Livingdocs Release March 2024: Conditional Components, Improved Editable Teasers and Multi-Image Drag & Drop

Conditional Components

Whether you want to curate homepage content for the following morning or edit an article to include a paragraph that would go live later, Conditional Components now allow you to do that.

With Conditional Components, you can now define a date and time when a specific component should be published — as well as when it should be removed — all within a single document. The timeline in the user interface allows you to preview future versions of your page or article so that you can always be sure what your readers will see.

It is also possible to configure which type of components can be planned ahead by users. When loading documents from the Livingdocs API, Conditional Components go live only at the pre-defined time; therefore, you do not need to make changes to your delivery pipeline to make use of this feature. Events are issued whenever a component newly appears or disappears, allowing your systems to refresh the caches.

Improved Editable Teasers

You may already use Editable Teasers when curating your content and editing articles to enhance the quality of your homepage while reducing stress points. Now, users are notified when the teaser data associated with a given article has been changed, and are prompted either to confirm the local edits or to revert them to the original article teaser data.

This is crucial in developing news situations where the facts mentioned in a teaser change over time, and you want to make sure you serve up-to-date titles to your readers.

This improvement is automatically available if you are using Editable Teasers.

Multi-Image Drag & Drop

Drag & drop components are a signature feature of Livingdocs. Now we have improved this capability even further. 

When you need to quickly add multiple images to an article or gallery, you can now select several images within the Media Library while in the Document Editor via the side panel to drag & drop them all at once.

Further improvements in the March 2024 Release include:

1. Media Library: Validity change events

   If you are managing licenses that are only valid for a certain duration of time, Livingdocs has provided a metadata plugin for this for a while: li-datetime-validity. Alongside an additional plugin to manage license validity with a single checkbox, Livingdocs will now emit events whenever the license of an image is changed. Thanks to these events, you can confidently remove any images with images that are no longer valid from your caches.

2. Bucket Independent Image Storage Format

   Now, moving all the images in the Media Library to a new storage bucket or changing the image service no longer requires a data migration by computing image URLs on demand. The changes we have now implemented are fully backwards compatible; you can already take advantage of this improvement by adapting your delivery systems. Please read the technical release notes for details.

3. Webhooks: Conditions for contentType and metadataProperties

   If you are using webhooks to notify external systems of changes in Livingdocs, you can now limit these webhooks to trigger only for certain contentTypes or changes to specific metadata properties. This allows you to simplify the code in your webhook handlers.

4. Named Crops: defaultIfSet

   When using graphics, they might not fit the predefined image ratios you use for photographs. Now you can allow for a special crop in these occasions; by marking it as the default when it's set, you make sure users see the correct image in the Livingdocs Editor.

5. Document List Assignment: Search Improvements

   We improved the search experience when searching for document lists to send articles to the document list inbox from within the Publish Control panel.

Breaking Changes & Upcoming Deprecations

In order to keep Livingdocs as streamlined and user-friendly as possible, we periodically remove features when we have found better solutions to the problems they solve. We will always give you ample notice so that you have plenty of time to make adaptations to your setup. You can find a comprehensive list of deprecations and changes that may affect your newsroom in the Technical Release Notes.

Breaking Changes

In the March 2024 release, no features were removed or replaced. There are only a couple small technical breaking changes; please make sure your technical specialists are aware of them before rolling out the new release.

Upcoming Deprecations

No new feature deprecations were announced with the March 2024 release. Nonetheless, please advise your technical specialists to review the Technical Release Notes in order not to miss anything.

To get more in-depth, technical information about this release, please refer to our documentation site. There, you can stream the recordings and peruse the slide presentations of our Feature Webinar and Developer Webinar, as well as gain insights into the technical specs.

We look forward to showing you what’s in store for our next release!