Percussion CMS Version 3.4 Release Notes
Enhancements
Version 3.4 includes the following enhancements:
Installer
The CMS Installer has been changed. Install and/or upgrade are now considerably shorter, but after startup there will be a short delay until the system is available. Each time server starts it checks to see if new packages (ie, widgets, gadgets, etc.) are available to be installed. If not, the system starts as usual. If so, the packages will be installed. During this time, users will not be able to enter the system. Instead they will be presented with a maintenance screen. By dividing the installation into these two separate processes, the overall time until the system is fully available is also shortened.
Convert folder to section and section to folder
Administrators and designers now have the ability to convert a folder to a section in the navigation and also to convert a navigation section into a folder. From the Navigation manager, you have the ability to select an existing folder and convert it to a section within the navigation. You can select which page in the folder will serve as the landing page for that section. Selecting a page as a landing page will cause the page to be renamed as 'index', but all links to that page will be properly managed.
If you have added sections to the navigation and wish to remove them from the navigation, but not remove the content from the site, you can simply select the appropriate section and convert it back into a folder. This will also convert any subordinate links within that section to folders as well. But again, all links to those pages will continue to be maintained.
Maintaining Site Navigation and Structure
Removing a Section and Landing Page from a Site
Rich Text Editor Changes
Several features of the Rich Text Editor that were lost when the newest version of the editor was released in 3.2 have been reintroduced. Content contributors can:
- Resize images by dragging the image border
- Set the background color of a table or cell
- Set image alignment when adding an image
Disable Widgets
For administrative users, there is a new Dashboard Gadget that allows you to enable and disable widgets within the Widget Tray or Add Asset dialog. If you wish to prevent users from creating assets of a particular type or adding specific widgets to pages or templates, you can disable them through the gadget. If widgets have already been added to the template, they will be unaffected. This only prevents the widget from being added to any new templates or pages.
When widgets are disabled, they are disabled for all users. Administrators or designers may wish to disable widgets for general usage, then temporarily enable them in order to create or modify templates.
This capability was added primarily in support of Widget Builder, so that administrators can test the creation of new widgets with confidence that they can disable them if needed.
Widget Configuration Gadget
Background Process Monitor
For administrative users, there is a new Dashboard Gadget that monitors the status of background processes. The intent is to help administrators understand when background processes are being run and also to know when they are completed. The following processes are monitored as part of the dashboard gadget: site import (using LiveFirst), publishing, search indexing, site copy, thumbnail generation and workflow assignment. This can help in debugging if any large background processes are impacting system performance.
Process Monitor Gadget
Administration APIs
There are now Administration APIs that can be used to retrieve status information about the server. All APIs require the user to be authenticated.
To check if the server is in maintenance mode:
GET /Rhythmyx/services/maintenance/manager/status/server
This returns a status code:
- 200 (OK) - The server is not in maintenance mode and is ready for use
- 409 (Conflict) - The server is currently in maintenance mode and is not ready
To check if there have been maintenance errors (prevents the server from being used):
GET /Rhythmyx/services/maintenance/manager/status/process
This returns a status code:
- 200 (OK) - The server has not had any errors and is ready for use
- 409 (Conflict) - The server has had errors performing maintenance process and cannot be used until the errors are resolved.
Customer Incidents
The following customer incidents were addressed in 3.4:
TAR8149/TAR8303
If you deleted a page after changing the default publishing server, the system was logging errors as the system was getting out of sync. This has been addressed by ensuring the system the state of the content for each publishing server.
NOTE: To address this issue a change was made in the installer to publisher-beans.xml (AppServer\server\rx\deploy\rxapp.ear\rxapp.war\WEB-INF\config\user\spring). If you have modified this file, please back it up. You will need to merge your modifications into the new file after upgrade.
TAR8170
Renaming a site was breaking the site's publishing definition for users publishing to FTP using the default Percussion web server setup. Administrators who change the site name will be prompted to update the publishing definition.
Percussion Community issues
The following issues were raised on the Percussion Community and have been addressed in 3.4:
- Editing templates in Version 3.3 with large numbers of pages assigned to them were causing system slowness. This was resolved.
- The RSS Widget drew is base domain from the current domain rather than the DTS connection URL. This has been modified to use the DTS connection URL.
- If a user copied content from a Percussion-managed website and pasted it into an HTML or Rich Text Widget, and the content included a Div using the class "perc-widget" this caused the UI to be non-responsive. This has been addressed by preventing the user from saving until the class has been removed.
- Further performance improvements in the Finder have been done to handle sites with large numbers of folders.