Affino 6.0.13 Mindmap

This release sees the biggest leap in Affino’s usability we have ever made. There have been hundreds of improvements made so that Affino is easier to learn and use. The biggest change is the complete reworking of the Control Centre, and although many of the changes are subtle, everything is now within easy reach. Two clicks and a swipe when using tablets or mobiles.

The usability changes go further to make it much easier to set up security, build page designs, style your sites, run stores and tailor the SEO on each Zone. We also removed a great deal of legacy functionality which has allowed us to streamline Affino further and innovate the new flat navigation that you get in this release.

Ecommerce is the second area which has seen some dramatic improvements. We now have Timezone support for the first time in Affino, so that you can run sites and stores across multiple regions on the same instance. Campaign driven commerce is greatly improved with better campaign management, catalogue management, coupon and order management, product search and product drill-down menu.

We have also improved the shopping experience with a great new drop-down shopping basket and the login overlay which allows for improved direct selling of subscriptions / memberships from the login page.

A major new feature is the introduction of the Funding Platform into Affino. People familiar with KickStarter and similar fundraising sites will be at home using the Affino version.

Many more elements have been Zoned particularly within lookups and Analytics, where Channel, Content and Site Analysis are all now Zoned for the first time. This takes Affino further towards our goal of being able to Zone the whole Control Centre. Watch out also for the tweaks we’ve made to the App Bar, they take a bit of getting used to, but you’ll notice that you speed up over time.

Altogether there were nearly 300 projects completed for this release, and we had to re-write the Affino updater to be able to handle the scope of all the changes, making this by far the biggest update yet.

We see Affino 6.0.13 as great foundation release to build on this year, and the changes we’ve made will allow us to drive forward on the plans for 2012 and accelerate Affino’s development moving ahead. Expect another release later in March to round out Affino further.