daniel
Daniel Rotter
Core developer and support guru. Passionate traveler and soccer player.
@danrot90

Sulu 1.2

With the 1.2 release we finally have adapted our new quarterly release cycle. And we've made it with only a few days delay ;-) So I am very excited to go through the most important new features and technical changes in this blog post.

Technical changes

– PHP7 support 
We have worked on PHP7 support and can confirm that it is really a lot faster. There will be a separate blog post with some benchmarks on this topic. 

– Symfony 2.8 support
We also updated to Symfony 2.8 but there are still some deprecation warnings so we are not Symfony 3.0 ready yet.

– Windows tests
We have some good news for all our Windows users out there: We are now running our tests also on Windows, thanks to AppVeyor.

General improvements

– New french translations
C’est génial: Sulu parle français maintenant! Many thanks to @cbastienbaron who added all the french translations to our administration interface.

– Data export
Data lists now have a very handy export function. Admins can download a copy of the data as a CSV just by the click of a button. This also works with big datasets since we are using PHP's streaming feature here.

– Restructured navigation
Probably the most visible change in 1.2 is the restructured main navigation on the left side. By popular demand we have moved the Webspaces to the top as they are the most clicked sections of a content management solution.

– Multiple-user warning
Sulu now warns you whenever multiple users are editing the same record in real time - at least when you have Websockets enabled. Otherwise this info will be displayed when users open the record. This works by default for contacts, accounts, categories, user roles, pages and snippets. The best thing about it is that it's super easy to add this functionality to your own bundles. Just check out our our documentation.

– Overwrite warning
The current state of snippets and pages are now stored in a hash. This enables the system to warn you whenever you are about to override the work of another content manager (you can of course still override the latest changes if you want).

New features for online marketing

We have promised more features for online marketing and here they are! With the new Webspace settings digital marketeers get very helpful functionalities to support and automate their campaigns. 

– Support for multiple analytics keys
To get the most out of your site analytics multiple keys per Webspace can now be defined. This is very helpful if you run e.g. AdWords campaigns which performance you want to track. We’ve also added support for Piwik or custom keys so you are not limited to Google products.

– Custom URLs and landing-pages
Administrators can create custom short URLs without the need of a developer. These can then be linked to any page of your Webspace and you can even skip the standard localization of the system. Creating landing-pages for campaigns could not be easier!

Content management improvements

– Default snippet 
Another very popular requested were default snippets. They can now be set by administrators in the Webspace settings for each snippet template. This default can then be easily loaded in twig templates. It can also be used as a fallback in case no snippet has been selected inside the page.

– Checkbox and radio-buttons grouping
Sulu is now capable of managing content using checkboxes and radio-buttons. Multiple checkboxes or radios can be grouped together. This gives admins a clean and easy to use interface.

Summary

All in all there are some great improvements in Sulu 1.2 - both technical and functional. Don't forget to checkout our updated documentation. Now, download the latest release, test it out and let us know what you think!