Terminalfour: 8.3.5

General

CDN/PXL

With this latest release, we have created a brand new CDN/PXL feature. This new functionality allows you to serve your media with a Content Delivery Network (CDN) seamlessly through Terminalfour. The PXL functionality allows for dynamic manipulation of images through filters changing the size, file format, and look of images as they are served to your site visitor.

A CDN is a system of distributed servers that deliver media, based on the geographic locations of the visitor, the origin of the webpage and the content delivery server. This service speeds up the delivery of media for your websites. Once you are set up on CDN/PXL you can now place cdn=true onto your media tag and it will publish that image out to your Terminalfour CDN as part of normal site publishes. 

A PXL Filter allows you to make image manipulations on the fly so you don't have to have multiple copies of the same image. For example, one filter might grayscale your image, another resizes it or adjusts its quality level to reduce file size. We have created a way to store and manage your PXL filters in Terminalfour to make sure you can maintain control of the filters across your application. Of course, we've built those filters into our tag builder so they are easy to find and apply.

CDN/PXL is an AWS-based feature. Your Terminalfour instance needs to be hosted to use CDN/PXL. Contact your account manager if you are interested in getting CDN/PXL or moving to AWS hosting.

Form Builder

Dependencies improvements - RDSM-26829

While reviewing Form dependencies for improvements some clients mentioned that the OR functionality on those dependencies wasn't working as expected so you were stuck with just AND logic. We felt that the user interface could make working with dependencies clearer.

We've tweaked the interface so now you can select 'any' or 'all' of the conditions to allow a dependency to spring into action. This should make dependencies more useful in your forms. As we were working on form dependencies we noticed an issue where newly created fields didn't work correctly with dependencies unless the form was saved first. That's also fixed up.

Media

Auto-publish media categories - RDSM-21889

Did you know you can auto-publish media from Terminalfour? That means that all Media Items will publish each time you run a publish - regardless of whether referenced in a T4 tag or not. While you probably wouldn't want to do this everywhere (as your publish time would increase) it can be useful if you need to ensure availability e.g. a certain folder of documents is always available on your site. 

You can now use auto-publish of Media Items on a per Category basis. With work on this release, we've ironed out the quirks in this functionality.

Performance

We're actively trying to pick up some performance improvements with every release to improve the overall user experience. Last release we tackled the approval page and this release we took up the performance of lists and the purging of mirrored sections.

We're seeing huge improvements with Lists in cases where there are the Lists have Sublists/nested Lists(at least 3x speed increase). How your Lists are configured will affect the level of improvement you see, but this will help those seeing slowdowns where Lists are called in Formbuilder.

Performance metrics were taken on purging Mirrored Sections based on a Section with 1000 Subsections. We've seen purge times decrease from over 8 minutes to under 30 seconds across databases. Again, some great performance gains made this release which hopefully translates to giving you back some of your valuable time.

Usability tweaks

Workflow emails - RDSM-31879

As part of our ongoing usability drive, we've made a small adjustment to our Workflow emails to improve that flow. The email you receive will now contain a link that should make it easier to find and approve the content from the Workflow.

On top of that, we've added the option to preview that content straight from the approval page. Hopefully, these small tweaks will improve usability in the area.

Download option when editing media - RDSM-23205

This is another small usability adjustment that clients have mentioned would make their lives easier, and we're happy to do so! There's now a download button when editing a Media Item. Previously you could only download from the listing.

Specific bugs of interest

Compare selected history back button - RDSM-24691

This one has been on our list for a while now. Delighted to say that the back button on the compare selected history screen is back in action, phew!

Duplicating content and user levels on existing content - RDSM-27195

This one has been mentioned to us a lot recently, even though it seemed a little quirky it is affecting people so we wanted to get it cleared up. Before this fix went in users couldn't duplicate content into a Section if there was a Content Item present in that Section that used a Content Type with a minimum user level set above that of their user. That duplication should work fine now

Pagination Navigation Objects and content after first page - RDSM-24044

We had a discrepancy between preview and publish in Navigation Objects with pagination e.g. Keyword Search, Publish to One File and the Pagination Navigation Object.

On publish, page one of the pagination would display the surrounding general content on the page while page two would only display the content that is being paginated. In Preview the surrounding content would be displayed on both pages. We've lined it all up again so that in both preview and publish the content is displayed on subsequent pages in the pagination. Please note this update could change how your published site will look on paginated pages.