Zenario 9.5

Introducing Staging Mode!

Staging mode on a page lets you make a draft and share it with colleagues before it's published.

This is a great feature if you want feedback on a new content item before you publish it, while showing it to people who are not Zenario administrators.

To use it, just make a draft of a content item — either an existing content item or a v1 draft. 

How to use staging mode

Open the meta data of the content item, and look for the "Staging mode" tab. You can enter a 5-letter code, or click "Suggest" to let Zenario suggest one. This is the secret code that you can send to your colleagues, who will be able to then view the draft.

Staging mode only works with content items that are public (not private, password-protected pages).

Once you save, you'll see the thumbs-up icon in the admin toolbar.

Copy the URL, which will include the Staging code, and send it to the people who you want to review the page. They will be able to access the page immediately.

Making a whole bunch of new pages?

That's fine. Go to each content item whose draft that you want to share, and just select "Use existing code". Then you can make a whole set of pages using the same code.

When you're done, simply publish the page (or delete the draft if it didn't work out). The staging code will be removed.

Improved search engine optimisation

This version of Zenario brings some SEO improvements via improved performance, achieved by reducing the site of print stylesheets (CSS):

• They are now included along with the normal skin styles as a single download, rather than two separate downloads. This reduces the number of http requests per page as well as the total download size.
• Zenario now includes a set of pre-written CSS rules as standard, that make most web pages look well-formatted when printed (whether to PDF or hard copy). They should look well-formatted even if the site has no specific print rules in the skin.

A print stylesheet is still formatted in a similar way to previous versions of Zenario, in the sense that a designer still needs to write the rules in the print.css file in the skin.

The print.css file will be inside the skin's editable CSS directory, which is in turn inside the zenario_custom/skins directory. For example, for the Zebra Designs skin (called zebra_designs), it will be in:

 zenario_custom/skins/zebra_designs/editable_css/print.css

You will need to change your CSS!

The one and only change you need to make for 9.5 is that you will now need a media query around your print rules, e.g. like this:

@media print {
    /*
        Your print rules here
    */
}

If you are upgrading from an earlier version of Zenario prior to 9.5, you will need to modify the print.css file to add the line shown above.

More features to be announced soon

Notes for developers

If you were using the requireJSLib() and requireJSLibsForFEAs() in your plugins, these function were previously called statically.

In Zenario version 9.5 we now need to track what libraries your plugin requests, as part of our improvements to our page caching system. This means that you will now need to call them as methods, e.g.:

$this->requireJSLib(...);

or:

$this->requireJSLibsForFEAs();

You will need to change this when you update to 9.5 to avoid a PHP error.