Last week at Enonic - 2018, week 30

Last Week

This summer we’ve seen the release of Enonic XP 6.15. This major event overshadows most other things that happened this summer at Enonic, so we’ll focus on this release in this issue.

6.15

6.15 was planned to release before the summer, but due to some major features (that’s been under development for many versions) we needed additional time to thoroughly test this release. The two big fundamental changes are the new HTML editor, and replicated sessions (improves how XP works in a cluster). The new HTML editor has many new improvements, to mention a few you can now easier drag images around, you can now drag-and-drop images into the editor to upload them, you can double click images and links to edit them, and many other small usability improvements.

7.0!

6.15 is the end of version 6, and we are now working on our first breaking change - 7.0 - in a very long time (3 years). We’ve gathered multiple feature requests (internal and external) over the course of these years that demand changes in the inner workings of XP. Doing these changes will cause the backward compatibility to be broken, requiring manual work to upgrade (hence being called “breaking change”), so we’ve collected these together and are planning them all for 7.0 to make the jump as concentrated and small as possible. It’s not as scary as it sounds, nothing is lost, but your in-house developers needs to do some adjustments to their code since apps built for 6 won’t work in 7 out-of-the-box.

Some of the things we’re focusing first on with 7.0 is to finally do proper references to other contents inside the HTML editor, investigating an upgrade to the latest Java, support for newer JavaScript, decouple all apps and libs from core, and more. All these changes mean we need to change deep down how these fields are stored, and that is a breaking change. We’ll also lay the ground work for built-in support for translations of contents, and many other features to come in the life of 7.x.

We can assure you that the jump to 7.0 will not be as scary as it might sound, and we’ll keep the changes to a necessary minimum, while composing detailed guides for how to upgrade your apps (as a developer). Those that remember the jump from 5.x to 6.0 will have an idea. The aim is to release 7.0 during the autumn, and from there begin adding features for each new version from there on. For the end-user, 7.0 will not bring many changes in the UI as we’re focusing on the internal architecture for this release, but hopefully we’ll land support for widgets in edit mode.


Enonic Releases

We hope that you have had time to try 6.15! Highlights for this version are found in our docs, but let me tease you with a few bullets:

  • Improved workflow in Content Studio
  • New HTML editor (CKEditor)
  • Updates to steps in Content Editor (improved UI)
  • Media Selector input type
  • Improved duplicate dialogue
  • Fully replicated sessions
  • x-data now support content type filtering
  • New way of doing x-data mixins
  • Brand new home screen background image!

And many more! Take a full look at the features in the docs, and try the new version.

If you for some reason would like to switch back to the old editor (TinyMCE), create a file called com.enonic.xp.app.contentstudio.cfg in $XP_HOME/config/ and type htmlarea=tinymce in it and save. This change is detected automatically by XP and you only need to reload existing admin-pages to see the old editor.

As always, we appreciate feature requests and bug reports here in the forum and/or on our Github page for XP.


Enonic Market

Enonic Market had these updates last week:

No relevant updates.


Further reading

Here’s some interesting articles that surfaced last week, related to Web Development in general.

Send me a private message if you happen to stumble over something interesting this week.


Events

The following events are planned so far:

No current events.


Training

We provide professional training for developers, editors, and marketers. These training events are coming up, but more are available! Need custom training, or training on other dates, or other locations? Contact us!

Don’t forget to certify yourself as an XP developer!


That’s it for now. Stay in touch with us here in our forums and on our open Slack channels.

See you next week!