Terminalfour: 8.3.4

General

Token Authentication

Web services authentication just got a whole lot better with the addition of Token Authentication in version 8.3.4.

API Keys / Tokens are unique identifiers used to authenticate a Terminalfour user. The Tokens generated by Terminalfour are digitally signed using a 64-bit secret and an HMAC algorithm to ensure that their contents can be trusted.  These changes should make things easier for external projects that use the Terminalfour API.  Further information can be found here for how tokens work and how to generate tokens. For information on setting up and managing tokens see the User Management documentation. 

One exciting way this will be used is the Git Integration Tool that's currently in development. This will be a standalone application to integrate Terminalfour and your Git repositories (Bitbucket & Github for now) so you can configure how and when assets will be updated.

If you're interested in finding out more about this project or getting involved in user feedback sessions please contact innovation@terminalfour.com and if you're already making cool things with web services yourself then we'd love to hear about that too.

We also have a Web Services training course to help you to take full advantage of the changes. If you are interested in getting more information on content, pricing or signing up for this training please reach out to our Learning and Development manager Vincent O'Malley.

Reply-to on Formbuilder

RDSM-31528 

8.3.4 gives you much more control over the reply-to email on forms. The feedback we've received is that people have to spend way too much of their time redirecting emails from Form Bank because the reply-to is set to the application's default sender. We've set out to remedy this and save you time by providing reply-to email address options in Form Builder. The available options now are:

• Use an existing User/Group
• Get the email address from a field in the form
• Manually specify an email address
• If none of these are set then the default sender is used as it was previously

Content Syncer

RDSM-24769

There were two External Content Syncer issues related to "Data Sync Old status" and archiving scenarios that we're happy to resolve:

1. Content Items that no longer appeared in the results set for "Data Sync Old status" were not moved to the Archive Section
   • Content Items with an expiry date would move to the Archive Section but due to issues with expiry date mapping this did not behave as intended. It also wasn't intuitive for users. Now, regardless of expiry dates, when an Archive Section is specified in Content Syncer and the result no longer comes back in the results set when 'Data Sync Old status' is run, that Content Item will move to the Archive Section.
2. Those Content Items were made inactive in the process
   • when the Archive Section is being used to move Content Items to another Section, it is no longer made Inactive. For example, if a user moves older news items to an Archive Section they still want that news published on the site, just not where it was before. Now a Content Item's status is not changed to "Inactive" when as part of archiving in "Data Sync Old status".

Bonus: If you do still want the content to not show on the site when it gets moved to archive you can map the expiry date since we fixed that mapping flow up in 8.3.3.

Google Analytics and Direct edit

RDSM-25594

Did you know you can see your analytics information in Direct Edit? This lets you see how your pages are performing so you can optimize content and drive engagement.

Some clients were experiencing issues where the analytics code was not capturing the filename and then Terminalfour couldn't get a hold of the data it needed to display the charts. That should be all ironed out now to give you a much better experience.

Other updates in 8.3.4

Approval page performance improvements - RDSM-30817

With some investigation and tweaking, MSSQL saw a huge reduction in load timings from over a minute to 21 seconds and then to fractions of seconds on reload. Tests were on 1000-5000 pieces of content. This should be a massive help to our clients on large installs on MSSQL.

Ordering of Microsites - RDSM- 22532

We've been trying to improve our user experience and we've noticed there are little things like this that people are working around day to day but are causing frustration. Our fix makes sure those Microsite listings are consistently ordered now. We know that once that Microsite list gets big that becomes a headache to deal with, so we're glad to fix it up.

We're continuously trying to listen and help improve the Terminalfour experience so please reach out to our Product Manager Laura Murphy to give your feedback or to be involved in upcoming user testing sessions.