Terminalfour: 8.4.0

General

We're excited to announce the latest release of Terminalfour which improves the content editing experience, performance of the platform, enhances the capabilities of Handlebars, and improves the accessibility of the platform for all users.

Jump to:

• Improved Content Editing Experience
• Performance
• Handlebars
• Accessibility
• Other Improvements

Improved Content Editing Experience

Conditional Elements

RDSM-37845

This long awaited feature allows you to hide elements from your content editors and only display them when they need to be seen.

We now show you a live preview of how your content type will be presented to content editors.

Alongside that, you can create rules that determine when elements should be shown based on things like:

1. The values of other elements in the content item
2. The user type of the user editing the content item
3. The group that the user editing the content item is in

You can check out our full documentation on conditional elements to learn everything it can do.

Inline element descriptions

RDSM-37883

Content editors can now see the element description inline when editing content. Previously this information was hidden behind a tooltip which made it less discoverable and more complicated than it should have been to provide additional context about how an element should be filled out.

Performance

8.4.0 Improves the performance of the platform in a number of significant areas

Media Library

RDSM-38244

Users were reporting that the Media library was much slower than it should have been for non-admin users. The more groups the user is in the worse the performance would be.

In 8.4.0 we've significantly improved the performance of the Media Library in these scenarios. Our testing has shown a 15x - 20x reduction in the time required to load a page in the Media library for these users.

Branch Duplication

RDSM-38271

8.3.20 saw branch duplication significantly overhauled and we've made even more improvements in 8.4.0. It's now an incredible 10× faster to Duplicate a large branch or site in v8.4.0 compared to 8.3.20. That's a 200× improvement between 8.3.19 and 8.4.0 in Branch Duplication. What used to take hours, now takes minutes or seconds.

The changes made in 8.4.0 improve performance across all database types.

Section Filtering

RDSM-37875 and RDSM-38412 

Filtering sections to find the one you want to edit has been significantly improved in 8.4.0 too. The time it takes for the filter to become active is faster now than in previous versions and we've also reduced the amount of load put on your CPU and RAM when rendering and filtering on a large site structure. This makes for a much better filtering experience, especially on very large structures.

These changes have also allowed us to remove the "3 character" minimum requirement for filtering, so now you can find your sections regardless of how short their names are.

Handlebars

Handlebars, a new way of templating in Terminalfour was introduced in 8.3.19. Your feedback has been fantastic. We've taken everything you've shared on board and we're delighted to introduce a number of improvements to handlebars in this release.

Improvements in working with lists

RDSM-38107 - We've now made it possible to output the selected List item's name with the publish Helper.

RDSM-38108

If you need slightly more flexibility we've created two new helpers to give you some more control.

The selectedNames Helper will output the selected list items' name and let you control the separator between each selected item.

The selectedValues Helper does the same, but outputs the values rather than the names.

RDSM-37636 - You can now output a list without it needing to be an element in your Content Type using the listById Helper

RDSM-38300 - If you need to output a list's name, that's now available as a variable within the list and selected Helper

Enabling more flexible layouts

We've introduced some new Helpers to give you more control over how your layouts work in different scenarios.

RDSM-37691 - With the pageLayoutId Helper it's now possible to output different things depending on what Page Layout is being used.

RDSM-38214 - The sectionLevel Helper will allow you to change what's output depending on how deep in your site's hierarchy you are.

Improving multi language sites with Handlebars

RDSM-37827 - With the languageLink Helper you have full control over how your links to alternate language content display.

Other Handlebars bug fixes

We've fixed a number of other items to give a more stable and predictable experience working with Handlebars. Check out the table below for more details.

Accessibility

RDSM-38219 

Badge and Tag colours have been tweaked so that they aren't mixed up with "clickable" buttons. We've also ensured that they're easier to tell apart for colorblind users. We've also added some icons to Content Status labels to make it easier to see at a glance what status your content is in.

RDSM-38349

We've added clearer indicators on the Site Structure for sections that are Pending or Inactive. We no longer rely on just color to let you know what's been deleted. This indicator remains visible when using the section filtering tool to make it easy to tell the status at a glance.

RDSM-37877 - Keyboard navigation has been improved when creating content

Other improvements

• RDSM-36898 - We've fixed the positioning of the Rich Text Editor when editing content inline in Direct Edit
• RDSM-35006 - Improved Content Syncer so it doesn't leave behind empty sections after removing content