Announcing our new CMS name

Tribiq CMS has evolved greatly over the past few years, and to go with the new interface is a new product name: Zenario.

Effectively this is version 7 of Tribiq CMS, so the upgrade path from Tribiq CMS version 6.1 to Zenario is smooth.

What’s in it the new CMS?

First, you will find a great new interface. It’s far more “sharp” than our interfaces on products up until Tribiq CMS 6.0, but we think it is clearer and faster to use.

Storekeeper has been renamed to Organizer, and the admin toolbar that sits above the front-end view of the website now just has four tabs: Navigate (with which you can browse your site), Menu (to create menu nodes and content items, and to edit the menu hierarchy), Edit (to edit web pages and put/manage plugins in slots), and Layout (to manage plugins that are in slots on the layout).

If your last version of Tribiq CMS is a couple of years old, you will find that the current four tabs replace what used to be six tabs (yes, we think it’s simpler!) and now we have our Gridmaker system which lets you actually define the layout of a web page using a grid-based design system.

Many of the old grid views have been replaced by list views, which I think is much clearer, and it’s now easier to re-order columns, sort and filter.

When publishing, it’s now really easy to do a Scheduled Publish, which used to be an Enterprise feature (and hard to find).

Users and Contacts

In the Users area, we have made some considerable changes. It’s now called Users/Contacts, so that you can discern people who can log in to an extranet area from people whose contact details you just want to store. Along with that, there are considerable changes in the data fields: the old fixed fields (business address, residential address and so on) which not everyone used have been reduced down to a minimal set of fields (email, name and a few more). In place of the ones that have been removed is a highly flexible system called Datasets.

Datasets – of which Users is just one kind of data – is a system with which an administrator can add a whole range of fields to the Users/Contacts data model. So if you want to store business address, date of birth, favourite poem…. and so on, complete customisation is possible. The system will store text fields, yes/no’s, radio buttons, checkboxes, select lists and centralised lists (like lists of countries). Look for this customisation feature in Under the Hood->Datasets->Users, add the fields you want and drag them into the order you want. You can define that a field is mandatory (administrators must enter it), or that it is a field that you want to be able search or sort on in the Organizer panel. You can even arrange it so that a field only appears if another field has been checked for a given user (for example, you say a User is a person in a certain profession, and then you get a set of additional fields about qualifications in that profession).

Once you’ve set up your Users Dataset, go back to the Users/Contacts panel and open user record, you will see your new fields there, ready to receive data.

User Forms

Building on the User Dataset system, there is now a brand-new User Forms system, with which you can create forms for use on the front-end of the site.

You’ll find it under Users/Contacts. Just create a User Form, select the fields you want, drag them into the order you want them on the form, and specify options if need be. Then create a plugin for the page where you want to deploy it, select the required User Form, and it will appear.

With User Forms, you can make a range of things, from “data capture” forms (capturing contact data and storing it), or perhaps creating a registration form for an event for extranet users. You can choose whether the User Form captures data into the Users/Contacts area, sends an email, or records a form submission, or all of those things. So really it’s very flexible in the ways you can use it.

Locations

The Locations system has received a similarly large upgrade. We’ve now got the concept of Companies, i.e. the legal entities to which Locations belong. (Okay, they may be non-profits or other types of organisation, but it’s the simple hierarchy that I’m really referring to.)

Locations also benefit from the Dataset system; here too you can specify any number of additional fields that you’d like your Locations to have.

For the front-end of Locations, we have a new module which lets you easily deploy a Google map on the front-end, with a pin for each location. You can see one in use on the new Tentipi site being built at http://tentipi.com/where-to-buy.

Documents

Our Documents system has been in use for long time, and we’ve finally overhauled the system. Downloadable documents no longer need to be content items, but instead can simply be “Documents”. The great thing is, you can manage the new Documents in a familiar hierarchical folder system (like on your hard disk), and when uploaded no longer need to be published. There is a drag and drop feature, to upload files from your local drive direct to the CMS, in a specific folder if you wish.

Documents (yes, again) benefit from the Dataset system, so again you can add fields as desired (like Title, Summary, classifications and so on). There is now a Dropbox connection (i.e. Dropbox.com) so that if you have really large files they now can be pulled directly to the CMS from Dropbox, avoiding your local storage and a possible lengthy upload process.

Along with this system comes a new Document Container module, which puts a plugin on a page so as to allow a visitor to download material. We can also create Advanced Document Search systems (we’ve already deployed several on various extranet sites).

Roll-out

We’ve been building sites on the new Zenario platform for about four months now, and are now going through a large programme of upgrades for hosted clients on older platforms.

We are currently creating an open source Community version for download, which we hope to get live in September.

 

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