Get an early look at some of the new features and highlights coming with the newest version of Brightspot CMS, version 4.5, available for customers to upgrade in July 2022. Contact your customer service manager to learn more at: support@brightspot.com.
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
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’s 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
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
In an effort to make type selection easier, faster, and more intuitive, users the ability to “favorite” 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 “Recently Used” function/section will no longer be used.
Earlier this year, Brightspot enabled users to “favorite” 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.
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 “Shared Preview Links” 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.
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’t need images to have URLs. This feature makes that possible.
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.
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.
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 “no code” platform, as editorial users can now achieve the same results as a developer would when customizing the platform.
In order to further collaboration—and keep content moving through its production cycle—Brightspot 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—and 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
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.
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
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.
Before, it wasn’t 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Version 4.5 will implement a new schema version diff feature. Since Brightspot's GraphQL schemas are automatically generated, it wasn’t 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.
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).
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.
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.
Imagine you’re working against a tight deadline. You’re completely absorbed when you find you need to quickly reorder all the assets on your page. Switching gears (and sides of the brain) to revise the layout of a content-heavy page can be frustrating, especially when required to perform the cumbersome process of removing and re-adding each asset, or repeatedly clicking an arrow button to move multiple assets up and down the page.
When we talk about localizing content in Brightspot CMS, we start by referring to translations. Once a piece of content is translated for a local audience, editors can then use variations to present the right information across multiple languages and locales.
Along with the usual functionality that accompanies any regular RTE, Brightspot’s RTE includes more advanced editing functions such as embedding, track changes and commenting. Here are a few tools you might have missed that can have a great impact on the quality of your content and publishing efficiency.
Brightspot provides a number of built-in search engine optimization (SEO) features that you can enable or review with any site launch. Here's a punch list of things to keep in mind as you make a play to win at SEO.
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