process from the import log. This includes errors such as missing files, images, or documents, or links that could not be created.
Creating templates from pages
The Design Manager provides the ability to review all pages in the site and to see which templates they are associated with. Pages that have been imported are shown in an "unassigned" column. Those pages can be selected from the "unassigned" column and converted into templates.
Starting in 3.0, the system auto-generates thumbnail images of every page that is in the system. By hovering over the icon to the right of the page name, you can view the thumbnail image, the page name, and the path where the file is located in CM1. This facilitates the ability to identify the page in order to select the appropriate page to serve as the template model.
Breaking pages down
The Design Inspector provides the ability to examine an HTML widget and determine if it can be broken down into regions based on the <div> structure of the HTML. Starting with the outer-most container, the user can break down the pages into rows and columns in order to isolate the sections of the page that will be added to the template and the sections of the page that will be made editable to content contributors.
How to Use the Design Inspection Tool
Matching pages to templates
In 3.0, users have the ability to drag unassigned pages that have been imported by Site Transformer to specific templates, updating their design as appropriate. When an Unassigned page is assigned to a template, the system parses the content in the page and inserts it in the appropriate regions and widgets. For each empty HTML or Rich Text widget on the template, the system uses a series of rules to attempt to find the correct content on the unassigned page to insert into the widget.
- If the template has a named widget, it looks for a named widget on the page
- It looks for a <div> with the same ID as the name of the region on the template
- It looks for a <div> with a class that matches the name of the region on the template
These same rules are also applied when the user changes the template that a given page is assigned to. It will attempt to fit the content of the page into the corresponding regions on the template. This greatly reduces the number of steps to change a site design, assuming the new templates will have matching div IDs or class names.
Bulk Approval
The Pages by Status gadget on the Dashboard has been enhanced in order to better facilitate bulk approval. Previously, users would configure the gadget properties to search for pages. With 3.0, a new search capability has been added to allow users to search by site, template, workflow, workflow step or last modified by. Once the search has been performed, the user can select multiple rows and approve with a single click. If the user cannot approve the pages for some reason, such as the item being open or having an asset the user does not have permission to approve, the user will be informed that they do not have permission to approve the page with an explanation as to why. The user can approve a maximum of 25 pages at a time, as that is the greatest number of rows that can be displayed on the gadget at a time. The user can paginate in order to approve additional batches of pages.
Form Widget - Email Support
The form widget has been enhanced to support emailing one or multiple users upon completion of the form. When configuring a form, the can indicate whether or not the submission of the form will trigger an email. The user can enter one or multiple email addresses where the form will be sent. The user can also configure the subject of the email. The email is triggered upon submission of the form and contains all of the information gathered in the form using the format <field name>: <field content>.
Customer Incidents
The following customer incidents were addressed in 3.0:
TAR 7084
Page auto-list was not sorting correctly by title when using dynamic content. This issue has been resolved.
TAR 7117
Email notifications were not working for Percussion shipped workflow states. This was due to an underlying bug where emails were being triggered upon completion of a workflow step instead of upon assignment to a workflow step. This has been resolved so that email notifications are properly triggered upon transitioning to a workflow states.
TAR 7157
The Bulk Upload gadget and the Blog gadget were not respecting the workflow permissions, and as a result users could use the Bulk Upload gadget to upload into folders that were meant to be restricted or create a blog in a section that was meant to be restricted. This has been resolved to properly enforce the workflow restrictions.
TAR 7160
Blog widget pagination was not working properly due to a change in the perc_common_ui.js file in 2.13. This has been resolved.
TAR 7341
Scheduled publishing was no longer properly triggering in 2.13. This has been resolved.
TAR 7423
When publishing a page auto-list, percussion was inserted an empty "read more" tag (<a>), which was adversely affecting the customer's design. This has been resolved.