Making it easier to manage your content
We ask our content management systems to do a lot. Whether it’s delivering personalised content to any digital channel or powering enterprise-level searches, the modern CMS does it all. But while your CMS is a central part of delivering sophisticated digital experiences, it’s also for, well, managing content.
This release of Contensis brings important improvements to the core content management features of Contensis – including new recycle bin, entry archiving, and image constraint features.
We’re also introducing the first version of our own query language – ZenQL. As well as making it easier for anyone to quickly search through multiple layers of linked content, ZenQL lays the foundations for future content reporting and custom view features in Contensis.
Restore deleted entries for up to 90 days
We’ve all deleted something and then regretted it. It might be that you’ve accidentally got rid of the wrong piece of content, only to panic minutes later when you find the item you actually meant to delete. Or it could be that you’ve deleted a piece of content, only for your boss to ask for it a week later.
To help avoid both scenarios, when you delete an item in Contensis it will now be moved to a recycle bin.
If you want to restore an entry that you or somebody else has accidentally deleted, you can do so 90 days from the date it was sent to the recycle bin.
If you’re sure you won’t need an entry, you can also permanently delete it from the recycle bin before the 90 days are up.
Both restoring and permanently deleting entries from the recycle bin are permissioned actions. You’ll need to be a member of a role with the delete permission for the content type to be able to see, restore or permanently delete an entry from the recycle bin.
Archive unused entries
If you regularly run time sensitive or seasonal campaigns, you’ll probably have content that you reuse over and over again, publishing and unpublishing it as required. Maybe you have products, services or landing pages that could be reused at a later date. You don’t want to delete this content, but you also don’t want it to clutter your entry listing and make it hard to find the content you’re actually working on.
You can now hide this content by archiving it. Archiving an entry removes it from your entry listing screen and prevents it from being surfaced in any linked entries.
When you need to make an entry available for reuse, simply unarchive it and it will appear in the entry listing and in linked entry searches.
Like the recycle bin, archiving is a permissioned feature, which can be set up in roles.
Archiving entries is also useful if you have content that you need to record for administrative or legal reasons. Universities, for example, usually keep copies of the marketing material used to promote their courses each year in case a student claims they were mis-sold a course. Using the new archive feature, a university could simply archive all courses at the end of each academic year, preserving the content but preventing it from being used accidentally.
Set more flexible constraints on images
We’ve added the ability to restrict image fields in your content types by width, height or a combination of both. While you could previously specify a fixed set of image dimensions, these new options provide greater flexibility to help ensure that the images that you use in an entry meet the requirements of your content model and design system.
You may want to ensure you're using high quality product photography at specific dimensions to showcase your product in a slideshow gallery. Or you might set a minimum image width in a blog post, where you want an image to fill the full width of the page but the height of the image is less important.
You can now choose from the following constraints when setting image dimensions in a content type:
- Minimum allows you to set the minimum pixel value for the selected dimension. For example, a minimum width of 1024px. Images can be larger than the value, but must meet the minimum width.
- Maximum allows you to set the maximum pixel value for the selected dimension. For example, a maximum height of 1080px. You can select or upload a larger image and crop it in the image editor, but images can be no larger than the value when they are saved. Images greater than the maximum will be automatically scaled by the image field and this will be reflected in the image editor.
- Exact expects the image to meet an exact set of dimensions when cropped. For example, 1920px wide by 1080px high. This was previously the only way you could restrict image dimensions in Contensis.
The constraints will affect whether an image can be saved when uploading it inline, the images that are available in the asset gallery and how an image can be cropped by your authors.
And only images that meet your requirements will be shown in the image gallery, making it easier for authors to find an image that they can use.
Find exactly the right content with ZenQL
ZenQL is our new Zengenti query language and provides a flexible way to search for content and other resources in Contensis. It provides an efficient and fluent alternative to the existing JSON-based search available in our APIs.
ZenQL is available now in our Delivery, Management and Security APIs. It also lays the foundations for a new advanced search tool in the Contensis interface. This will let you report on content using many extra search facets that are currently unavailable in the entry listing interface and will be coming to Contensis in a future release.
Other updates and improvements
Other new features and significant changes in this release include:
- Site View has been re-engineered to use server-sent events, drastically improving the performance of large site structures with the added benefit of providing real-time updates between Contensis users managing the same tree.
- Content guidelines have been moved below the field label, and no longer require the field to be focused.
- We’ve added support to webhooks and server-sent events for node menu reordering, node moving, entry restoring as well as the archive and unarchive actions.
- We’ve added some new content menu actions in the entry listing and Site View to allow you to preview an entry as well as opening content in a new tab.
- It’s now possible to duplicate inline entries and components in a repeatable component field.
- A new setting has been added to a project allowing you to set Delivery API exclusions. This setting helps reduce or exclude sys object data such as the content owner from being available in Delivery API.
For a full list of changes, check out our what’s new page.
Upgrade now
If you are a cloud customer, you can raise a support request today to schedule an upgrade to Contensis 15.2.
If you are currently using an on-premise version of Contensis, and want to find out more about moving to our cloud platform, get in touch to arrange a call from your account manager.
