Differences

Version 5 is a major upgrade of the Content Engine with significant changes to both the user interface and the underlying architecture. The major differences are:

New Content Studio

Content Studio has been completely re-written, and now has a much more modern and user-friendly interface, with a new rich text editor for editing HTML fields. The new Content Studio is the only means of editing content in version 5. For details, see the Escenic Content Studio User Guide.

Smaller Web Studio

The scope of Web Studio has been reduced in version 5; it is now a publication management tool, and all content editing functionality has been removed. Publication administrators can use Web Studio for general publication management, editing the section structure of publication and access rights administration. For details, see the Escenic Content Engine Publication Administrator Guide.

Everything is content

The image, multimedia and link objects used to represent binary data in version 4 no longer exist, and articles have been renamed: they are now called content items. This name change reflects the fact that content items are now used to represent all kinds of content, including binary content such as images, audio, video, and binary documents such as PDFs, Word files, spreadsheets and so on. However, template developers and programmers should note that for reasons of backwards compatibility, "article" has been retained in tag, class and method names. In addition, a number of transitional implementations of old image/multimedia/link classes and tags have been made in order to ensure backwards compatibility for version 4 templates. For a detailed description of the new architecture, see the Escenic Content Engine Template Developer Guide.

Catalogs withdrawn

Catalogs do not exist in version 5. Since images and other multimedia objects are now represented by standard content items, there is no longer any need for a special means of organizing them. They can be organized using a publication's section structure in the same way as all other content.

Section pages

Section front pages are now simply called section pages. A section can can have any number of section pages, and section pages have a new and more flexible internal structure based on new concepts called groups and areas.

Image versions

A new, more flexible concept for managing multiple versions of images, called representations, has been introduced. The old image version concept is, however, retained for reasons of backwards compatibility.

New resource file formats

New XML resource file formats supporting the new concepts and structures are introduced. In addition, the articleType resource has been renamed to content-type. For details, see the Escenic Content Engine Resource Reference.

New syndication format

The version 4 import/export format has been replaced by a new syndication format that supports all version 5 concepts and structures. For details, see the Escenic Content Engine Syndication Reference. In order to support migration, version 5 is still capable of importing version 4 import/export format as long as version 4-specific structures are avoided. The migration tools described in this manual include special import filters that convert such version 4-specific to their version 5 equivalents during import. For more information about this, see Import.

XML only

HTML fields in version 4 articles were very permissive, and would accept a wide range of HTML variants. Version 5 content items, on the other hand may only contain well-formed XML (XHTML plus Escenic relation elements). In order to support migration, the version 5 import process checks imported markup and automatically corrects it where possible. For further information, see HTML Markup.