Affino 7.5.6 Release - Responsive Design Breakthroughs

Managing your Responsive Affino site just got a lot easier with the Affino 7.5.6 release. There are a number of great enhancements focused on making you more productive, and opening up more of Affino on the responsive side. We’ve made it much easier to add new content listings, create great looking advanced articles, add online forms,  and showcase your content and media with greatly improved highlights elements such as the article and media listing design elements.

 

All of these elements have been rolled out on the v7 Responsive Design framework, which is quickly proving itself to be a much faster, easier and more capable way to deploy stylish and engaging sites. We’re now on the home stretch for delivering the v1 Affino Responsive Design Centre which we’ve been working towards for the last four and a half years. Expect it in the next release.

 

In the meantime, we fixed all the gremlins with the existing beta release design centre and added some nice new smarts  to ensure your Skins (page designs) are that much easier to manage than before. One of the milestone design capabilities are Design Panels which you can use to create modal dialogues (drop-downs / popups) which can include any design element, or combination thereof.

 

Forms have been transformed in this release, with every responsive form reworked to the new v7 quality level. This means that everything from the registration, profile updates, login, password reminder and online forms have been reworked and now look great across all devices. 

 

Additionally we’ve launched a great extension to the Affino CRM with a new Projects management area which allows you to do everything from store project contacts and documents securely, through to task management, time logging and billing.

 

We have an exciting calendar of updates for Affino for the year ahead, and this is just the first of what will be a series of great releases that we’re looking forward to sharing with you.

 

Upgrade Guidance

 

The Affino 7.5.x releases are essential updates for all Affino sites. It is an easy update, simply go through the standard update process. You may need a new licence key to access the updated CRM elements if you have not yet requested one, so please contact your account manager. It is important to note though that there are Significant Responsive Updates which may affect the styling of your site with this release so please co-ordinate any update with support from the Affino team.

 

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. 

 

We have further tweaked the core responsive engine in this release, so if you are running a staging instance make sure you verify design consistency there first. if you’re not, please book in update assistance with the Affino team to support you with resolving any design issues which arise from this release.

 

Key Enhancements

 

Panels

 

It is now possible to implement Panels on responsive skins. These can be used for drop-down and mega menus, in fact any time you need an overlay menu both on desktop and mobile. You can create any Design Object and assign it to the Responsive Button Design Element (Button DE) at which point the panel will display when clicking on or mouse-overing the button. This is a great step forward as it means that the menus no longer have to be scripted as has been the case to-date on responsive.

 

Start Breakpoints

 

We have added the ability to set the Start Breakpoint for a design element layout. This is a crucial development. Until now all design elements have been designed to resize nicely as the browser gets narrower, however the original starting point was always set to be the fluid start point for full-screen display. That did not work well when a design element was only being used on a part of the page. 

 

By being able to select the starting breakpoint we can optimise the elements to be the ideal size and layout irrespective of how they’re used. We will need to tweak all the design elements to be aware of the new attribute, but once in place it will be much simpler to roll out new Skins and tweak existing layouts.

 

Responsive Forms v7

 

We have updated the responsive forms to use the new v7 engine. Which means great new consistency in styling on the forms across all breakpoints, with minimal (or no) custom CSS required for forms. We have also updated the error handling so that errors and guidance are now much more clearly highlighted. 

 

Along the way we have made it easier to create high impact forms with the new Highlight Button style so that each form can have one or more easily highlighted buttons. You can now create Online Form directories with the new responsive form listing and detail screens. We also added support for key new responsive form fields including predictive text and WYSIWYG fields.

 

Responsive Products v7

 

We have re-worked extensively the responsive product listing and detail pages to now work with the new v7 engine. They look great and respond well through all breakpoints. We’ve added a new quantity drop-down on the the buying option to let users easily buy multiple items right from the project pages.

 

Responsive Shopping Basket DE v7

 

New responsive shopping basket which has been evolved and optimised to work across all mobile devices, whilst still providing a great desktop experience. We no longer have the popup basket, however we instead display a notification that a product has been added to the basket on the DE.

 

Projects

 

Projects is a major new CRM element, allowing you to manage the core elements for projects. You can easily add a project, with all the key contacts, documents and information. It is possible to track all tasks, contact notes, time spent and project threads directly against each project, so that for the first time the project becomes a full part of the workflow.

 

Each project can be secured to a specific security clearance, and has the usual audit trail in place.  Projects are directly connected with Contracts and in turn Bills for tight credit control.

 

 

Other Enhancements

 

Accounts - now display the Company Number and Account Manager in the main panel, also have moved the custom tab to the top of the Detail tab. On the Account listing it is now possible to filter by the company number and to see it in the listing. We have also introduced Account Merge so that it is now possible to merge accounts in the same way as it has been possible to merge contacts. Simply select and account and the one you wish to merge it into.

 

Article Export - added a number of fields to the article export to make it more useful including: Section, Multi-display, Presentation Style, Live, Publish Start and Publish End

 

Broken Link Analysis - we’ve extended Broken Link analysis to be Zone aware so that it now works well across multiple Zones. Export also updated.

 

Channel - new attribute to display section titles, when selected the Section Title is displayed on each listed article.

 

Creatives - it is now possible to delete creatives, essential for responsive setups where you might not want to display ads on all breakpoints.

 

Forums - it is now possible to manage un-subscribers as well as subscribers to forums. Essential for knowing the big picture and to be able to support users who are not sure of their subscription history or current status.

 

Redirects - new Redirect Export option for exporting redirects, along with updated Redirect Import makes it much easier to round-trip redirects when you’re doing bulk updates. We have also updated redirects to minimise the chance that they set up loops, i.e. redirecting to the same page.

 

Responsive Article Listing - added ability to display the author and date on each article, also added the ability to target users based on their interests.

 

Responsive Article Steps - new v7 design framework for greatly improved styling, layouts and spacing. Updated step management so that it’s not possible to create the first step as a float, and to have two steps immediately next to each other both floating. Makes it easier to manage steps with fewer issues.

 

Responsive Auto-Related Content DE - updated to auto-display related content on the Channel, Section and Article levels.

 

Responsive Blogs - now use the v7 Responsive Design Framework, also added back in support for the image scroller.

 

Responsive Channel Details DE - new v7 design framework update for improved styling

 

Responsive Channel Listing - new v7 listing for channels and sections

 

Responsive Design Styles - new Highlight Button settings, new HR based horizontal rule (i.e. no longer uses images for dividers)

 

Responsive Levels DE - new v7 design framework for greatly improved styling, layouts and spacing. 

 

Responsive Link Article - new v7 design framework responsive link article, allows for smart navigation and external content highlights throughout your content listings.

 

Responsive Recruitment - new responsive recruitment registration, covers all the key attributes required for profiling candidates; new Apply for Job popup to help streamline the job application process.

 

Responsive Registration - This is a major update to the registration process. We have enabled the Recruitment attributes on the registration and profile updating so that it is now possible to capture essential candidate profiling information right from the registration. To set this up you need to have the Member Types set up and associated with Recruitment Sector Profiles. We have also added in all the missing fields from the Classic registration, with the exception of Affiliate which will be in a future release.

 

Responsive Search - speeded up the search, no longer reload page between searches. The search now also automatically surfaces articles available to the user at their engagement wall / paywall level.

 

Responsive Two Column Listing - new responsive listing template for listing out Channels and Sections in two columns.

 

Responsive Simple Article - updated to v7 design framework for better consistency and look and feel of the article content.

 

Subscription Plan - numerous fixes and enhancements on the subscription plans mean that we’re now ready to work on the next phase which is the up-coming Subscription management screens.

 

Tasks - added Start Time for more granularity on the timing of tasks.

 

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.

 

Affino About Page - updated

 

Account Import - fixed

 

App Bar - numerous fixes, mainly to add support for more content types

 

Article Highlights DE - fixed

 

Article Import - now generates screen names reliably

 

Button DE - fixed auto-link

 

Checkout - more address / shipping related issues resolved

 

Comment Notifications - fixed

 

Cookie Policy - fixed

 

Login - resolved issues with logins on new Zones

 

Skins - resolved Skin update error

 

Media Listing - fixed

 

Media Upload - fixed when using workflows and for incorrect redirects

 

Member Profile DE - fixed

 

My Information Profile - fixed

 

Opportunity and Opportunity Analysis - minor improvements

 

Responsive Blogs - fixed numerous issues including now displaying all the images

 

Responsive Button DE - fixed auto-link issue

 

Responsive Cookie Policy - fixed

 

Responsive Ecards - fixed

 

Responsive Feature Scroller - fixed

 

Responsive Gallery Article - resolved numerous issues when many different image sizes are used in a gallery

 

Responsive Levels DE - further enhanced so that all the settings are now enabled and actionable, also resolved issue so full hierarchy is now consistently displayed.

 

Responsive Media Listing - numerous fixes

 

Responsive Member Listing - add contact fix

 

Responsive Simple Article - improved layout

 

Responsive Skins - Copying now works for assigned Design Scripts

 

Responsive Video Player - fixed layout issues

 

Security - set-auto complete to off for key login and registration fields. Added audit panels to Security Group and Security Right management screens so it is now clear who originally created and last updated these key security elements.

 

Removed

 

This Affino release sees a number of elements removed in preparation of the move to Responsive, including:

 

Nothing removed in this release.

 

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:

 

Salesforce - improved the mailing list subscriber sync

 

Component Changes

 

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

 

JQuery updated to 2.20

 

JQueryUI updated to N/A

 

HighCharts updated to 4.1.10

 

TinyMCE updated to 4.3.3

 

Video.js updated to 5.4.6