Percussion CMS Version 4.2 Release Notes

Percussion CMS 4.2 is now available to all customers on the CM1 Downloads page.

Enhancements

Page Optimizer

One of the key tenets of Content Marketing is that the delivery of high quality content that is valuable to your audience will drive your organization’s goals, be it online sales, enrollments, registration, etc. At the same time, the way that many users find content is via web search, and therefore, optimization of your content for search engines is critical.

Page Optimizer provides a critical tool to assist content contributors in creating content that aligns with the SEO goals of the organization. Most critically, these corrections can be made before content is ever published to the web. As you are in the process of creating or editing your content, an in-page tool allows you to analyze the page against a series of known issues that can damage your search engine rankings. It will highlight the problems that you need to correct on the page and provide specific instructions on how to correct those issues. Most times those issues can be corrected by the content contributor, though occasionally they may require intervention by a designer.

Page optimizer also analyzes your page for any broken links. Since backlinking is an important process in content marketing, adding external links to your pages is important to drive traffic to your site. But since external site links can change, making sure those links are still valid is important.

Once the content author has made the desired changes to the page, he or she can submit it through an approval workflow so that those responsible for overall content quality can review the content. Page optimizer can be used during the approval process as well to serve as an auditing tool before publish.

Page Optimizer is sold as an add-on module to Percussion CMS.  You can contact sales@percussion.com if you are interested in activating this module.

Page Optimizer Overview

Assets by Status

One of the challenges of using shared assets, in particular image and file assets, is that there was no centralized way to view the status of assets that were being leveraged on the website. As a result, if an asset that was being used on a page was not approved, the page would publish without the asset or with a prior revision of the asset. This would only be caught by viewing the published page.  

The Assets by Status dashboard gadget is modeled after the Pages by Status gadget. It provides the ability to search for assets using a number of criteria, and then to approve those assets in batches of up to 25 at a time. This will allow content editors and site administrators the ability to double-check that assets needed for the site have been finalized and approved prior to publish.  

Assets by Status

IE10/IE11

Percussion CMS now supports both IE10 and IE11. 

RedHat 6.5

Percussion CMS now supports installation using Red Hat Linux 6.5 as the operating system.  For Linux deployment, we require a standard deployment of the Linux operating system.  A minimal deployment of Linux may remove components of Linux that are needed for Percussion CMS processing.

Performance Improvements

As part of our ongoing efforts to improve system performance, we have made changes to how some data is accessed from the database.  If your database administrator has modified the default permissions of the Percussion database, this may require their intervention to assist in the upgrade. Instructions for this are included in the page for Upgrading Percussion CMS. 

Customer Incidents

The following customer incidents were addressed in 4.2: 

• In the Widget builder, if a widget were created with a field that includes an accent character, there would be unexpected behavior. This has been resolved. 
• If a site was imported using LiveFirst and there was a discrepancy in the number of pages being imported, the site could not be deleted. This has been resolved. 
• In the design manager, you could not drag a page from one template to another if both source and destination templates are not visible in same view. The drag-and-drop action has been replaced by a menu action. 
• Customer Security Scan was causing the server to return exceptions instead of errors making it appear the product had security violations.  The resolution was to provide better error messages. 
• Site copy occasionally left pages associated with the original site's templates. This has been resolved
• Security scans detected a cross site scripting vulnerability in Delivery Tier Services. This has been resolved.
• Navigation items created in CM1 are were not ADA compliant and fail federally-mandated Section 508 compliance testing. The navigation widget now allows you to add title attributes to navigation links
• If a folder had a large number of files (over 1000), Finder pagination arrows were obscured. This has been addressed. 
• If a folder contained a large number of files (over 5000), the Finder was timing out. This has been resolved.
• LDAP user searchbox was not displaying the error to user if the search failed. This has been resolved.
• The Bulk Upload gadget was timing out if a given subfolder had a large number of files (over 5000). This has been resolved. 
• When browsing for assets within the Rich Text widget, if a folder had a large number of files, the asset library browser would time out. This has been resolved.
• When browsing for folders within a file auto-list, if a folder had a large number of files, the UI would time out. This has been resolved.
• Having a large number of workflows (over 150) with unique roles and section assignments would cause the Workflow configuration page to time-out. This has been resolved. 
• Customers using MS SQL as their database could get their database into a deadlock state, causing unexpected behavior in the application. This has been resolved.
• When deleting a site, it was possible that content could be left in the database as "orphaned".  Delete has been fixed to ensure that all content is now deleted during a Delete Site operation.  

Known Issues

The issues below were reported too late to be able to be fixed in 4.2. These are under investigation and will be addressed in a future release. 

• For customers using 64-bit Linux, page and template thumbnails are not being generated.  
• If a user attempts to delete a site while the content on the site is being indexed, this can result in errors in the UI and in the log.  Before deleting a site, please review the process monitor on the Dashboard to ensure that content is not actively being indexed.  The most common scenario when this is encountered is if someone imports a site using LiveFirst or copies a site and then immediately decides they want to delete the site.  Until this is resolved, please allow the indexing of the new site to complete before deleting it.