After 6pm PST today (January 7th) we are releasing a new user interface for our content manager application and a new API backend (named Instances API)! After months of hard work engineering, the development team is truly excited for and proud of this release.

Zesty.io New Manager Interface

This newly designed interface will replace the old content authoring experience with a new experience. While much of the original user flow still exists, there are differences visually in where items are positioned. We've also improved existing elements like the publishing experience and the content navigation.

As previously announced, we've developed a faster, more intelligent interface for a better content authorship experience. As the new interface has been built in React, will ensure that we can ship new features to satisfy our customers' needs at a much faster pace. And while this is just the first step, it's a landmark for us as we're working towards an open-source React/Redux based interface of Zesty.io for developers to contribute, just like our Accounts UI on Github.

Stuart Runyan is the lead engineer with Grant Glidewell and Randy Apuzzo as core contributors. The new interface is powered by our public @zesty-io/core design system, which will be used in all UI design. While this new UI only covers the content manager, other areas will be rebuilt in the first half of 2019.

The team has built a truly remarkable content managing experience. The new manager leverages local storage to deliver a blazing-fast experience to users. The team has also condensed Markdown, WYSIWYG, and Plain Text editors into one field, so content authors can choose their editing preference.

Lastly, one of the most exciting aspects of this release is a new personalized dashboard, which is designed to streamline content authorship. We've added accelerators (smart shortcuts) to content models that authors access most often and their associated content items. We've also designed this dashboard to give content teams better insights on their consumers' consumption of your brand's content.

NOTE: Re-Authenticating Google Analytics

In order to fully take advantage of Google Analytics inside the Zesty.io manager, teams will need to re-authenticate their Google Analytics account. No data will be lost during this process;however, the app needs to be re-authenticated to view data within Zesty.io. Please contact your site administrator or team member with Google Analytics access to authenticate. If you need assistance, please reach out to our customer success team at support@zesty.io.

Zesty.io New Instances API Release

The Instances API is backend technology driven by Golang. Lead engineer Mohammad Oweis along with core contributors Wei-en Wong, Simon Prickett, Stuart Runyan and Randy Apuzzo have been working on this project for over 6 months. The work Mohammad and the team have completed is replacing much of our legacy codebase that drives customer services. The instances API powers our developer APIs (integrations), the Atom Plugin (external code editing), and the new manager interface built in React.

You can browse through the Instances API documentation at https://instances-api.zesty.org (these docs are a work in progress). A node wrapper has also been released for the Instances API, available on NPM at https://www.npmjs.com/package/zestyio-api-wrapper.

Read More About Zesty.io Scheduled Releases in Q1