Our platform providers, Terminalfour, release incremental updates to improve the development and administration features of the CMS.  As part of those updates, they also bundle in improvements targeted towards end users and their day to day management of content and websites.  Below are some of the highlights for our users of moving to the latest release.

Media Library

Remember/Retain Media Library Category Location After Actions

When navigating the Media Library, or visiting another area of the CMS and returning to the Media Library, users were frequently left at the root category, meaning they would have to navigate down through the folders to the category they were just in. 

How does this help?

This update should enhance the user experience by remembering the last category a user was in, even when navigating away from the Media Library to undertake another action in another area. 

Download Option When Editing Media

This is a small usability adjustment but one that may make things easier for our users.  Previously users could only download an item from listings in the Media Library.

How does this help?

There is now a 'download button' available when directly editing a Media Item.  So now users can download the piece of media they are currently editing. 

Terminalfour Dashboard

You may have noticed some changes to the Welcome Screen following our recent upgrade and that is due to the inclusion of the new Terminalfour Dashboard feature.  This will provide all users with information relating to the Content Health for their websites and their Recent Content Activity.  

How does this help?

Under the Content Health tab, users can quickly see what content is for review, how fresh their content is and how long it has been since the oldest piece of content has been modified.  This will help users to assess old content, both expired and archived, and decide whether it is still required or not.  The Recent Content Activity tab will show the content that has been recently edited on the websites that a user has access to.

We will provide further information and guidance relating to the Terminalfour Dashboard in the near future.  

Content Editing

Clickable Breadcrumbs in Sections

The user work flow has been improved by adding links to Section breadcrumbs.

How does this help?

This should improve navigation and reduce the amount of clicks required, especially when you are multiple levels down in the Site Structure.

Remove Formatting Button

This functionality has been updated to allow for targeted selection as well as full block format changes. It removes formatting and markup from a selection, or from all content if no selection made. 

How does this help? 

We find that it is a fairly common occurrence that when creating content, our users tend to copy text based information from external sources such as websites, email, word processing programs and PDFs, and paste that information into the HTML Editor in Content Types.  When doing this, much of the hidden formatting code behind the text based information, is also copied, which leads to content layout issues and can cause accessibility issues.

It is recommended that when copying content from external sources, users should click on the Remove Formatting button, and then structure the content appropriately. If it is just a section of content, say a paragraph that has been copied and pasted, then a user can highlight that paragraph in the HTML editor and click on the Remove Formatting button to remove any hidden formatting.

Bug Fix - Section Link Is Not Showing Up in Preview Until Content is Saved

An issue that has caused unnecessary confusion for our users.  When a user created a new piece of content that contained a section or content item link, that link would not show up up in preview until the piece of content was saved.

How does this help?

This has been changed so that the preview shows the section or content link, regardless of whether the piece of content has previously been saved or not.