Percussion CMS Version 3.1 Release Notes

Please note that for customers upgrading to 3.1 from a version earlier than 3.0, the system must re-index all content in order to support enhancements made in Version 3.0. This can result in the system being slower than usual for a period of time following the upgrade. This is a one-time tax upon first upgrading and not typical of system performance. Users can work in the system during this time, but should anticipate somewhat slower application response time. The length of time varies upon the system hardware, database size, and database type. If slowness persists beyond a couple of hours, please contact support.

Enhancements

Release 3.1 includes the following enhancements:

User Interface Refresh

Several enhancements were made to the user experience designed to increase performance and to reclaim vertical real estate on the page.  

1. The color palette of the application has been updated to include more white space and brighter colors.
2. The Finder was redesigned to recapture vertical real estate by combining the navigation bar with the Action buttons. Both are now available when the finder is collapsed.
3. The performance of the Finder was improved to remove lag time in resizing and interacting with the Finder.
4. The search bar and the navigation bar were combined into a single control. The user can simply type in keywords and hit Enter to search or can type in a path (i.e. /sites/www.foo.com/folder) to navigate to that location in the Finder.
5. The user can manually set the vertical height of the finder and that height will persist as the user navigates between pages of the application and across sessions.  
6. The navigation in the top right of the application has been redesigned and now includes a link to the Percussion Community.  

My Pages

Content contributors can "bookmark" pages in the application and rapidly access them.  The Finder includes a link to My Pages which is a list of all pages I have bookmarked across all sites in the application.  For example, if I am a Product Marketing Manager that is responsible for the Product description pages on my site, I can bookmark each of those pages. When I log into Percussion, in the Finder, I can click on the My Pages link to see the list of pages I have bookmarked. This avoids needing to navigate through the file structure in the Finder to find my pages.  

Linkback

Linkback provides users the ability to create a Percussion bookmarklet in their bookmark bar/folders. When viewing the live website, the user can click on the bookmarklet and it will take the user directly into that page in the CMS. If the user is not logged in, the user will first be prompted to login upon clicking the bookmarklet.  If the user clicks the bookmarklet when looking at a site not managed by Percussion, the system will inform the user that the page is not managed by Percussion.  

When combined with My Pages, this provides a tremendous convenience for casual content contributors. Those contributors can go to the page in the the live website they want to edit, click the Linkback link to navigate into Percussion, and from there bookmark the page for future reference.

Designer Role

Version 3.1 introduces a new out-of-the-box role in the application -- the Designer Role. The Designer role will have the ability to access Design Manager, Navigation and Publishing, but not have access to Workflow, Roles & Users. This role can be valuable for any organization that separates the responsibility for system administration from "design administration", for example, if you are using a third party contractor to implement a design.

By default, the Designer role will be added to every workflow step with the same read-only permission as the Admin role. The Designer role cannot be renamed or deleted.

Below are additional restrictions of the Designer role:

• As a Designer, I cannot override the checkout of another user
• As a Designer, I cannot create, delete or copy a site
• As a Designer, I cannot modify folder permissions unless granted explicit permission to do so
• As a Designer, I cannot access Dashboard gadgets reserved for Admin use
  • Google Setup Gadget
  • Membership Gadget
  • Activation feature of License Gadget

LiveFirst Performance improvements

The import feature of LiveFirst has been optimized to greatly reduce the time import a site. Internal testing has shown a 4x improvement in import times.  One enhancement to the import process has been to improve how we identify unique pages to be imported. Previously, links containing an anchor tag were being treated as separate pages to be imported, resulting in duplicate pages being imported. This behavior has been modified to recognize the page URL before the anchor tag to determine if the page is unique and needs to be imported.  

Move Page API

To address challenges with importing sites with a large number of files at the root of the site, we have created a Move Page API. Customers will be able to programatically move pages to sub-folders via the API to avoid the tediousness of needing to move these manually through the Finder. 

Rich Text Editor update

The Rich Text Editor (RTE) used in Percussion (TinyMCE) has been updated. This includes the following changes. 

1. The interface is now better organized and less cluttered making it more intuitive to use.
2. A "fullscreen" option is available for the RTE. This will expand the RTE interface to take up the full width of the dialog box. As the dialog box is resized, the RTE will resize automatically.
3. Customers can now create their own custom styles rather than having to use the ones provided by Percussion.  Customers can remove the styles they do not want and add their own. 
4. The Add Link and Add Image dialogs have been redesigned. Navigating to an image or page is done via a file tree interface in lieu of the double-click interaction that occurred previously. In addition, the last tree location is remembered in the application. For example, if I need to insert four images on a page, if I navigate to /assets/site/images/folder/sub-folder to select my first image, when I go to select the next image, the dialog will already be open to /assets/site/images/folder/sub-folder. This is true for links as well. 

Customer Incidents

The following customer incidents were addressed in 3.1:

TAR7159

The following widgets were not rendering correctly in IE7: Category List Widget, Archive List Widget, Tag Widget and Results Widget. This has been addressed.  

TAR7342

Choosing a time of 1200 on a calendar widget was displaying as midnight instead of as noon. This has been resolved. 

TAR7449

The search indexer was not removing documents that caused errors in the indexing process. The corrected behavior is that error conditions are now logged and the documents are removed from the indexing queue. 

TAR7499

Large sites with many duplicate links due to hashtags were causing performance issues with the LiveFirst import process. This has been optimized to greatly speed import times. 

TAR7542

If the default workflow in the system was either renamed or removed, custom roles could not be added to the system. This has been addressed to allow renaming or removing the default workflow. 

TAR7564

If a user enters a custom doctype on a template and does not include the xmlns:dcterms="http://purl.org/dc/terms/" attribute, publishing pages using the template was returning a 500 server error. The server will no longer return a 500 error; however, this attribute is required on template for the pages to be included in page auto-lists. 

TAR7621

If an LDAP user's sAMAccountName only contained numbers, the user could not be imported into Percussion. This has been resolved. 

TAR7655

Calendar and date-picker fields on the meta-data editor were not selectable. Expanding these fields would require the user to scroll and when the user went to scroll the fields would collapse. This has been resolved. 

TAR7656

When users add a root class or classes to the blog-post widget within the style tab, the classes are now being applied.  

Percussion Community issues

The following issues were raised on the Percussion Community and have been addressed in 3.1

• The form widget was not validating input on text boxes. Input is now validated and users cannot enter for than 256 characters for a given field.  
• Global Variables were not accepted special characters such as commas and dollar signs. This has been resolved so that these characters can be entered on the dashboard. 
• When importing pages using LiveFirst, if a page that had not been assigned to a template was deleted from the finder, it was causing issues with the Unassigned column list on the Design Manager. This has been resolved.