Roxen Internet Software

Version 4.5 is a significant update to Roxen CMS. The most visible changes are found in the page editor, but a lot has improved in many other areas of the product.

The main goal for the updated page editor is to significantly reduce the number of mouse clicks needed in regular editing tasks. With the changes in 4.5 you can:

• Reach the component editor form with a single mouse click.
• Jump between different component editor forms with a single mouse click.
• Save changes to a page and return to preview mode with a single mouse click.

This version introduces a built-in clipboard to let you cut, copy and paste components within a page or across different pages. Your clipboard is stored on the server and can hold multiple components at the same time.

The integrated rich-text editor module has been upgraded to FCK Editor version 2.2. This gives faster loading, better browser compatibility and enhanced context menus. It also results in increased customization options for administrators who want to vary the toolbar depending on which sub-directory/sub-site you are working in.

A new sidebar panel gives you a good overview of all pages you are working on at any moment. This sidebar can be shown or hidden at any time. The list of page titles is presented in a way that mirrors the site structure and all items are just a mouse click away.

This toolbar tab lets you access your settings and also lets you find the product documentation without first switching to the more advanced Content Editor environment.

When clicking the New button, you can now assign a custom name to the directory where a the page is placed. Another enhancement is that you get a chance to select from many stationeries when available.

During publishing it's now possible to provide a descriptive log message.

Starting in this version Roxen CMS will display a graphical conflict resolution interface when you are asked to merge a recently published version into your own version of a page.

In this new and powerful interface you can decide on which components you want to keep, incorporate text from both revisions if necessary, and finally preview different resolutions to component placement conflicts.

This is a complete rewrite and is now based on the page component model. This new implementation lets you insert form elements into any page, control the layout via XSLT and also make use of traditional Roxen CMS features such as version control, workflow and multilingual content for your forms.

You create your forms with simple building blocks:

• Predefined selections: radio buttons, check boxes and drop-down menus.
• Text input fields: text, numeric, date, e-mail and URL values.
• Special components: custom submit buttons and page breaks.

The module includes report tools that also are available as page components. Export to Microsoft Excel is possible for further analysis of submitted data.

The improved Forum now supports unauthenticated users to post messages. There are also additional capabilities letting users subscribe to threads or forums and a convenient quoting feature when responding to a posting.

With this update moderators are able to limit attachment size, lock or hide threads, edit postings and remove attachments, and ban IP addresses.

By placing an RSS component in your page you can subscribe to an external RSS source and display the headlines within your page. The module will fetch the latest headlines periodically and also keep a local cache in case the remote server is temporarily down.

This module used to be available as a separate install but has now been incorporated into the product distribution for easier activation.

Roxen CMS ships with a site framework called the Basic site. It is used as a starting point for new projects, to demostrate Roxen CMS capabilities, or just to learn from when teaching customers and partners about Roxen CMS development.

In version 4.5 the Basic site templates have been redesigned from scratch to take advantage of CSS. This means that the HTML page output will not contain elaborate markup consisting of tables or transparent pixels. Instead you get greater freedom in styling components, page layout and navigation menus with CSS.

The benefits are:

• You are better prepared for design variations.
• It's necessary for improving accessibility.
• You can more easily optimize layout for printing as well as special devices.

The previous Basic site is kept in parallel in case you upgrade an existing installation, but for new projects we strongly recommend adopting the CSS variant.

Web developers have been given a couple of new features in the Content Editor interface:

• Direct access to XML editing for other content types that are derived from XML.
• Interactive searching for filenames across the whole repository.
• Display and sort file listings on last change date.
• View persistent disk cache dependencies and monitor the cache crawler.