Top 9 new features in Hippo CMS 11

This blog post takes a look at some of the new features in Hippo CMS 11 from a developer’s perspective.

A while ago I blogged about Hippo CMS 10. Since then a lot has changed in the Hippo world. Hippo CMS version 11 has been released and I will show you what Hippo is offering in the latest version of its CMS.

Around October last year Hippo was acquired by BloomReach. This deal brings:

together a company that offers personalisation and optimisation in an e-commerce context with one that helps manage web content and more generalised digital experiences beyond just e-commerce, giving the combined company a more complete offering.

The digital combination:

will become the only digital experience platform that natively leverages data and algorithmic intelligence to create, build, personalise, market and measure every digital experience – across verticals and geographies.

With this acquisition the enterprise release of Hippo CMS is officially referred as 'Hippo DX' where DX stands for 'Digital Experience'.

So, without much further ado, and in no particular order let’s look at a non-exhaustive list of what’s new in Hippo CMS 11.

Top 9 new features in Hippo CMS 11

1. Channel Manager

• Channel manager gets a makeover so to speak. It is now much more intuitive to work with. According to Hippo, they introduced these features based on the “customer & partner feedback”. This is reflected in how easier it has become to use the interface. Replacing menu bar at the top for Sitemap & Components is a tabbed left vertical channel sidebar. The channel sidebar bar can be toggled to show/hide via click on sidenav icon. The rendering is graceful for all viewports. Also, gone are the I-phone & I-pad portrait, landscape windows for mobile view. Instead, now you have an elegant menu on the top to choose your viewports.
• Channels in channel manager can now be deleted. Deletion of channels can be performed only by admin(s) and only channels marked for deletion (hst:deletable = true) may be deleted. Developers can use the BeforeChannelDelete event to remove related content and to perform any clean-up operations.
• Containers in channel manager can have names identified by property hst:label in console. The label for each empty/non-empty container is displayed in the top-left corner of container, see image below (for e.g. “Banner Collection” in “Verkoop categorieen” component). Labelling makes it easier to identify a container within a list of containers. 
  

2. Hippo in the Cloud

Hippo now offers cloud based service on their onDemand platform built on Amazon AWS infrastructure. The cloud platform is aimed at developers, content-editors and marketers alike.

3. Localisation

Hippo has added to the number of languages supported for localisation in CMS, latest addition to this is Chinese. The CMS texts for languages are available as language packs. Better support is added for time zones, so that CMS is capable of working in any time zone.

4. Logout mechanism

• Another handy feature, for developers and testers, is added to logout mechanism. In earlier versions, if you have CMS & console open and if you logout of the CMS then you are also logged out of the console and vice versa. With version 11 you can log in and out of both independently.
• Logging out of the CMS now logs out preview sites in the Channel Manager as well.

5. SHA-256  Hashing for passwords

An extra layer of security is added for newly generated passwords with SHA-256 hashing. This will not affect the existing hashes (SHA-1) of old passwords. I have here SHA-1 (v. 10.2.0) & SHA-256 (v. 11.1.0) Hippo generated hashes for same password string.

• $SHA-1$sYkJN8dlPjw=$R4tx6mG7ipwtBo9Td1xdV8gGkEE=
• $SHA-256$HWe8qKvHzz4=$WusLcXMlybG0pNViqH1Adq7Kbx7ABZsVLmoEFcK4JIY=

6. Cookie Opt-in

This is a simple, easy to configure solution to comply with the EU Cookie Law for opting in or out of the Relevance Module. It uses one of the Cookie Consent’s Javascript plugin. The plugin is fully customisable. If you want a standard cookie opt-in solution for your Relevance module you should consider this.

7. Fluent API Support

This feature is aimed at developers. Hippo has provided support for  Fluent style Query API for its HstQueryBuilder. Idea behind fluent style API is to have a compact and readable code.

8. JavaScript Goals

With this strategy/workaround you can convert a Javascript event into a goal (i.e. conversion). Normally, “a goal is a visitor reaching a pre-determined page after viewing the page the experiment runs on. Reaching a goal is considered a conversion”. Sometimes, though, you have a scenario where the goal is not a pre-determined page but an event. For e…g. user clicking a button. In that case, you can use the workaround provided here. There is still a dummy page used for conversion but it is accessed by a background process.

9. Enterprise Forms

Anti-spam feature is added to the enterprise forms. After adding an “Anti-spam” form field to a form you can choose to select its type as a slider or a honeypot. Form spamming via bots/scripts become much more difficult with this feature enabled.

That’s all folks in this blog-post on Hippo’s latest offering. I hope you enjoyed it and I would appreciate if you could leave your comments/opinions in the comment section below.