dotCMS 5.1: A Minor Release With Major Updates

Besides speed, marketers need the ability to manage and control every aspect of their digital experiences that they are delivering to their consumers, whether that’s via websites, native mobile apps, single page applications (SPA), or IoT devices without being overwhelmed by code, or relying on the It team. Simultaneously, developers want the freedom to innovate using the tools and frameworks they love.

With the release dotCMS 5.1, we’ve continued to build upon our ‘NoCode’ philosophy, introducing some major updates to the marketer and developer experience along the way. The features within this release stem from our efforts to provide enterprise brands with a Content Foundation as a Service, empowering them to build, orchestrate and deploy their digital experience platform, and subsequently offer connected, trusted and continuous customer experiences.

Here’s everything you need to know about dotCMS 5.1:

Empowering Marketers in a Headless CMS Environment

dotCMS has a long term vision to become the most user-friendly open-source Java CMS on the market. dotCMS 5.1 has introduced the following features to further empower marketers:

Edit Mode Anywhere

dotCMS now gives marketers and business users the full dotCMS editing experience in a headless environment. This includes inline editing, layout design, personalization, drag-and-drop capabilities, and device-specific content previews, no matter what front-end framework is being used. Thus, marketers can directly edit their sites, single page applications, kiosk experiences, or any other content-driven application without touching a single line of code.

Improved Content Relationship Management

We’ve overhauled the way we handle content relationships, making the relationship part of the content type. As a result, content types now include a new relationship field which enables users to easily manage existing relationships and pull content and their nested relationships in a single API call. Version 5.1 also introduces the ability to create one-way relationships, which shifts the management of content relationships to one side for better control.

Enhanced Content Type Builder

dotCMS’s content forms can now be broken down into rows, tabs, and columns for a better editor experience. Plus, we’ve added field variables simplify the editor experience, and we’ve also added field variables to facilitate.

More Keyboard Shortcuts

With even more keyboard shortcuts that bypass the need for a mouse, dotCMS 5.1 enhances our platform’s status as an accessible CMS.

Streamlining the Developer Experience

dotCMS doesn’t just aim to please marketers and non-technical users, this minor release introduces a host of game-changing features that can streamline development.

Scriptable API Builder

In dotCMS 5.1, it is now possible to define and deliver scripted REST endpoints using a single versionable .VTL file under a convention-based folder structure. The Scriptable API Builder supports a full range of REST actions including content pulls, content formatting, remote API calls, and content rendering.

Scripting as a Service

Users can now construct their responses at runtime by PUTting and POSTing Velocity script in the request. dotCMS 5.1 will then render the Velocity script and return the result as either a JSON or as a text snippet.

Native GraphQL Support

A first for Java-based content management systems. dotCMS 5.1 comes with support for the GraphQL API and the GraphQL query language. The dotCMS GraphQL support exposes the dotCMS content repository as GraphQL and provides an API that allows developers to query and return specific properties of content and shape the API response at call time.

Single Page Application Development Simplified

dotCMS 5.1 boasts a SPA starter kit that includes a demo site with full “Edit Mode Anywhere” features, helping brands launch SPAs faster, and with less reliance on IT. The SPA starter kit helps take care of things such as authentication, navigation, routing and Content API queries, which, when coupled with the Node.js server, also allows for full manageability.

File-based Page Components

To further support content creation workflows, dotCMS’s page components and their content-specific templates can now be built completely offline as files and uploaded into dotCMS in batch.

Buckle Up, Because We’re Building Upon Our Four Pillars

dotCMS 5.1 may be a minor release, but it brings major updates that will further speed up your time-to-market and simplify the processes needed to deliver competitive customer experiences across channels.

Our vision, which fueled the development of dotCMS 5.1, is built on four pillars key pillars:

1. Hybrid CMS: Decoupled CMS with API-first architecture, working in tandem with native content delivery resulting in both static and dynamic content publishing.
2. Continuity: We’ve taken steps to support CI/CD, DevOps, microservice architectures, and containerization. For business, experience continuity, hyper-personalized and omnichannel customer experiences.
3. NoCode: making marketing and business teams self-sufficient, moving away from hardcore Java, moving towards empowering web developers and platform developers who can innovate.
4. Intelligence: dotCMS can create and aggregate data on content relating to content performance, personas, trends, customer journey maps, helping brands drive business outcomes.

With features like Edit Mode Anywhere, GraphQL support (a first for any Java CMS),  and Scripting as a Service, we’re pleased to be delivering on our vision to benefit marketers, business users, and developers. See what you think of our latest release, download and try dotCMS 5.1 today.