Version 9.0.42

Release date 1st February 2010

Sitekit CMS version 9.0.42 went live on our shared hosting environment last night.

Currently the majority of our development focus is on consolidating CMS version 9.0 around our target browsers of IE6,7,8 and FF3.5 on Mac and PC. These notes also include the main points of our previous release on the 18th January.

NOTE: Problems may occur when images, style sheets and files are cached locally. If problems occur, please clear the browser’s cache before continuing. If the files are cached at network level (common on the N3 network), the assistance of a Systems Administrator may be required.

The main version release changes are below:

1. Addition of 2nd stage to bulk image upload  to allow for addition of meaningful alt tags after upload.
2. Addition of  ‘bulk image properties editor’ via right click on folder in asset view, this allows images attributes including alt tags to be edited in a grid view.
3. Improvement to automatic 301-redirection and sub domain handling.
4. Addition of support for UTF-8 encoded characters in page layouts and content layouts.
5. Addition of ‘New external link’ option to external links Link Picker. 
6. Link checker/replacer, this is used to resolve older shorter name link to the longer asset based links in migrated sites.

In more detail

Second stage to bulk image upload and Bulk Image Properties Editor

the bulk images properties editor is called from the asset tree, via the right click option ‘Image properties (bulk)’.

The bulk image editor itself is shown below it allows for editing of all fields except the filename (which can be edited itself in the asset tree). The main reasoning behind this is to allow fast bulk editing of images ALT tags for improved SEO. This same editor is also used as the second stage in any bulk upload of images, again to encourage sited editors to enter meaningful alt tags. Note that we’re not making alt tag entry mandatory but we are making it easy for people to apply meaningful ones during editing and upload.

301-redirection improvements

The 301 redirection is a standard which tells search engines that a location has moved permanently, letting the search engine know that its index of the old address should be updated with the address of the new location.

UTF-8 encoded characters

UTF-8 is a flexible web-compatible character encoding system. Implementing it allows for a greater range of non-Roman characters within page templates.

New External Link option

The 'New External Link’ option in external links Link Picker adds the ability to create external links in the links library via the external links picker in page content.

Link checker/replacer

The link checker appears under asset properties on the nav view for a particular branch. It’s main use would be in migrated sites when checking for broken links and/or converting them to full paths. These can come about because there may be references in a page to www.site.net/content.htm however in the revised site structure after import this page is now at www.site.net/products/2008-reviews/december/content.htm the  latter is a better URL for SE purposes but needs to be applied consistently across the site. ‘Check links’ allows them to be found easily.
Once found there's a couple of option to replace them

• Full paths – this is the long textual version of the path as shown above e.g. ‘/products/2008-reviews/december/content.htm’
• Magic words – this is a numeric reference to the page e.g. ###shortcutid.12567### which would be replaced by the full path on page rendering.

You’d use the first if you were expecting your site structure not to change much and were in the habit of editing in HTML mode, the links are easy to edit in HTML view as they’re structure and paths are readily apparent. You’d use the second option of you were planning at some point to do a lot of site re-structuring, by referring to the pages by shortcut ID there’s the link will ‘follow’ whatever new structure is adopted. If editing however the link structure is not readily apparent.

Please get in touch with support@sitekit.net if you're interested in trying out version 9.

Further version 9 documentation and a migration guide can be found through the links below

• quickstart v9 pdf
• migration guide v9 pdf

Version 9.0.41

From the 18th January 2010.

This release concentrated on bug fixes specifically in IE6 and FF. it should considerably improve the systems stability and performance on those platforms as well as fixing a lot of other lesser issues. 

1. Memory leak fix and debug added – an issue with memory leaks has being producing intermittent instability in the admin system.
2. Inappropriate centering of data in page editor fix – this is caused by bleed over between the site style and the editor style.
3. Multi lingual bugs where primary language is not English – sites could not recognise non latin characters in admin, sitemaps were rendered in English, also new pages were always created in English rather than the site’s primary language.
4. Loss of data on window minimisation in FF – after much investigation it was found not possible to remove this problem, as a prevention the minimise option has been removed for IE6 and FF browsers
5. Cross browser version of tree picker – branch dependent variables and editorial as news configuration is now operating cross browser. (see revised matrix at page bottom)
6. Default paste behaviour in editor changed - RadEditor now defaults to strip all formatting and paste plain text when pasting into a body block.
7. Front end HTML change - In line image HTML code changes – the non-compliant IMG ‘name’ attribute has been replaced with ‘id’ and the ‘alt’ tag is repeated in the ‘title’ tag for improved front end FF support.
8. Warning on publish if editorial page has no visibility for search/sitemaps.