Escenic Content Engine 5.1-1 released
Escenic is pleased to announce that Escenic Content Engine 5.1-1 is now available for download at Escenic Technet. This release adds support for upgrading from Escenic Content Engine 4, a plug.in API for making extensions to Escenic Content Studio, and more than 140 other enhancements and improvements. As always, this is a free upgrade covered by the standard Escenic support and maintenenace license.
Support for upgrading and migration from Escenic Content Engine 4
This release adds support for upgrading from Escenic Content Engine 4 to 5.1-1. The new Migrator plug-in exports all content from the 4 installation to XML, which is then imported into Escenic Content Engine 5.1-1 using the standard import functionality. This approach makes it possible to "tidy up" old content, transforming it into well-formed XML.
The Migrator plugin supports delta exports, alowing for two separate installations (both on version 4 and 5) to be kept in sync during testing and tuning. The plug-in includes a web interface that you can use to control the export process.
Customers may also take the opportunity to adjust the existing content types to fit with the Escenic Widget Framework, allowing Content Studio users to manage the design and layout of the website directly in Content Studio without making changes to the JSP or CSS.
Plug-in API for Escenic Content Studio
There is now an officially-supported interface that can be used by plug-ins to add new features to Escenic Content Studio. Escenic Content Engine 5.1-1 includes a developer guide for writing plug-ins for Escenic Content Studio, including detailed information on how to add custom menus, specialized editors, etc.
Other highlights in this release
The release notes contain more than 140 enhancements and improvements, including:
- Support for pack200 compression has been added to Java Web Start for Escenic Content Studio. If this option is enabled, then Java Web Start downloads a compressed copy of the Content Studio software, giving an 80% reduction in the size of the download.
- The editor framework on which the Content Studio HTML field editor is based has been upgraded to the latest version. This brings a number of improvements, including: Improved performance, improved support for right-to-left languages and improved interoperability with other applications. For example, copy and paste from Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel is now much faster and more accurate.
- Improved cache monitoring via Java Management Extensions (JMX).
- New formatting options in HTML editor for alignment and justification.
- The Solr package supplied with the Content Engine has been upgraded to version 1.4.
- The RSS feed boxes now support authenticating to proxies if present.
- Much easier configuration of URLs for adding the page's title, sections, date, etc to the URL. See also: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) with Escenic Content Engine.
Further information
More information on Escenic Technet. Direct link to relesase notes (requires customer login): Escenic Content Engine 5.1-1 release notes.
Escenic Content Engine 5.1-1 was released on February 15 2009.
