Sulu 2.0.0-alpha2 released

Two weeks ago we have released the first alpha of Sulu 2.0 and we want to make the releases more frequently now. So we have already pushed the second alpha which added some more features and tinier enhancements.

The smaller enhancements include a nicer design of the ColumnList in which the pages are shown and some corrections regarding positioning of certain elements.

Additionally the ColumnList now also shows more information: It displays if a given title is just a fallback from another language. This happens when it is a so called "ghost" page, meaning that the page does not exist in the language you have currently loaded. Apart from that the published state of the page (the green and yellow icons, which have already existed in Sulu 1.x in a similar way) is also shown.

Quite soon after the first alpha people were mentioning that it wasn't possible to delete a page. Since we agree that this is a very important functionality we have added it on the ColumnList navigation.

Another enhancement in the ColumnList is that it remembers which page has been opened before and that the datagrid sends a different request to load all of these elements at once. Currently the active element is only remembered for the current session, but the persistent storage will also be implemented before the final release.

Since we have decided to focus on the content management part of Sulu for now we have also decided to implement the ghost dialog. This dialog appears if a form is opened in a language in which the the entity does not exist. The overlay asks you if you want to copy the content from a different language. This currently works for snippets and pages.

And last but not least the SEO tab was added to the form for pages. This tab allows you to add meta title, meta descriptions etc. and also shows a small search engine preview. The nice thing here is that in Sulu 1.x this was a completely custom view which had to handle quite a lot of stuff. With Sulu 2.0 we could use our standard form component and just developed a simple FieldType which is displaying the search engine preview. This again shows that our new UI strategy was the right decission and that implementing stuff like this in your own application should also be fairly easy.