Zenario 8.8

Version 8.8 of Zenario is now available, and comes with several improvements in administration mode.

Installing Zenario with multisite support

Zenario already supports the ability to have a single hub installation (database and Zenario install), but numerous satellite sites. In 8.8, when installing Zenario, you now have the ability to specify the database connection to the global multisite database, as well as the local database parameters. When specified, Zenario then writes both lots of settings to the zenario_siteconfig file. This previously had to be done manually. Then when logging in, an administrator can either provide their local admin login details, or their global admin login details, if they have an account on the global site.

This is a great advantage for organisations running multiple copies of Zenario, such as hosting providers and web designers. The web designer, for example, would then log in with their global credentials for any of their client sites, while client users would log in to their site with their local credentials.

Improvements to Organizer

Organizer now has a new friendly "Organizer start" page, that you see when opening Organizer. This has links to every major part of Organizer.

When logging in to Zenario, the last login time and IP address of the administrator are displayed.

The overall layout of Organizer has been improved, with improvements to the positions of the search box, action buttons and panel navigation.

We've added a new "Find services" box. If you're looking for a feature, but cannot remember where in Organizer it is, you can use this to quickly find it.

There is now a "Support line" button in the top-right of Organizer and the admin toolbar. This pops up a form in which an administrator can write a question. It gets sent to the support mailbox of the site, as set in the zenario_siteconfig file.

When viewing a content items flat-view panel in Organizer, it's now easier to see if the item is attached to the menu, or if it is an orphan.

Editing content items

It's now possible to edit the text of the current content item's menu node at the same time as editing the content item's metadata, i.e. in the same admin box. So you can edit the menu text at the same time as adjusting the title, other metadata, and content. (Changes to menu node text take place immediately, they are not version-controlled).

When editing any content item, there is now colour-coding within the page to indicate where the content is coming from:

• green indicates version-controlled content, whether published or not
• pink indicates library plugins that are on the current content item
• purple indicates library plugins that are on the layout of the current content item (any changes will of course affect all content items using that layout)
• purple also indicates menu plugins, as these are always set on the layout.

You can click a coloured area to switch to between the different modes, rather than needing to click the Edit, Edit plugins, Edit menu and Layout tabs.

There is now a History tab on the admin box of every content item, which shows the history of drafting and publishing that content item.

When in Organizer in a content items panel, there's now a link under the Settings icon to enable more content types.

Scheduled publishing

When setting a content item to be published at some time in the future, the interface has been improved. The admin box now makes it clear when a content item is scheduled to be published, and by whom, with the same information visible in Organizer.

Forms

We have fixed some bugs in the Forms editor, which could give a partially empty page after making changes to fields and then saving. This should now no longer occur.

Users and locations

When making a smart group, you can now filter by users and contacts who are in a specific group, and who are not in a specific group.

In addition, when viewing a smart group, you can now delete users/contacts from this view.

When the Enterprise Organization Manager module is installed, which supports user-role-location relationships, sub-roles are now supported. A user who is given a sub-role also automatically is given the parent role.

Minor changes

• Menu nodes, which can have images, now support retina images for higher quality.
• Added compatibility with Maxmind GeoLite2 for improved GeoIP lookups.
• Emails sent when in Email Debug mode now show a "debug was on" indicator in the Sent Email log.
• When changing the alias of a content item, the page now reloads using the new alias.
• On large sites, with large menu hierarchies, there is now a better safeguard against deleting too many menu nodes at once; it's now not possible to delete a menu node if any of its child nodes in turn have child nodes.
• Administrators are now prevented from having email-like usernames.
• Content Summary Lists that show things in a category, now make it clear when a category is public, which is necessary for the category name to be displayed.
• For extranet sites, the User Redirector plugin has been improved to allow more rules to be set, i.e. where to redirect a user to, after login, depending on groups and other rules; an administrator now sees an appropriate message from this plugin, rather than being redirected.

Bug fixes

• You can no longer copy or duplicate a document-type content item.
• If you attempt to use an alias that already exists, you'll now see an appropriate error message.

Notes for hosting providers

When installing Zenario, we now check that the MySQL max_packet_size config setting is not too small.

PHP errors are now reported to the support email address, previously the reporting was only on MySQL database errors.