What's new?
Next Generation Authoring improves the experience of both users and developers by making the content form easier to use, and providing developers with additional features to control form layout and how fields are displayed.
This page provides an overview of the new features and links to help you get started.
Please send us your feedback about Next Generation Authoring, to help us continue to improve the authoring experience. Find out how to send feedback.
New and enhanced appearanceLink copied!
Without making any changes to your schemas, you will benefit from a more intuitive interface along with improved input fields for date and time, color pickers, number and text input improvements and new media and content choosers.
An example of the date/time picker with the enhanced authoring experience is shown below.
See the full list of 'look and feel' enhancements.
Customizable componentsLink copied!
To display the input fields on the content form, Next Generation Authoring uses components. You can use these components as is, or you can customize the functionality by setting parameters.
Examples of when you could use customizable components are to:
- Use a slider as an input field and control the slider labels
- Set the maximum width for a component
- Customize the color picker with a company specific set of color swatches
Learn how this feature can help optimize your authoring experience by taking a look at our example customized input fields.
Control over layout with grids and tabsLink copied!
New layout features allow developers to specify how fields are arranged on the content form. Fields can be organized into grids, so that related items are grouped together. Tabs can be used to organize fields for easy navigation, putting advanced options under one tab, for example. Tabs can be horizontal or vertical.
These layout features help you to make the form easier to navigate and provide a better experience for the content producer.
The image below shows a content form with fields organized in a grid.
A form with two vertical tabs is shown below.
Find out how tabs and grids can help with workflow and organization.
ConditionalsLink copied!
There are several new schema features, including conditionals.
Conditionals allow you to use the value of one part of a schema to set the state of another. For example, you can enable or disable a field based on user input, change the validation of a field based on the value of a country selection dropdown, or hide and show fields based on whether a checkbox is selected.
Learn how your authoring workflow can be simplified with the help of conditional input fields.
Content palettesLink copied!
Content palettes are flexible lists that make it easier to create blogs, layouts and other combinations of different types of content items. An improved user interface makes it easy to choose the content you want and arrange it in the order you choose.
Find out how you can gain flexibility when authoring content with content palettes.
Dropdown menus with labelsLink copied!
You can now create dropdown menus with a list of labels and values, so that user friendly labels are used in the front end and the corresponding values are returned.
In the example shown below, "Low", "Medium" and "High" correspond to numbers defined by the developer.
Make sure field values are easy to understand by using friendly field values.
Read only propertiesLink copied!
Read only properties are now supported. You can combine this setting with conditionals so that properties can be enabled or disabled based on the state of another property.
Hidden propertiesLink copied!
You can now include properties in a schema that are not displayed on the content form. You might choose to use hidden properties to add metadata to a schema that cannot be seen or edited by users, for example. These properties can be const values or properties that you update using the Content Management API. See hidden properties for more details.
Related pagesLink copied!
For content authorsLink copied!
Optimizing the authoring experience