Common Caching Pitfalls
We all know and love caching, right? It makes all of our complex algorithms and expensive database or filesystem lookups seem so fast and simple. But there are downsides to caching. For example, how…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.