Good morning and welcome to the Contensis product update. My name is Richard Saunders I'm the Senior Product and Design Manager here at Zengenti and I help set the direction and roadmap of Contensis. I want to start today talking about long form content. We've all got different types of long form content on our sites, whether they be blog posts, documentation, case studies.

News articles or even things like legal policies .And all of this different type of content takes time to create and currently in Contensis, we use a composer editor to break up the different types of content blocks that exist within a long form piece of content like this. So you might need to insert images or quotes or tables and textual content.

And today we want to introduce Canvas. Canvas is a modern, rich text editor, specifically for creating long form content. Single use content, like I've already mentioned, things like content pages or news articles or research or press releases. It's modern and new because we're storing this content as JSON, so that content can be available everywhere.

No longer are we storing that content directly as HTML or as Markdown, but in an industry standard format of JSON that can be transferred anywhere and everywhere. We started building Canvas with the core focus on getting people into Contensis to write that content in the first place. And we know people create that content in all sorts of different places.

So, right at the beginning, we wanted to ensure that we could paste from all the common places, whether that was Google Docs, directly from HTML or Markdown, or services like Notion and Confluence. And we wanted to make formatting effortless. The ability to create content fast on the move, whether you use an inline toolbar or want to use something like Markdown.

And keeping in to the sort of focus of keeping you in the flow, we wanted you to be able to arrange, order, and format, and convert between different types of content straight from your keyboard. As well as the input, we wanted to control how flexible the configuration of Canvas is. We want to allow you to control what types of content and types of formatting that can be applied.

And we do this by supporting different types of editor within the canvas. And they can be a variety of things, including headings, paragraphs code snippets, panels or callouts, tables, images and even components. You can control it in the content type builder by adding a canvas field to your content type.

And then you can choose the different types of field and decorators that we support. Those decorators include things like bold, italics, underline, keyboard highlighting, text highlighting, as well as things like variables and of course anchors and links. And once you've inserted those types, you can control to what level those can be added.

So for example, with links, you can decide whether you want to support anchor links, external URLs, entries, or from a node picker. Loads of flexibility in the configuration. Writing long form content often wants to be in a distraction free interface. So rather than making the canvas as a field in amongst your existing fields, we wanted to support the ability to create a canvas in a full page tab in the Entry Editor.

So if a canvas is inserted on its own without any other fields you'll get a full blown canvas experience.

But, we also recognize that you may want to use Canvas for smaller blocks of content. So things like maybe a biography of a user. And you could limit this field to simply allow links and plain text. But you might also allow bold and italic support within that text area. As I mentioned, we've got rich editors including code blocks and others.

So here's an example of a code block. Which actually utilizes a full Monaco editor in the background so you get full Monaco editor support, line numbers, multi select and code formatting. And we also support components. So we wanted to ensure that you could use any existing components in your content model within the canvas itself.

That way if you've created like an email newsletter sign up, or a curated product slider that already exists in other areas of your site, you could insert one of those in the middle of a blog post if you needed to. So here we've got a curated product slider of which can be edited in the component fly out editor, giving you control of rich, reusable content within long form content.

And we also support a rich type of set of links, so you can directly link to entries if you want to roll your own and sort of navigation. You can use site view nodes to directly link to site view URLs, and we also support anchors, whether that's directly anchoring to a header or to a particular block of text or text selection.

As I mentioned for developers, this code is stored as JSON, allowing you to use it everywhere. And that JSON is based on a canvas schema that we've come up with that defines the markup defines the content, and shows how it's represented. So let's look at an abstraction of what that canvas schema looks like.

So here in the white text we've got Important make sure you wear safety goggles. The double stars showing that it's in bold in markdown if it had been written in this way. When it's inserted into the canvas in the background, we convert that paragraph into a type of paragraph and then the values are made up of two text fragments.

The first text fragment represents the word important as you can see here, it's been given the strong decorator. And then the second fragment just has the text itself. So we're separating the styling we're not, we're not saying this is a bold tag or a strong tag. We're saying, That the emphasis is strong and you could style that on your front end site maybe with a bold tag or a strong tag or a div with a class of strong. However, you might want to control that. All content that's created in the canvas and through the management api goes through validation so we can strip out any content that's not expected so if you're not allowing bold We'll remove those bold tags maybe around HTML that you're importing and ensuring that the canvas represents the content that you want in your system. And to make it easier to get that content out of Contensis, we're going to provide a bunch of helper functions to render that canvas JSON as HTML in your project.

There will be a default rendering of clean semantic HTML, so using correct HTML elements to represent that content, but also giving you the ability to customize that render. So you might want to add personalized styling, or adding additional classes, or adding additional wrappers around particular content in those components that you're going to render in your front end site.

So let's take a look at Canvas in a demo.

So let's just switch over to my browser. So here I've got a content type that represents a content page and currently if we look at the body, we've got this body content in a composer with all the different fields that are defined. Well, I've got a canvas tab now and I've got a field called canvas inside that canvas tab and because the canvas field is on its own without anything, we're going to get a full blown editor experience.

If we go and look at the configuration, we can configure the canvas, all its types and decorators here, and you can see we've got the kitchen sink. We've enabled everything but you've got control of what you want to do, and we've got these presets of things like long form, so it takes out things like code and panels that you might not want, or even down to kind of simple, just headings and lists and dividers.

Or you can completely customize it as you see fit. So you might want panels, you might want a variable, you might want a code, inline code snippet. I'm going to keep it with a kitchen sink, and show you what this looks like. So if I open up a content page, let's go to entries, and let's take a look at content pages, and let's go to a privacy policy.

We've all got this long privacy policy on our sites so if we look at the body, this is the existing approach using a composer made up of multiple blocks of Text that you have to populate. Well in the canvas now that content can look like this And it's much easier to manage this content and to control this content.

If we want to insert headings, we can just do forward slash heading and put a heading one like that. We got full text selection support. So let's, let's get rid of that. If we want to convert this heading here we could say, right? I want this to be a heading three. Now it's currently heading two or I could do that with the inline toolbar as well and change that back to a heading two. So that's a piece of basic long form content.

Let's take a look at maybe a blog post or something similar. And let's take a look at this plant one again. Here is the old post body. And if I wanted to insert an image in this composer in between, maybe before this heading, I'd have to cut this text. So I'd have to select this text like this, cut it, and then I'd have to add another field in the composer called markup.

I'd have to paste that text in, and then I could insert an image between these. And then I could select an image from the gallery and insert. Well, to make this a lot more easy, easier, if we go to the article now, this is the content just copied over into the canvas. And now if I wanted to insert that image, I can just press enter, forward slash image, press enter and select the image from my image gallery.

And now we've got the image inserted. We can even replace it if we wanted to for another one, or I can create a minor crop to this. So if I just want to bring that down and bring the sofa more into view like this it's got full crop support, support things like captions and alt text a modern living room with houseplants.

And I could set my alt text there as well. So you can see that inline. We've also got things like callouts or panels, you might refer them to. So this is allowing us to create callout blocks within our text. So this is.

Previously I mentioned everything supports keyboard behavior so we can go to panel type and I just want to put this as a note, or alternatively I could use the dropdown here. So there's lots of different ways of editing this text and this, all these components support keyboard support.

So that's a very quick glimpse of the canvas editor. We're really excited how it's going to make writing long form content much, much easier and in a more collaborative way. So let's head back over to keynote. And let's just talk about composers. So I mentioned that the composer interface was difficult for creating long form content.

So does that mean they're going to disappear? Well, some of them will disappear and 40 percent of composers that we looked at across our cloud platform could become canvas fields. They were largely made up of HTML and images. And the other 60% we're effectively content assemblies. So, let's have a look at content assemblies.

Rachel Lovinger, Content Strategy Director at Razorfish says, The assembly model is a way content creators will put individual content items together to make webpages, campaigns, documents, or other content products. So, we see this as landing pages and as blocks of content that aren't long form, but are usually landing page representations or marketing pages.

So here we've got a composer for a composable landing page. And each of those components within the landing page represents maybe a video block. So it's bringing together existing content from from existing entries, but being shaped into design system components that are rendered on the front end.

Resulting in pages like this completely composable in Contensis. We've got these bento blocks, video blocks. And these logo blocks, it's bringing together contents into a single layout, but where that content is updated in separate entries, this page would be updated together. It's been assembled together with existing content.

Okay, the next feature that I want to touch on is the dashboard. If you were in the previous 15.5 product update, we were hoping to release the dashboard shortly after the 15.5 release went out. Unfortunately, due to some testing scenarios and The work that we do to upgrade our packages when we start a new release, we became too divergent to release the dashboard in 15. 5. So the dashboard is coming in Contensis 16, and it's made up of a comment activity widget on the left hand side. So you can understand when you've been mentioned in a comment and see replies to conversations that you've been part of. And there's an entry widget, giving you the ability to create customized views and give you quick oversight of your content.

I'll shortly touch on those features. We're also bringing email notifications, finally, so you'll have things like emails that are awaiting approval, content that has been approved and published, published by a schedule, content that may have been declined and understanding why. You'll get notifications when you're mentioned in a comment or when a discussion has resolved.

You'll also be able to control whether you opt in or out of these email notifications within your user profile. So as you can see here, there's a new email notification section that you can turn those email notifications on and off. And also you'll see just above it we've got the ability to say whether you see the new dashboard view and or the entries listing as it currently stands.

So let's go and take a look at those features so we'll head back over. to my dashboard. So here I'm logged in as a user and that's been involved in some conversations. So this is the dashboard and the conversations that are that exist. And if I look at one of these comments, the entry will open and we'll see the comments list here on the right hand side.

Any responses to this will then be updated on the dashboard as well as comments on the dashboard. We've also got things like these entry views. Now at the moment there's no views set up here. But I could add existing views that I've created through the entries listing screen to here. So I might want to have a view of all the plants, maybe all pots or even products that are awaiting approval.

So when I look at this listing now, I've got a bunch of views that I can switch between easily. So I got one item waiting for review, I can quickly edit my pots or my plants directly from the dashboard. We've also brought in the new entry from here, or you can open it up. This current view in the entry listing as well directly from the dashboard.

So if you want to carry out some more search filtering or change the layout of your current view, you can do that. From this screen. So that's the dashboard. If we head over into your profile settings, you'll see here and my default view is being set to the dashboard. Or I could choose entries and this is where I can control email notifications in my account so I can turn those on and off of whether I receive them or not.

When you first come into Contensis 16, you'll be presented with a project dashboard and onboarding modal explaining the new features so your users will get a bit of an insight. So we're getting introducing the canvas, the home page, a little bit about the widgets and the comment activity. Email notifications, and then the opportunity to save their preferred homepage preference.

So yeah, I want to use the new homepage or no thanks, carry on using the entry screen of which they can change at any point from their user profile. So that's a quick overview of the dashboard setting your email preferences for content. So let's. Go back over to Keynote and see what else is coming in Contensis 16.

So in the last couple of releases, we've introduced things like redirects and proxies within the Contensis interface. And we're now going to bring domain management support within Contensis as well, controlled through roles and permissions. So you'll get oversight of your domains that you've got added to your current project.

And the ability to add additional domains and see what their DNS and SSL status is. We're also bringing support for SSL certificate management as well, so you'll be able to upload replacement certificates. And in time, we'll bring email notifications for domains and SSL certificates as well for when they're coming up to their expiry date.

So you don't end up in a situation where your certificates have expired. We've also made some nice improvements around workflow. So the ability to approve your own content. We've got lots of authors who have also got approval rights and currently they have to submit an entry for approval. Go back to the entries listing screen and then select approve next time they open up the entry.

So now if you're an approver, you'll be able to approve your own content from the entry editor. So you'll be able to click, directly, approve and publish. Or if you do want to send it for approval for another, user to review it you can still send for approval with that We're also supporting an approval requests now. So within the entry editor when you send an item for approval You'll be able to select an approver from the list whether that was the last approver anyone in a particular role or a set of users that you want to review your content.

So those are gonna be some nice enhancements to approval workflows and workflows in general. We continue to focus on bringing accessibility updates to the product. We now enforce alt text when you add an image field to a content type. You can still switch this off, but we just feel it's a good default to have, so that's been updated.

Table captions are automatically enabled in Canvas, and we plan to bring this to rich text fields as well, ensuring that all tables have captions is a WCAG requirement. In the 15.5 update, I mentioned that we've made improvements to the chip component, and I've just reiterated that here now. It's a much easier keyboard navigation with chips, being able to easily remove them and being read clearly by screen readers.

And we've done the same approach for Dragon Simply Speaking users. So there's improved label reading for radios, checkboxes and toggles these weren't previously being read correctly. We've also introduced Contensis Accessibility Backlog. So this is available from our accessibility statement page on contensis.com and it highlights all the main kind of blockers to using Contensis with some of these accessible features. So one of those being in the image editor, you can't currently crop just with the keyboard alone. So we're just highlighting these areas. It's an easier way for us to kind of manage and display these issues and work on them as well.

So there's lots of features coming out in Contensis 16, but what's coming up ahead? Well, we've got lots of future updates coming. Forms are going to come to the new UI. You're going to be able to create and manage form responses within Contensis, and we plan to bring this out probably first quarter of 2024.

We've also been looking at ways of supporting multiple crops of the same image within the entry editor. We know that lots of entries have multiple image fields where you upload the same image multiple times in order to create different crops of it. So now you'll be able to define project level image dimensions, which then can be assigned to your content types where necessary.

This means you can have a single image field called team photo. And be able to edit multiple crops in the image editor. So switching between the default thumb, square and hero images, you'll be able to adjust the crop and the appropriate alt text for each of those images. So we're excited about that feature.

Assets. We've been wanting to address assets for some time now. We've got assets largely working in the Contensis interface with things like asset usage and understand. which entries they're attached to. But we've got some more work to do around the infrastructure of storing those assets because they're currently stored in classic.

So you can look forward to that in 2024. And we've also been working on right to left support. We recognize that there are users and content authors that need to translate content into Arabic and Urdu and in some cases, Hebrew as well. So we've been looking at updating the interface to support right to left support for those authors it's quite a big undertaking to localize the application into arabic and we know that there are different levels of right to left support that we want to bring but this is Contensis in right to left.

So here we've got the content type builder and here we've got the entry editor It's very confusing getting used to the layout on right to left, but we recognize that in a split view as well, when you're translating English content into Arabic typing that content isn't always consistent in the way the Arabic text is is constructed.

So we're looking at making those improvements. So if there's anyone who's particularly interested in this area, or you have Arabic or Urdu content that you're looking to translate, I'd love to chat to you so we can so we can test it with your users and get some feedback on this feature. So let's do a quick recap on Contensis 16 and what we've been hearing today.

We're going to be introducing a new canvas editor. So a modern structured rich text editor with easy navigation and formatting. Contensis 16 will include the dashboard with the comments and entry dashboard views. We're going to introduce actionable email notifications, you're going to see domains and SSL certificate management within the Contensis interface and the improvements to content approval, approving your own content as well as requesting approval from specific users.

As always, you can keep an eye on what we're working on and what's under consideration on our Contensis Roadmap. So if you head over to https://roadmap.contensis.com this is updated periodically with what's currently happening. And as always, I want to invite you to join our conversation in Slack on the Slack community, whether that's feature discussion, suggestions, or just needing help with other Contensis users.

So, thank you. That's my update for today, and I look forward to hearing your feedback.

Contensis product update - Autumn - Velocity 2023

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