2021 was a strong year that included new product enhancements and product development that met customer needs. Lots of planning for scaling the business was done, too. We analyzed and improved internal processes in preparation for growth in 2022. We hired new executive members, bolstered the engineering team and will be more than doubling our team size in the next 12 months. 

In 2021 product updates focused on supporting developers with powerful tools that reduce time to market and coding labor.  You can see how we achieved this in our Enhancement Summary below. 

In 2022, we are changing gears to deliver product updates focused on the marketer's experience. We kick off the year by introducing Duo Mode Editor. Duo Mode gives real-time viewing of content editing. It consolidates the process of editing, saving, and viewing edits to content fields by keeping these tasks in a single view in the Manager. It comes replete with collapsible content nav sections for maximal page real estate utilization and affords marketers a huge advantage when looking to iterate on content quickly by getting immediate content editing feedback. Check out the video demo here.

2021 Product Enhancement Summary

Below is a collection of the more significant 2021 product improvements by quarter: 

Q1

• Rearchitected media section with improved UI and more features including the ability to hide files/folders, deep links, accessible metadata and more: 

(Before)

(After)

• Preview locks to keep preview links secure:
  
  
  
  

• Display of user timezone in content status boxes:
  
  
  
  
  

• Addition of a base directory for site.css, site.js, robots.txt, sitemap.xml & more.
  
  

Q2

• Introduction of Parsley Auto Layout (PAL) for automatically created HTML structures based on single & multi page models. PAL can be used on Parsley calls that reference a single content item’s calls (this, loop variables and data calls). Eg: 

{{this.autolayout ( ) }}

{{ each model as item }}

{{ item.autoLayout (stacked) }}  {{ end-each}}

{{ model.first ( ) .autoLayout (auto) }}

• Wildcard Redirects for redirecting entire paths. Another highly requested breakthrough feature launched created was Wildcard Redirects which uses with an asterisk (*) to stand-in for a subfolder value, gives more flexibility and dynamism to creating and handling redirects.such as /about/ * / instead of creating redirects for each of its immediate subfolders. Here are the available formats:
  
  

• Media Proxy URL allows enterprise level users to modify the asset domain from default “zesty.io” to their registered domain URL instead. It replaces xyz.media.zesty.io.com with “myregistereddomain.com / - / media /”
  
  
  

•  OTF, or On the Fly Media Rendering. OTF allows users to manipulate images by passing query parameters to the end of the image URL (affecting blur, orientation, saturation, sharpen, width etc.) example, “blur” - image manipulation by using query parameters:
  
  (Before)
  

(After with blur)

• WebEngine Modes that offer 3 different options Headless, Hybrid and Traditional for rendering output to work with different data access styles, giving the ultimate flexibility to work in the style of a customer’s implementation target: 

Q3

• Aesthetical enhancements for a more intuitive Manager UI and modern feel by making use of the color white on the sidebar subnav:

• Content Insights for keyword choice alignment in content and meta, which helps marketers understand how frequently their keywords occur which helps to test their effectiveness and where to make word choice adjustments:

• The ability to search and filter by item name, ZUID or path in the Content Section:

• Flexible multi-lang pathing where developers can add a language code to any custom endpoint regardless of URL structure.

Q4

• Duo Mode Editor for in-page, real-time editing experience with collapsable side navs to maximize editing real estate:

All of these are available via our publicly accessible Manager UI GitHub repository and Accounts UI GitHub repository.

A Summary of 2021 by the Stats

• New Releases / Features: 21

• Enhancements: 47

• Updates: 11

• Bugs: 66

• New & Updated Docs: 31

To support this growth, Zesty.io received a Pre Series A round to help fuel innovation on Zesty.io’s composable DXP tool set!

2021 New & Updated Documentation

How to set up internationalization
Using our GraphQL API
Using the x-default hreflang header tag
Preview Lock
Accepting an invite
Field types
Asset groups
Loader
Create an account with Microsoft SSO
Using dynamic value with Parsley's Include
Using dynamic references in head tags
Base directory setting
Refresh an instance's cache
Use Parsley's seo_meta_description to access an items meta description
Safeguard against email spoofing with our Safe Email Send feature
I18n items are created as siblings, therefore deleting one will delete all of sibling entries
Using if conditionals around image field with more than 1 image
Troubleshooting why a custom endpoint may not be rendering
How to add a favicon
Wildcard Redirects
Parsley AutoLayout (PAL)
Analytics Overview: Analytics are no longer on the homescreen and can only be set up by owner, admin and developer roles.
Content ManagerDashboard Image to reflect current dashboard
The Datetime field has been added to the table of available fields
Environmental States & Caching Behaviors
Parsley's to JSON
WebEngine Modes
Authentication Header
Preview Lock Password Linking
WebEngine Base Page
Media API