During our latest planned maintenance window, we were delighted to have successfully upgraded to version 8.4.0 of the Web CMS platform. This is a major version release from Terminalfour which places emphasis on improving the content editing experience for content editors.

Improved Content Editing Experience

• Conditional Fields for Content Types
  This feature will allow our team to conditionally display fields in Content Types using rules and criteria. It will help simplify and streamline the content creation process for users by showing only relevant fields during the content creation and editing process. We are excited about this long awaited feature and will take some time to review how we can implement this feature during the development of new and review of existing Content Types. We will communicate any changes with service users in due course.
• Inline Field Descriptions
  Content editors can now see the field description inline when creating and editing content. Previously this information was hidden behind a tooltip which made it less discoverable and more complicated than it should have been to provide additional context about how a field should be filled out. 

Accessibility

Continued platform improvements to enhance accessibility and visual indicators based on client feedback and third party accessibility audits.

• Badge and Tag Colours
  Badge and Tag colours have been tweaked so that they aren't mixed up with "clickable" buttons. They are also now easier to tell apart for colorblind users. Icons have been added to Content Status labels to make it easier to see at a glance what status your content is in.
• Pending and Inactive Sections
  Clearer indicators including icons have been added to the Site Structure for sections that have a status of Pending or Inactive. This indicator remains visible when using the section filtering tool to make it easy to tell the status at a glance.
  

Performance

Improvement in the performance of the platform in key areas.

• Media Library
  Significant improvements to the Media Library load times for users with access to multiple folders.
• Section Filtering
  Filtering sections to find the one you want to edit has been significantly improved. The time it takes for the filter to become active is faster now than in previous versions and the amount of load put on your CPU and RAM when rendering and filtering on a large site structure has been reduced. This makes for a much better filtering experience, especially on very large structures.

Asset Development and Functionality

This latest version of the Web CMS builds extensively on the development and functionality foundations introduced in the previous version of the platform. The team have been busy assessing how we can use conditional fields, new Handlebars templating logic, and improvements to the content editing experience, to develop more informative assets that are easier to use. We will be communicating the outcome of these improvements in the near future.

If you have any comments or queries relating to the above, please do not hesitate to get in contact with us via the IT Service Desk.