Optimizely Release Notes — March-April 2023

Blend reviews Optimizely’s release notes every few months to better understand how changes will affect existing and future projects. Here are the major new releases over the last two months.

For the full list of releases, visit Optimizely’s Release Notes. And for more information on how these changes might affect your project, or to reach out to Blend Interactive’s Gold-level development team, contact us today!

Google Analytics 4.

A natural update, but an important one: Opitmizely has added support for Google Analytics 4.

(GA-151) — Product: Episerver Google Analytics v 4.0.0)

User interface updates.

Optimizely has implemented several user interface updates to help create a better admin and editor experience.

Updated workflow.

Users within Optimizely CMS can now filter by language in the dashboard workflow area, and can set a standard language option within the Admin view. The option will persist until the user is logged out.

(CMS-26354) — Product: Episerver CMS UI v 12.19.0)

Implementation of deep linking.

If a broken link is found on the dashboard or within any broken links report, users can select that link and be taken directly to the property, ready for editing. Additionally, any property that contains a broken link will trigger a notification.

(CMS-25570) — Product: Episerver CMS UI v 12.19.0)

TinyMCE upgrade; now allows creating blocks and selecting content.

Two updates regarding TinyMCE — first, an upgrade to Tiny MCE itself, and an update to how blocks are managed within TinyMCE.

Previously, TinyMCE rich-text fields would only allow placing an already created block; now, you can select Create New Block and Select Content from within the editor.

(CMS-27012) — Product: Episerver CMS Tiny MCE v 4.1.1)  |  (CMS-25570) — Product: Episerver CMS Tiny MCE v 4.2.0)

Validation updates.

Several updates tied to field and type validation have been included in recent releases, including:

• Added Length validation for ContentArea property (CMS-27037) — Product: Episerver CMS v 12.14.0
• Validators (such as LengthPropertyValidator) may be activated (if configured) to validate property data after content data is sent to the back end. (CMS-26161) — Product: Episerver CMS v 12.14.0
• Added the ability to use IPropertyValidationSettingsRepository to define allowed types validation. (CMS-26591) — Product: Episerver CMS v 12.14.0
• Added an optional type identifier RegularExpressionValidationSettings to specify if the regular expression should be interpreted as ECMA script or .NET.  (CMS-26457) — Product: Episerver CMS v 12.14.0
• Added a Saved property to PropertyValidationSettingsBase informing when the setting was last modified. (CMS-26453) — Product: Episerver CMS v 12.14.0

More Commerce updates.

Commerce continued to receive new updates to help improve the development process, all listed below. 

• Content Delivery API — Optimizely has released CD.Commerce as a part of Content Delivery API 3.7.0 — (HAPI-2515) — Product: Content Delivery API v. 3.7.0
• Improved performance for the Promotion Exclusion List — For times when there were many promotions to handle, this recent update has improved the performance of the Exclusion List. (COM-15206) — Product: Episerver Commerce v. 14.10.0
• Support all authentication for tokens — Previous versions depended on concrete implementation — this current version now adds the ability to depend on abstraction OpenID specification. (COM-16828) — Product: Episerver Service API v. 7.0.0

Additional features and bug fixes.

There are always bug fixes and minor functionality changes. Rather than list the rest, please visit the release notes page and filter by date.