Upgrade highlights for editorial users
Introducing The Shelf
A new CMS feature, The Shelf allows users to drag and drop content directly from a centralized location onto a Page and to see, at a glance, what those draggable items are. The Shelf is available on all landing page content types (Article, Page, Homepage, Section, Tag, etc.) and the Entity Page content types (Corporate, Broadcast, Podcast). It also allows users to drag and drop content into articles to create enhancements; see below for more highlights.
The Shelf
The Shelf provides Brightspot users with a persistent location where they can discover new content through recent activity or find content using saved searches and then easily add it to any page by dragging and dropping it into the page.
- Find content by filtering recent activity or by using saved searches
- Drag and drop items into pages or lists to create promo modules
- Drag and drop items into rich text fields to create enhancements
- Drag and drop images into galleries
- Drag and drop videos into playlists
- Drag and drop individual or multiple items using multi-select items
New Board View for Brightspot Search
Born out of efforts made toward an improved board view in Assignment Desk, a more genericized board view has been added to the CMS. The new board view resembles similar board views in Trello or JIRA鈥檚 Kanban view; see below for highlights.
Search Board View
The new Board view in search provides teams with yet another way to visualize groups of content in swim lanes or columns. Users will be able to intuitively drag and drop content between columns to update their content.
- Configurable group options to change what columns display
- Filter, sort, export and print the data displayed on the board
- Ability to save and share filtered, sorted views
- Content can be dragged from column to column
- Dragging content between columns updates the currently selected group field in real time
Built-In Planning Tools
Various enhancements have been incorporated to Assignment Desk to help editors manage and associate assignments, pitches, progress and more. The Assignment Desk Board View has also been improved to include dynamic drag-and-drop functionality; see below for more highlights.
Built-In Planning Tools
Brightspot's planning tools provide a way for teams to pitch, share and collaborate on ideas they would like to generate site content around. Teams are able to create and track assignments for a variety of content types.
- Pitch content type to allow others to vet ideas
- Assignment content type with supported subtypes, including Snippet, Article, Image, Graphic, File, Audio, Video
- Built-in notifications for creation of assignments and pitches
- The new Board View to manage Assignment statuses and other group fields
Ability to 鈥淔avorite鈥 Content in Dropdown Menus
In an effort to make type selection easier, faster, and more intuitive, users the ability to 鈥渇avorite鈥 the things they most often select from dropdown menus and filters. This feature exists on a per-user basis and will bubble up those types/selections to the top of their respective lists. As a result, the 鈥淩ecently Used鈥 function/section will no longer be used.
Ability to 鈥淔avorite鈥 Content Templates in Quick Start Widget
Earlier this year, Brightspot enabled users to 鈥渇avorite鈥 content types in the Quick Start widget, which pushed them to the left for easy user access. Now, this extends to content templates that have been configured to appear in the Quick Start widget, too.
Shared Preview Link Management
For security, users who have shared preview links may want to curtail access to these preview links. With version 4.5, users can access a 鈥淪hared Preview Links鈥 list item in the Profile dropdown, which will show a list of all active preview links, which can then be removed as the sharer sees fit.
Site Specific Permalink Rule Overrides
CMS users can now set permalink rule overrides at the site level (formerly only available at the Global level). This is helpful if a user has, for example, a Media Desk site that needs its images to have URLs for brand portal preview purposes, but also has another site that doesn鈥檛 need images to have URLs. This feature makes that possible.
Ability to Print Search Results
Users will now have the ability to print search results (an extension of the Export as CSV functionality) in the Brightspot CMS search, and not just in Assignment Desk.
Ability to Filter by Site Category in Sites & Settings
Brightspot CMS users will now be able to quickly search for sites via site categories after accessing Sites & Settings in the CMS, much like they are already able to do with the site switcher.
Query Field Support for Editorial Content Types
With this latest CMS version, users will now have the ability to add and subsequently set a query field to editorial content types. This query field lives in the UI after accessing the editorial content type a user wants to add it to. This now means that Editorial Content types support the same data modeling capabilities as one would enjoy when data modeling using Java. This change brings Brightspot a step closer to being a 鈥渘o code鈥 platform, as editorial users can now achieve the same results as a developer would when customizing the platform.
New out-of-the-box integrations
Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams Notifications
In order to further collaboration鈥攁nd keep content moving through its production cycle鈥擝rightspot supports a variety of configurable notifications designed to keep users up to date on the notifications they need most.
- Users can configure one or many delivery methods
- Supported delivery methods include in-CMS, email, browser, text, Slack鈥攁nd now Microsoft Teams
- Users can configure one or many subscriptions, including workflow and publish
- Admins can set automatic notifications for all users, as well as shared subscriptions for user groups
- Developers can further extend the notifications system to add custom subscriptions
Google Vision
Google Vision Image Autotagging
The Brightspot DAM, Media Desk, now supports powerful auto-tagging capabilities to add relevant keywords (labels, celebrities, text) to images via an integration with Google Vision.
- Use image tags for search
- Automatic image tagging
- Tagging by keywords
- Tagging by text match
- Tagging by celebrity matches
Google Analytics
Google Analytics Data Collection & Reporting
Our Google Analytics connector was improved for Version 4.5, and can now be enabled as a primary data source in the CMS to report on front-end traffic results in Site-Level Dashboards, Search, and page-level analytics. Additionally, the Google Analytics Plugin also includes event metrics reporting.
- Configure Google Analytics as a primary data reporter for one, several, or all of your sites in Brightspot
- Easily begin the data collection process by configuring Universal Analytics tags or Google Tag Manager tags within Sites & Settings
Upgrade highlights for developers
JavaScript-backed Java Classes
Upgrading to Brightspot version 4.5 will allow back-end customizations in Brightspot to be written using JavaScript rather than only in Java, opening up the pool of developers who can easily work in Brightspot.
Styleguide: Style Field Information Now Shown
Before, it wasn鈥檛 always obvious where styles were coming from when viewing page and module templates; therefore, helpful tooltips now appear when hovering over different elements within Styleguide, including where they are coming from, where they are set, and how to update them. Additionally, the ability to opt out of the inspector tool completely as a failsafe has been added.
Styleguide: Help and Tooltips Added to Templates
Hovering over included templates will now shows their template path and name as well as any template ancestry. Additionally, hovering over images, Styleguide will display help text that shows which image size is being used.
Improved Error Handling of Initial Notifications Setup and Configuration
The error messaging as it relates to Notifications has been improved with this version of the CMS. This was the result of a number of discoveries related to how error messaging was being displayed at the Email/SMS verify step and in a multi-server environment.
New CDA Module with Helpers for Returning MarkedText from View Models
Since the rCDA already had the ability to returned MarkedText for rich text fields in models so that GraphQL callers can retrieve HTML in a structured, output-agnostic manner, the latest version of Brightspot will give the same ability to view models.
New JavaScript Transformation Helper
A JavaScript MarkedText transformation helper has been added since it will be useful to developers who parse structured rich-text editor data with a front-end framework.
rCDA Type-specific Sort Options for Inverse Indexes
Since API callers should be able to sort inverse fields without knowledge of the indexes that exist in Brightspot, version 4.5 makes each type expose its own sort options explicitly.
New Schema Version Diff Feature
Version 4.5 will implement a new schema version diff feature. Since Brightspot's GraphQL schemas are automatically generated, it wasn鈥檛 always obvious what impact the changes that the Java Recordable and ViewModel classes had on the generated schema. Coupling this with the fact that Brightspot's GraphQL APIs are being consumed by applications outside of Brightspot, it was important to avoid breaking these clients as the Brightspot CMS APIs evolved. Allowing developers to visually see the impact of their Java code changes on the generated schema compared to a previous version helps prevent accidental backwards-incompatible changes from making their way into production environments.
More Distinct Type Names
Both the Mark_Interface and Mark names have been renamed to better convey their meaning. Mark is the base interface (a representation of some type of element in the MarkedText), with two subtypes: HtmlMark (a representation of plain HTML element in the MarkedText) and RichTextMark (a representation of a rich text element in the MarkedText).
Ability to Sort Interface Implementations in the Explorer
At times, there are many implementations of an interface, and visually parsing the unordered list displayed in the explorer can be difficult; therefore, this new version of Brightspot modifies the explorer JSX to ensure interface implementations are always sorted.
Improvement to Editorial CMA and CDA ObjectType Selection
The rCDA and CMA are both configured with Dari (Brightspot) object types. Before, every object type of which the system is aware is shown, which can be confusing to developers. Now, with version 4.5, users will be shown the types they would see in the global CMS search and create menus.
If you have questions about how to upgrade, when should you upgrade, what is involved and more, please contact your Brightspot customer-service manager to learn more.