Hello all, happy to announce that we have released a new version of BloomReach Experience and Hippo CMS. This minor release introduces new functionality and improvements. In this document we will give a brief overview of the highlights of this release.

Please note that BloomReach Experience customers and partners have early access to this release. The Hippo CMS community release will be made available in about six weeks, towards the end of July '18, in line with our Open Source Release Policy.

BloomReach Experience and Hippo CMS - Highlights

What is new for end users

Publishing content from the channel manager (BRE as well as Hippo CMS)

From this release onwards, a CMS user can publish or request publication of a document directly from within the channel manager, specifically from the visual editing panel, as part of the Projects feature. This removes the need to navigate to the content perspective every time the user wants to publish a document or to request its publication. The feature provides content authors and editors with greater confidence over what will be published; they see the content in page-view, rather than just in document-view; they see exactly how the content will be rendered and shown to end-users. Additionally, being able to publish and request-publication from within the channel manager is a time-saver for content team members and makes the editing and publishing process much more user friendly.

Awesome usability improvements

We are continually improving the user experience of the product, and in this release, a number of improvements have been made across multiple existing features:

• A number of user experience and design updates were applied to the ‘merge’ and ‘update’ screens within the ‘Projects’ feature; the interface is now less cluttered, more aligned and generally easier to understand and use - especially if there are conflicts during the merge and update processes. This is a BRE only improvement.

• The system now remembers if a user had selected either 'Documents' or 'Pages (sitemap items)' in the menu link picker; this will support and speed-up a user’s document/page selection within this picker. This improvement is both available in BRE as well as in Hippo CMS.

• A new 'Save & Close' button was added to the component dialogue box; this will help in preventing users making changes to a component’s configuration and accidentally closing the dialogue without saving their changes. This feature is available for both BRE as well as Hippo CMS.

Asynchronous functionality in projects (BRE only)

Projects is a collaborative, team-focused, feature; it supports content team members in working together to get their online experience live on time.

It is therefore important that the feature shows all changes that are being made by multiple users (on multiple devices, browsers etc.) in real-time. The current status of a project, documents which have been added, channel changes (and so on) need to be correctly represented at any time; a change made by one user must be displayed to another user, without delay and without the user having to refresh the page.

Additionally, it is important that any individual user is given immediate system feedback based on actions they have taken, for example: if they add 20 channels to a project, they should be told that the channel-adding process is ‘in-progress’, and this process should not prevent the user from using other functionality, and taking further actions, within the feature.

In order to achieve immediate feedback for individual users, and across multiple users, and to ensure that ongoing processes do not block the use of other functionality, we have applied asynchronous techniques to the projects feature as part of this release. This is available in BRE only.

What’s new for developers

Swagger UI for exposing and documenting the Page Model API

The built-in Page Model JSON API provides an intuitive REST API endpoint for SPAs, ensuring seamless integration with WCMS. SPAs may consume the JSON API responses to construct pages, components, menus, etc. with referenced content item models or domain-specific models, contributed by each component and aggregated for the page, in their own SPA frameworks. Page Model JSON API provides a generic, extensible and most effective aggregated model representation for easier SPA development support.

In this release we include a Swagger-powered UI documenting and exposing the Page Model JSON API to developers. This UI is available at /swagger.json by default. For example, if the URI endpoint of the Page Model JSON API is http://localhost:8080/site/resourceapi/, then you can access the Swagger API documentation through http://localhost:8080/site/resourceapi/swagger.json.

Minor release

V12.4 is a minor release so it is backwards compatible with the previous minor release. Also, updating to this version from the previous minor version should be of little effort. Furthermore, due to our higher release frequency for minor releases, this might not be the final minor release in the major version 12 range.

System support and requirements

The full system requirements can be found here: https://www.onehippo.org/library/about/system-requirements.html.
Main highlight is that we completed the phase out of Tomcat 8. From this release onwards we officially do not support Tomcat 8 anymore, as it is end of life.

End-of-life and support

Support table for releases

Please note that this release triggers the end-of-life status of V12.2. This version will not be supported anymore as from today.

In the table below you can find the support status of your product and when support will end; this is dependent on the version currently being used and license level. Please note that versions that are not listed are not active and not supported.

(Orange cells indicate changes compared to the previous release)

Pre-announcements

• Please note that we intend to drop support for Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2 around September 2018 as these products will be end-of-life (mainstream support) by then. We will support Windows Server 2016 from that time onwards.

• As of V13.0, Essentials will no longer provide JSP rendering templates, and always use Freemarker instead.

• We are in the process of planning the introduction of support for Ubuntu server 18.04 and JVM 11.

Availability

BloomReach Experience is available as from June 12, 2018 onwards.