2sxc 11 is out celebrating International Star Wars Day. Highlights are new Admin-UI, Razor Code-Behind, automatic Polymorphism and lots of new Apps. We're super excited - may the fourth be with you!
Brand new Cockpit, Code-Editor, Visual-Query Editor 💖
We rebuilt the Admin UI from scratch using Angular 9 and Ivy. This is a very important milestone for us, because the old UI was technically so outdated that we didn't add any more features for over a year now. Petar has been working on this full time for the last 7 months and we believe it's awesome! Thank you sooooo much 🙏!
This is the foundation of a new era - we can finally add features again without having to develop them twice 😎. This also let us create a much better UX for the code-editor and visual-query. We're really excited - have a look:
One small note: for the next few weeks we'll still include the old Admin-UI in the distribution so you can access it in case something doesn't work as expected. Just Alt-Click on toolbar buttons to open the old UI if you run into trouble, and tell us what went wrong in the github issues.
Razor Code-Behind 🚀
Razor should be simple, but often we need to do calculations or list-sorting etc. which makes the HTML look very technical. This is scary for web designers who just want to change some colors so we're introducing a new feature called Code-Behind. You can now create another file with the extension ".code.cshtml" and the same name as the view-razor, and the functions etc. will be available in the Razor file. We think this rocks!
We'll explain this more this week as we release Apps demonstrating this feature.
Automatic Polymorphism (Editions)
Most of our work (Content-Templates, Apps, etc.) are multi-edition releases, supporting multiple CSS-Frameworks or allowing a super-user to make changes to a staging-edition, while the end user still sees the live edition and nothing breaks. There are three common use cases:
- Polymorphism for Targeting Multiple-CSS-Framework: this lets views correctly adjust the output based on the CSS-Framework of a theme. Commonly used in Content-Templates and designed Apps like galleries.
- Polymorphism for Open-Heart Surgery: This allows developers to make changes in the background, while the website visitor still sees the released output. This is common for technical Apps like Mobius Forms.
- Polymorphism for A-B Testing: This allows different outputs to be tested with various target audiences. This is common for Landing-Page scenarios and similar.
Polymorphism has been with 2sxc since ca. 2sxc 9.32, but it was fairly technical to use and it made our Razor files look more like programming, so we really wanted to change it. 2sxc 11 now does most of this automatically with just a simple configuration in the views. We'll explain it more as we release Apps using this feature.
Performance, Enhancements and Hidden Features
We've also done a lot in the background which will probably remain hidden, but it's amazing anyhow. Here some examples:
- 2sxc can now easily handle apps having more than 100'000 entities (data records). This was not a common scenario in the past, but is becoming increasing more important as people leverage 2sxc in enterprise solutions.
- Editing templates and WebApi files directly from the Admin-UI is now just a click away.
- Boolean Tri-State input field
- You can now create custom input fields
- You can also configure the WYSIWYG field
- One of the hidden features we're showing now is Data-Scopes. Internally each App in 2sxc has a lot of hidden data which is meant for advanced users. In 2sxc 11 this is now easily accessible.
More to Come - Get Started Now
We'll release awesome new stuff every day for the next 11 days after International Star Wars Day, so stay tuned. 2sxc 11 is already used on production websites including 2sxc.org, so we believe it's stable and good to go.
Get 2sxc 11 from Github now - and enjoy. We would love to hear your feedback!
With 💖 from Switzerland and Croatia,
Daniel (iJungleboy), Petar (PagnoDunadan), Aaron, Roman, Tom and Tonci
PS: 2sxc 11 still runs on DNN 7.4.2 as well as the latest DNN 😁