Friday, October 24, 2008
EditMe launched a new release this morning that includes some very powerful new features. This post will touch on what's changed at a very high level. Look for additional posts coming up about how some of these new features can best be put to use in your site.
There is a new Organize tab at the top of the editing screen that provides the ability to create page hierarchies and groupings. See the documentation for more on this. All new sites will have a dynamic tree navigation in the menu area. Look for a post next week with instructions for upgrading existing sites to take advantage of this feature.
There is also a new Properties tab housing three new fields:
See Page Properties for a description of each field. These are editable by anyone who can edit the page. The old Properties tab, which contains settings only available to Administrators, has been renamed to Advanced.
Finally, the link drop down in the editor's Insert Link dialog has been updated to show more page links (max 250 instead of 100) and to truncate long page titles to make this drop down easier to use.
The Diff screen, which compares different versions of a page to show what has changed, has been enhanced to work with non-HTML content. You can now use the Diff screen to compare versions of CSS, JavaScript and Layout pages in addition to normal HTML pages.
The Diff screen also will show changes made to a page's Child Pages list (using the new Organize tab) between edits.
A number of "include scripts" have been made available. These are prepackaged scripts built with EditMe's API that can be easily embedded into any EditMe page with an [[include:]] tag. These scripts take advantage of the new Organize tab features, as well as the new Page Date field. Look for a post in the next week or so that shows how you can create a blog in EditMe by simply combining a few of these include scripts. See Include Scripts for full details.
Don't be put off if these seem a little confusing. These include scripts are the foundation for upcoming Skins and Modules to provide powerful blogging and navigation features.
The Templates system screen has been merged with the Special Pages administration screen. This same tool to manage non-standard pages is now available to both Administrator and non-Adminsitrator users. Only pages a user has Edit access to will be listed on this screen.
Some minor changes have been made to all of the skins to support these new features. If you are using one of the standard skins and haven't modified your site's Layout or Style Sheet, you are encouraged to re-apply your current skin to get these changes. If you have customized your skin, look for an upcoming post that describes these changes so you can make the updates manually and avoid having to redo your changes.
Depending on which skin you use (Acton and Newton), you will have to re-add the top navigation links. Where previously these were set using custom scripts that were specific to the Skin, the link management has been replaced with the new Organize feature. You'll want to make a note of the links you have there and be ready to add them again when re-applying.
An initial page version is now created from the default, or specified, template when visiting the editing screen for a new page. This means you'll see a page version created if you start to create a page using the editor and cancel before saving for the first time. This initial version is saved as a minor edit with a change description indicating the template used.
The following bugs and usability issues have been addressed in this release:
The following enhancements have been made to EditMe's development platform as part of this release:
