Affino 7.3 Release - Usability and Stability

Affino 7.3 is very much a usability and stability release prior to the major Affino 7.5 release, there are some great improvements though as always. Imports and Exports have greatly improved in this release. All imports are moving to XLS format making it easier to manage your products and allowing for much faster imports. 

 

We have another major invites update which makes Invites in Affino as good as any you’ll find. We’ve improved all aspects of the invites and now provide richer more usable interfaces.

 

Most of the enhancements in this release build on the new architecture we now have in place and focus on smoothing out the performance curves further and ensuring all tasks run faster and more effectively, whilst ensuring the fastest response times for real users when browsing and engaging with sites.

 

There are some great usability enhancements like the ’nuclear’ refresh; ’select all’ on the popup multi-selectors, and enhanced template management. We’ve also introduced key elements such as Referral Analysis, and the new Panels Design Element.

 

Upgrade Guidance

 

The Affino 7.3 is very much a stability release and is an essential update for all Affino sites. It is an easy update, simply go through the standard update process.

 

It is essential that you run through the complete update process starting with the Affino Updater, followed by the System Update, Re-Initialise Site, Design Element Update, Skin Update and finally Clear Guest Cache; all of which are available on the Settings > Update screen. 

 

Key Enhancements

 

Imports / Exports

 

All imports have been changed to Excel (XLS) format from XLS format as we found that these would run up to 1,000 times faster than with the CSV formatted imports. The Exports remain as CSVs as they are more efficient. 

 

We have also added a new import verification process for Catalogue and Article imports. This will notify you of any item in the import which has an error, which line and which fields, and which values are incorrect. We will look to roll this out to all the imports in the future.

 

Finally we have added a new tracking system that allows you to track imports and exports. We’re piloting this with Catalogue Item Imports and Exports and Order Exports. You will be able to see at any point what imports / exports are currently running, by whom and which records were last processed. You will see them both on a centralised Active Tasks screen . This is a big step up for visibility on what’s going on, and should reduce the chance of multiple imports and exports being processed at the same time.

 

 

Added together these are a very significant improvement in the whole import / export process and will result in much faster processing and faster sites overall as less resources are used in processing the imports and exports. 

 

Invites v3

 

We loved the updates we did for invites 2, but they didn’t look great and there were some real-world usability issues. So we’ve gone back to the drawing board again and have introduced a new design, made invites even easier, added separate LinkedIn alerts, updated the Pending Invites to track Google and LinkedIn invites as well and refined the whole experience for everyone.

 

We’ve also added the ability to refresh you LInkedIn and Google contacts lists, see more details on on-site members, and more easily browse between your different contact groups.

 

Performance Improvements

 

We’ve added a number of elements in this release to help improve performance and reliability throughout Affino. In particular we have improved handling of long running tasks such as imports and exports, message sending, feed handling and data processing. We now do resource checks to see how busy servers are before running the tasks, and will automatically reschedule for later.

 

We are also both distributing and centralising tasks more intelligently. Some tasks are now run off each application node that were previously running centrally, whereas others which are communicating with external nodes are now centrally managed. This means higher overall performance and more consistent delivery.

 

Usability

 

On the Display side we’ve added a ‘nuclear refresh’ button which now sits on the App bar and is an all-in-one refresh. You no longer have to do separate cache, page cache, skin regeneration refreshes, just push the button. We’ve further evolved the Edit and Relate functions on the content panel to make them smarter in detecting what’s the main content on the page for you to edit, and we’ve improved the Live Design panels to make it clearer what Design Styles you are working with.

 

On the Control side we’ve updated all the popup multi-selectors to add a Select All option, and made it much easier to select tick-boxes throughout the Control Centre, especially in listings when you’re selecting many of them. There’s also dozens of lesser improvements which will ease your experience further.

 

Other Enhancements

 

Article Imports - can now handle much higher loads and process many more records in one go than previously, also now automatically index all inbound content (on top of all the other enhancements outlined above)

 

Brightcove Integration - added support for more types of Brightcove player embedding

 

Customer Ladder - it is now possible to use track cancelled purchases and use them to trigger actions

 

Feature Scroller - the browse thumbnails can now be vertically and horizontally aligned

 

Form Style - New Mouseover and Inactive button states on forms mean that they can be better looking and more intuitive.

 

Incoming Feeds - now automatically search indexed

 

Invite Friends DE - it is now possible to have it horizontally or vertical

 

Login DE - new register option

 

Member Points DE v1 - new design element which displays the number of points a member has accrued via the Customer Ladder.

 

Panel DE v1 - new Panel design element allows you to list out content in panels, whether it’s articles, products or media. Will be very useful with the move to responsive design.

 

Recruitment - numerous further refinements to the recruitment experience including improved candidate messaging

 

Referral Analysis v1 - we’ve added a new Referral tracking screen. This tracks all inbound sources, links and searches. It allows you to drill down through entire sites (zones) down to specific articles to see what the inbound sources are, as well as charting the overall referral tracking volumes. It’s a great new addition.

 

 

Template Management - now also handles JavaScript code

 

Tips DE - new styling options for more flexible layouts

 

Fixes and Minor Enhancements

 

Fixes are elements which didn’t work as well as they should, and have now been made to work better. Minor enhancements provide subtle improvements that most people won’t notice, but which nonetheless improve on the overall Affino experience.

 

Alerts DE

 

Article Sort Order

 

Blogs / Blog Highlights DE

 

Broken Link Analysis

 

Buttons / Panels

 

Caching

 

Checkout

 

Comments Highlights

 

Contacts

 

Control Login

 

Customer Ladder Analysis

 

Email Profile

 

Encryption

 

Forums / Forum Highlights DE

 

Geo Targeting

 

Google Merchant Centre

 

Incoming Feeds

 

Lead Export

 

Media Library / Media Item Detail Import / Media Embeds (YouTube)

 

Message Campaigns

 

Object Designer

 

Online Directory

 

Password Reminder

 

Personalisation Profile

 

Product Search

 

Recruitment Profile / Job Search

 

Registration / Demographic / Redirects

 

Salary Range

 

Search Profile

 

SEO Import

 

Shopping Basket DE

 

Site Analysis

 

Site Search

 

Store Credits

 

Topics / Topic Filter DE

 

User / User Export

 

Removed

 

No elements removed in this release, but expect quite a few to be trimmed in Affino 7.5.

 

Integration Updates

 

These are integrations which have had essential maintenance in this release, if you rely on any of them then you’ll want to update at the earliest opportunity:

 

Brightcove

 

Dropbox

 

Google Contacts

 

Google Merchant Centre

 

LinkedIn

 

YouTube

 

Component Changes

 

Affino benefits from using some great frameworks, here are the updates we’ve rolled out for these frameworks in this release:

 

JQuery same

 

JQueryUI same

 

HighCharts same

 

TinyMCE same