Agility CMS sees March updates

The team over at Agility CMS have a number of updates that will be coming down the pipe over the next month or so to their clients. Here is a rundown of the expected updates.

User Generated Content Enhancements
Lots of our customers love UGC. They've been using it for all sorts of great things, and we wanted to make the most common UGC tasks even easier and faster to develop.

Comments – Setup, Development, Moderation. Easy.
You can now add comments to any Content Definition (either UGC or digital content). Just check off the “Comments” checkbox on the General Settings tab of the definition and choose Flat or Threaded. You can even add custom fields to the Comments schema that is created. What great about this is that Comments in Agility are just like any other UGC item, so if you know how to work with UGC, you know how to work with UGC comments, and it’s automatically enabled once UGC is turned on for your site.

Votes, Likes, Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down, Ratings
Now you can add voting, liking and rating to any content type with the quick check of a checkbox. Sweet! The values captured show up on each content item on the Feedback Stats tab.

UGC Input Form Updates
Building on the work we did with input forms on our last release, we’ve added a bunch of things to the UGC side of things this time around, including Tabs, Custom Sections, Dropdown fields, Custom Scripts and more. As always, we think the most important part of Agility is making things easy, so we will continue to tweak this stuff over the next few iterations to bring all of the features into alignment between UGC and the rest of Agility.

Email Templates
You can now custom all of the Email Templates that Agility uses to send alerts and notification emails out to your content moderator and website users. Just look for “Workflow Alert Email Templates” and “User Generated Content and Website Users Alert Email Templates” in the Settings section.

New OData API for Shared Content
OData is a great protocol for content APIs. By enabling OData for Shared Content, we’ve given you a complete API for XML and JSON/JSONP that allows you to access your content from anywhere. It’s easy to enable, too. Just check off “Enable API Output” on the Advanced tab of your Shared Content, and it will be included in the data exposed by the API.
We’ll have more documentation about how to work with the OData API for Shared Content over at developer.agilitycms.com soon.

MVC Support
We were so excited about this that we already blogged about it here!
The long and the short of it is that MVC and Agility are a great fit, and we can’t wait to see what our customers will do with it. To make life easy, we’ve added some features that make MVC development a real joy with Agility, including adding strong types for every Content and Module Definition in the system.

Microsites
Also, we’ve added Microsites, so that with MVC you can build different website templates that can easily share the same content from the site, using a folder to contain the pages for each microsite. For instance, you can keep www.mysite.com, m.mysite.com, ipad.mysite.com all separated in Agility, and they will be automatically routed for you through MVC.

URL Redirections
When you rebuild your site, it is critical to redirect URLs from the old site to new pages on the new site in order to maintain your Page Rank. This is critical to ensure that your hard won search engine optimization achievements are maintained with the rebuilt site. As expected, setting up URL redirections is super easy.

My Accounts
One of the things we wanted to make easier in Agility was the idea of customer self-service. That’s why we create the new My Accounts page. It shows you all of the website accounts that you have in Agility and lets you set up the billing and technical contact information for each account.

You can even set up new sites and add them to you login, right from Agility itself, making it much quicker and easier to set up a new site.

Website Hosting in Azure (Beta)
Agility websites can now be hosted in Azure.
Website hosting has never been easier.

Improved Website Diagnostics
We’ve switched up the way diagnostics happen for your website. The API for tracing and logging is the same, but we made it easier for you to see what’s happening behind the scenes for your site when it’s in development mode. If you do have an error in development, the top bar will turn red and give you a link to the log file, so you can see what happened right from your browsers. Also, you can now sign up to receive error messages from the website by email in the Settings section of Agility. Any error emails are syndicated into a digest and sent as they occur, once every 15 minutes.

See more information and images at Agility Blog Post [http://www.agilitycms.com/blog/Agility-Release-March-2011.aspx]