With the release of version 7 of the Altis Digital Experience Platform, we are proud to present some exciting new features and updates that will help marketers make customers’ digital experiences more memorable and impactful.
These updates reinforce Altis as the go-to solution for providing memorable digital experiences with WordPress.
Stronger personalisation analytics with Experience Block Insights
We’ve expanded the capabilities of Experience Blocks to provide you with even more comprehensive content performance metrics. Experience Blocks is a key Altis feature that empowers users to deliver personalised content to custom Altis audiences. While the ability to assign conversion goals to Experience Blocks and track their performance has been available since Altis v6, this latest update marks the launch of Experience Block Insights – an entire dashboard dedicated to summarising the results of your content personalisation efforts.
All Experience Blocks that deliver personalised content across all of your pages and websites are now accessible from a single dashboard, from where you can dive into each block’s performance data.
A single Experience Block’s metrics along with comparative performance against variants and fallbacks.
Validation checks have also been included in this release – authors will now receive warnings if conversion goals can’t be tracked or if fallback content is missing.
Greater usability from Reusable Blocks
We have made usability improvements to Reusable Blocks by introducing several enhancements for Altis customers that take you beyond the WordPress core updates. In Altis v7, we have introduced:
- Ability to search by block title within the editor
- Usage Count displaying the number of times the block has been used in across posts and pages
- Links to posts using the Reusable Block
- Reusable Block categorisation
Easy collaboration with multi-authorship
With Altis you can now add multiple authors to posts, manage guest authors as full or partial users, and attribute content to multiple users. Slow workarounds are no longer required to show multi-authorship and collaboration. This is a modern take on traditional WordPress author attribution, with a neat UI to boot.
This feature was sponsored through the Altis partnership with Siemens, and is also available as a standalone plugin.
Developer Features & APIs
Local Server
- A “
mysql: link” was added to the output from “composer server db info” for software that supports the format. This allows using command or control click in the terminal to open the link. - A new composer server db exec command enables executing SQL from the command line without logging into the container or using some other tool.
- Experimental support now available for Mutagen.io volume sharing. This can improve speed and file synchronisation issues on MacOS and Windows in some cases.
Search
- User and terms indexables can now be turned on or off via config
- Better handling for large requests such as documents during indexing
- Improved default search algorithm with a tighter scope for matches
PHP 7.4
Altis v7 upgrades to PHP 7.4, which introduces more language features for developers and also speeds up page load times. Both Local Server and Local Chassis now default to using PHP 7.4, so you may need to update your application to run on PHP 7.4.
The full list of breaking changes in PHP 7.4 can be found here. We recommend the PHP Compatibility standard for PHP Code Sniffer to automate finding issues that need fixing.
ElasticPress 3.5.6
The ElasticPress dependency has been updated from 3.4.3 to 3.5.6, which will require users to reindex their content. A full list of ElasticPress changes for each release can be found here.
Experience Block Insights
Several new REST API endpoints have been added for fetching blocks and block analytics data, along with a background post type that can be used for storing persistent data.
WordPress 5.7: “Esperanza”
The Altis v7 CMS module is now updated with WordPress 5.7, the first WordPress release of 2021. Some of the highlights of this release are:
- Improved Reusable Block editing in the block editor. Reusable Blocks can now be fully edited inline in a post and saved separately to the post they are embedded in.
- A new Robots API provides control over the robots meta tag and search engine previews
- Lazy loading for iframes
- Ability to send password reset links to users
- A number of changes to the block editor features making it easier and quicker to work with.
We’re always looking for opportunities to improve the Altis platform. All comments and suggestions from our community are welcome, so please get in touch if there’s anything you’d like to see from Altis.