v10 release notes

Sitekit 10 introduces major improvements to the CMS in some key areas. The outline list follows with details on each of the changes further down.

• Administrative interface redesign - flatter and faster.
• Posts system - configurable cross referencing post system, use it for everything.
• Events plus - new improved events calendar and listing system.
• Membership improvements - who likes what content and profile listings.
• File title based A to Z - what it says on the tin.

In addition to the above we've also had time to add support for IE11 (non-metro), single sign-on for deployed systems and the ability to filter the audit trail by individual.

Looking at those items in details now:

Administrative interface redesign

We've changed it to make it faster and easier to user. The flatter design means there are less icons and graphics to load for every admin request. We've also spaced out the items more to make them easier to read and clearer. We've not changed the juxtaposition of elements or their functionality apart from the exceptions below

• Members, groups and users have been moved from configure to the manage tab
  
• Help has been removed as a tab and now sits behind the normal '?' icon at the top right of the screen.
  
• There's a new tab 'reports' where we display the existing reports and some new ones.

We've also redesigned the help system which you're in at the moment to make it clearer and improved its search. There's also a new guide to editing with other guides for administrators and developers to follow. The Sitekit syntax guide is also now online. 

Posts system

Posts are a powerful new addition to Sitekit CMS - they allow you to create related cross-referenced structured lists. 

Posts can be used for the following: 

• news listings
• events listings
• filtered events calendars
• diary pages
• staff directories
• A to Z resource listings

They are sufficiently flexible that you can use them for pretty well anything that you need structured searchable data for. There's a worked example of a training system to demonstrate what you can do with them and what they can add to you site.

Events plus

Event plus is an new calendar, diary and time based listing system based on the posts architecture above. It improves on the existing events module by providing the following

• Improved markup of calendars and listings
• Better recurring event management
• Improved RSS feed output
• Fully searchable using the indexed search
• iCal output support
• Extensibility via webservices and overriding local XSLs
• Support for front end event creation 

More information is in the worked post example above.

Membership improvements

The membership work in the last release has been extended to provide page 'likes' and dynamic profile page creation. Profiles pages can now contain the member's full profile plus their activity stream including what forms they've submitted, forums they've posted on and pages they've commented on. It can also include a set of page they've liked. Similarly you can also add which logged in members have 'liked' a page.

Most of these extensions are in the web services below

/ws/assets.asmx

/ws/Members.asmx

/admin/ws/userfunctions.asmx

File title based A to Z

The CMS has had the ability to produce A to Z list page for several years. That A to Z is based on meta-keywords, page titles or additional metadata. In this release we extend that to include A to Z's for files. Files don't have metakeywords so the A to Zs are based on file name, file title and additional metadata as before. This will provide a useful tool for accessing large directories of files and will also assist in having them indexed by Google. Access to this is by additional options in the list by page.

Deprecated functionality

In version 10 we've deprecated the Postcards/ecards module as it had become outmoded and no-one was using it. In addition we've also stopped supporting IE6 in this release. That's not to say that the admin interface won't work in IE6 it just means that any new code that's added will no longer be tested in IE6 or built to work or be compatible with IE6. It's 13 years old, Microsoft are no longer going to be providing security patches for it and it's really no fun writing code that needs to work on it.