Neos 1.3 Sneak Preview

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The feedback the Neos team got regarding the upcoming 1.2 release has been very positive and encouraging. I you haven't seen them yet, make sure to watch the small teasers showing off some of the nice features in 1.2. And while Aske, the release manager of Neos 1.2, unremittingly labors to fix the loose ends and get the stable version out of the door, the whole core team was very busy with the next release already.A while ago, while discussing the Neos roadmap, Gina Steiner, Christian M?ller and me speculated about what would be possible, if we only had the funds to let 5-6 people of the core team work for a whole month on Neos. Fast forward to November: through a budget granted by the TYPO3 Association we were able to finance a significant amount of time from key developers at regular hourly rates to work on important features for Neos 1.3. Fourteen team members have been involved in total, some of them working almost full time. In the course of this three-week-sprint, they delivered features which usually would have takenmore than half a year.You might wonder what we have been working on all of November? Here are the highlights among the many more small and large improvements in version 1.3.Security FrameworkAndreas F?rthner has been working on a Security Framework 2.0 for TYPO3 Flow for more than a year already. During this November sprint he, together with Bastian Waidelich and Rens Admiraal, finished the new system which provides all kinds of rights-related features in Neos. Version 1.3 will allow you to define access-restricted areas of your website and create frontend user logins. Through the new policy system, you can define which group of Neos users may access or modify which parts of your website. You can restrict modifications to specific content types or languages; or even limit access to custom properties which you defined for specific node types.Localised User InterfaceHenjo Hoeksma leads the effort to create a fully translated Neos user interface. Many aspects are to be considered here, since text is contained almost everywhere, like Fluid templates, Node Type property labels, Javascript libraries, Handlebar templates and much more. Each of those ask for their individual technical solution. We are proud that you can already try out Neos 1.3 (dev-master) in several languages today! (Translations for different languages are coordinated via the Crowdin platform.)HistoryEver wondered what other editors have been doing on your Neos site since you logged in last time? Sebastian Kurf?rst implemented a new History module which shows key actions in a nice timeline. By now we can display actions related to nodes and users, but much more data is captured and additional views are planned for the future.Asset ManagementEver saw me talking about "The New Resource Management" at a conference? Chances are that you did, even 1-2 years ago. And that's exactly when I started creating the 2.0 version of Flow's resource management, making it cloud-capable and more modular. The new resource management allows for using various storages for your assets, be it local storages like the file system, or remote ones like Amazon S3 or a remote file system. Assets then can published automatically to publishing targets. And these can as well be local, like the filesystem, or, for example, a Content Delivery Network. The new mechanisms are fully transparent to the developer and are almost fully downwards compatible.Based on the new resource management, Christian M?ller and I created a major re-write of the TYPO3.Media package. Following concepts of software like Adobe Lightroom or Apple Aperture, we created an API which allows you to non-destructively manipulate images and automatically create and maintain thumbnails.The new resource management has been completed will be part of Neos 1.3 and the next major version of TYPO3 Flow.Google AnalyticsBased on user feedback and industry trends, we started integrating a series of third-party services into Neos. Christopher Hlubek developed a first-class integration of Google Analytics which not only allows you to connect your account and automatically integrate the JavaScript snippet, but also shows metrics related to the current document right in your Neos inspector. That is content creation side-by-side with feedback from your audience, helping to improve your reach and performance against conversion goals. The set of data is of course fully configurable and we’re confident you'll love the diagrams!SEOAnother core need of digital marketers we addressed during this sprint is to provide first-class support for Search Engine Optimisation in Neos. We'd like to Neos behave as SEO friendly as possible by default and allow editors to customize the search result experience and have control over keywords. In 1.3 we have included support for editing keywords, title and description, as well as noindex / nofollow rules per document. For this purpose we created a new SEO tab in the inspector which allows for quickly entering related data, right next to the content you want to push. Another tab features a well-known bird as its icon: Twitter Card support allows you to customize the title, description and image for the presentation of a document as part of a tweet. Additionally you can select between different Twitter Card styles and add the author's Twitter handle. Both integrations are paving the way for other channel-specific inspectors that fit your individual needs.When will it ...?We have literally spent hundreds of hours creating these new features and not all of them are finished yet. However, we made so much progress that we don't want to keep the current state of 1.3 only to ourselves. You can try out most of the new features on a demo site we specifically created for showing off the cutting edge features of Neos dev-master.Head over to http://neos-master.demo.typo3.org/en/try-me.html and create a demo account to discover the new features in the Neos user interface. If something unsual happens while you're playing, please bear with us – on every merged Git commit the website will be automatically deployed, that’s how cutting edge it is ...Enjoy your test-ride – and make sure to let us know how you liked it!Robert (Release Manager 1.3)on behalf of your Neos Team

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