Release Highlights

CMS 8.07 Release Highlights - Technical Release

Release Schedule

  • Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, Inc.:
    • Tue, 23rd February 2021 07:00 am Prague time (01:00 am D.C. time)
  • LibertyNet:
    • Tue, 23rd February 2021 08:30 Prague time (02:30 am D.C. time)​

Table of contents

  1. Akamai Image Manager
  2. Turning CMS8 into a SPA (Single Page Application)
  3. AMP version for Photo Galleries and Static Infographics
  4. Improvements on the Main Image Search Page
  5. Tags on Video, Photo Gallery and Audio

Refactoring Release

Refactoring / Technical release is about improving the design of existing code. It is the process of changing a software system in such a way that it does not alter the external behaviour of the code, yet improves its internal structure. This was achieved through modernizing infrastructure by doing some Dotnet Core Docker module Development Improvements. Docker is an open platform for developing, shipping, and running applications. Docker makes it possible to separate the applications from the infrastructure. This allows for a quicker delivery of the software. With Docker, it is possible to manage the infrastructure in the same way as applications.

1. Akamai Image Manager

Automated Image Optimization: Image Manager converts online images to browser-specific image formats, and resizes images for mobile devices based on viewport width. In addition, it can compress images while maintaining a high visual quality.

Product description: https://www.akamai.com/uk/en/products/performance/image-and-video-manager.jsp

Currently used features:

  • Scale for Mobile - serves the best available size for the requesting device.
  • Use Best File Type - serves the best available size for the requesting device. Use Best File Type serves the image format that works best for the requesting browser.

The original images are excluded from Image Manager transformation and are provided in their original form.

2. Turning CMS8 into a SPA (Single Page Application) ​

A single-page application is an app that doesn’t need to reload the page during its use and works within a browser. Think of the apps you use daily: Facebook, Google Maps, Gmail, Twitter, etc. All these are examples of a SPA.

One of the best advantages of a correctly-configured SPA is the user experience (UX), where the user enjoys a natural environment of the app without having to wait for the page reloads and other things. You remain on the same page, which is powered by JavaScript programming language.

3. AMP Version for Photo Galleries and Static Infographics ​

AMP pages are dedicated to mobile users and give them a chance to have site pages loaded from Google cache. This happens if a user comes to the page from a mobile version of Google search.

The AMP pages for Article content types, Media pages (Audio and Video) have already been implemented in the past releases. This release brings AMP pages for Photo Galleries and Static infographics.

4. Improvements on the Main Image Search Page ​

Based on the feedback from CMS8 users who works with images on the main search page, we are bringing the image edit in a modal popup. This means that after an image modal is closed, CMS8 user is kept on the same position on the result page instead of being sent to the top of the results page. This should improve working with images, by removing unnecessary doubling of search.

In the next release, we are going to improve images while attaching (embedding) to an article and make image preview in a modal popup.

We've improved search result page performance; and worked on action buttons to display them all according to priorities on the search result page.

5. Tags on Video, Photo Gallery and Audio ​

Last release we started to use tags in article pages for keywords (Meta tag in the HTML source code). This is done to help with search engine optimization for Yandex, given that Google stopped using meta keywords in web ranking.

In this release, we've improved other content pages and use tags for keywords of the page and use the pattern: categories of the page and tags from the page (as for content pages already applied).