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New text editor, improved privacy and change approvals: Another 5 reasons to stay updated with Episerver

With new releases every week, Episerver are constantly tweaking and adding features to their product family. Here are 5 recent improvements that will boost your productivity and your site performance.

User interface improvements

New text editor

Episerver's text editor has finally been upgraded to the latest version (TinyMCE v4). The new version has a more modern look-and-feel, lots of bundled editing tools, and most importantly; it's fully HTML5 compatible.

For those interested in under-the-hood stuff, TinyMCE is now also moved into a separate nuget package, allowing developers to update (or replace) the text editor separately from the core CMS. Configuration is also now code-only.

For editors, this means a smoother editing experience. For developers, it means more standardized HTML output and a cleaner project architecture. 

More info and requirements


Upload images on-the-fly when inserting images in text

A small, but much-requested feature is the ability to upload images directly when trying to insert an image into a text paragraph. Until now, you had to first upload the image to the media library, then go back to your paragraph and browse to the uploaded image. 

With this tweak, you have the upload option in the "Select Content" popup window when browsing for images, making the whole process a lot smoother! 

Note: While this tweak is made by an Episerver employee, it comes from his personal developer blog (and is delivered by an unofficial nuget package, so it may be affected by future Episerver updates - use at your own caution). But hopefully, it will make it into the official core product shortly!

More info and requirements:

 

Privacy improvements

Episerver logs no longer contain personally identifiable information (PII)

For security and debugging purposes, Episerver's core CMS components log system activities such as content events, authentication events and system errors.

Those logs have now been tweaked so that no personally identifiable information (PII) such as usernames or IP adresses are recorded. This is a move on Episerver's behalf towards GDPR compliance.

More info and requirements:


Cleaning up uploaded files when a form submission is deleted

Files uploaded via an Episerver Form, are stored in Episerver's database alongside the submitted form data. Until now, those uploaded files were left behind if the original form submission was deleted by a website admin (note: individual form submissions, not the entire form.)

This not only caused unnecessary bloat in the database, but it also posed a potential privacy issue since those files may have contained personal data. With this update, orphaned files from forms are now cleaned up. 

More info and requirements:

 

Add-Ons

New add-on for change approval workflow

Episerver already had an add-on for content approval workflow, giving site editors the ability to approve each others work before publishing.

Now, there's a new add-on to setup approval workflows for structural changes to the site, such as moving pages/blocks, language setup, setting access rights and configuring content expiration.

More info and requirements:

 

Bonus reason:

Automatic Image Optimization for customers on Episerver DXC

If your site is hosted on the Episerver Digital Experience Cloud (DXC) platform, the Cloudflare CDN service is included in the package. A CDN (Content Delivery Network) copies your content onto servers in different geographical regions, so that content will be fetched from the server closest to the visitor - resulting in faster loading times.

A bonus feature of Cloudflare CDN is that images on your site will automatically be optimized to a smaller file size whenever possible. This is done by removing extra information such as metadata (file description, headers) from the file, and using image compression algorithms. This is done automatically by the CDN service before serving the image to the visitor.

Note: In some cases, image compression can lead to "artifacts" (choppy graphics) on hi-res images with subtle color variations (such as gradients). Episerver can disable image compression on a per-customer basis, if so required, but in most cases, the optimized images will be almost indistiguishable from the original.

More info and requirements:

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