RC1 Release of django CMS 3.2
We've worked to introduce a few extra things before feature-freeze, which is now in effect starting with this release candidate RC1 of django CMS 3.2.
As readers may recall from previous blog posts, django CMS version 3.2 is all about streamlining the content creation process for content editors. To that aim, we’re sure you’ll find that managing content in this release is much more responsive and intuitive.
Here's a fairly completely list of the updates so far:
- Significant and numerous UI/UX enhancementsincluding:
- Full touch device support (Tablet, Tabletops, Phablets)
- Larger UI elements for touch
- Better responsiveness design for smaller screens
- Improvements to clipboard
- New welcome/initial/start screen
- Overhauled "structure mode": it is now significantly more responsive and faster
- Overhauled the toolbar: new design, clean, responsive
- Switch to SVG for iconography
- Overhauled JS/CSS
- Improvements in enforcing parent plugin restricts on frontend
- Removed "Alias" item from list of plugins (Create Alias still available)
- New content creation wizard capability (see: Content Creation Wizards)
- Replace 'develop.py' with enhanced 'manage.py' (developers take note)
- Pulls Aldryn Apphook Reload into core
- Renamed cms_app, cms_menu, cms_toolbar to plural versions
But, this is just a list. You have to try it to see just how responsive and intuitive the new UI/UX feels. (See installation instruction below). We hope to hear from testers to get their feedback (preferrably in the form of GitHub issues and pull requests)
Content Creation Wizards
Also in the same vein of speedy content creation, there is now a new feature called Content Creation Wizards which is an extensible tool for helping content editors quickly add content to their site. To start, content editors will click the new button labeled "Create" located in the toolbar. This will present a dialog of choices (based on the users' permission levels):
Selecting an item (in this case New Page) then pressing "Next" brings the user to the next step, which, in this case is a much simplified page-creation form. Some smarts were added to the form to take care of many of the default options.
After providing a page title and some arbitrary text content, the user presses "Create" and a new page is created complete with a new text plugin containing their provided content. The content editor is then free to further customise as they see fit.
Extensibility
The other choices shown on the first wizard screen are from other apps that were added to the project (Aldryn NewsBlog, Aldryn FAQ and a test app: Things). The wizard definitions for these options reside in the respective projects. Alternatively, the wizard API makes it very easy for a project to add new, remove existing, or even re-arrange the options shown. This should make it clear to developers just how easily extended this is.
There are some limitations to the wizard in this release: namely that there is only one wizard allowed per Content Type (model) and only one "step" per wizard. We hope to remove these limitations and add even more capability for the final release.
Installation Instructions
To give the new RC1 release a try, follow these simple steps:
- Create and activate a virtual env;
- Use djangocms-installer to install the "latest" release;
- Remove the latest production releases with:
pip uninstall django-cms pip uninstall djangocms-admin-style pip uninstall djangocms-text-ckeditor
- Install the latest version of supporting projects:
pip install https://github.com/divio/djangocms-admin-style/archive/develop.zip pip install https://github.com/divio/djangocms-text-ckeditor/archive/develop.zip
- Install the latest RC1 with:
pip install https://github.com/divio/django-cms/archive/3.2.0.rc1.zip
- And optionally:
pip uninstall django-filer pip install https://github.com/stefanfoulis/django-filer/archive/develop.zip
- Be sure to run sync/migrations:
python manage.py syncdb python manage.py migrate
Now, you're off to the races!
