XperienCentral R36

XperienCentral R36 contains a mix of improvements and bug fixes.

Extensionless Friendly URLs

The friendly URL functionality of XperienCentral’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) component has been improved. It is now possible to generate friendly URLs that have no extension. In earlier XperienCentral versions, a friendly URL had the extension .htm or .html ("contact.htm" for example). In R36, you can now generate friendly URLs (like "contact") without an extension which makes it easier for website visitors to find and remember URLs on your website.

Conflicting URL Indicator

When the desired friendly URL for a content item is already claimed by another content item, you can now quickly see that there is a conflict and identify the content item that is using the friendly URL you want.

In the SEO tab of the Properties panel, you can see that the preferred friendly URL for the current content item is already claimed if there is a conflict. In the example below, the article entitled "Contact" already has a claim on the friendly URL "/contact"  that the page "Contact" wants :

Furthermore, the name of the content item is also a direct link to the one claiming the friendly URL that the current content item also wants. This makes it easy to quickly resolve friendly URL conflicts.

Reserve URLs as Context Paths

As a result of the ability to generate friendly URLs without an extension, the need to reserve specific context paths was created. This is necessary because the path to an external application running on the same host as XperienCentral could conflict with an extensionless friendly URL. When a content item tries to claim a friendly URL that is a reserved context path, that is indicated in the “Properties of all versions” section on the SEO tab of the Properties panel. For example:

WebP Image Support 

Support for the WebP image format has been added to R36. The WebP image format has superior compression and quality characteristics compared to other formats such as JPEG and PNG. Encoding images in WebP means that they will load faster and consume less bandwidth while image quality is retained. This could also improve the SEO performance.

Custom Modular Content Improvements

Beginning in XperienCentral version R36, custom properties of Modular Content can now be imported/exported and used as facets in Advanced Search.

Upgrade to Solr 8.11.1

The version of the Solr search index tool included in XperienCentral version R36 has been upgraded to 8.11.1 which includes a number of new features and other overall improvements.

XperienCentral JCR Index Documentation

Documentation for the XperienCentral JCR Index has been added to the documentation Wiki.

Bug Fixes

In R36, as is the case with every release, a number of issues have been resolved that were either reported by a customer or were found internally and deemed to have an impact on customers.