Web part and widget enhancements in Kentico CMS 8

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The workflow for widgets feature brings better supervision over website content, and the possibility to copy web parts/widgets between pages eases development in Kentico CMS 8.

Copying web parts/widgets

During website development, you often need to reuse components that are already configured on other pages (possibly with slight differences). In version 8, you can save time by the using copy/paste functionality of web parts and editor widgets. 

You can access the copy/paste actions via the context menus of web parts or zones. Zones allow you to copy all child web parts. The paste action of zones adds the copied web parts to the end of the zone. Pasting through the action of a specific web part places the content directly below the given web part. Note that copying does not carry over the content inside layout web parts. The same functionality is also available for editor widgets.
 
widgets_copy.png

Workflow for widgets

Editor widgets in version 8 behave as regular page content. This means that modifications of widgets are not saved immediately and users need to confirm changes via the save button. The content of editor widget zones is processed within the workflow process, so only published changes are displayed on the live site.

Because the behavior of editor widgets is different from previous versions, we recommend enabling the Prompt to save changes on exit setting in Site Manager -> Settings -> Content -> Content management to avoid losing changes accidentally.
 
There is one exception for content personalization and MVT variants of web parts or widgets. Variants aren’t considered as page content. When users create or modify a variant, the changes still apply immediately without saving the page. Likewise, variants are not included in the workflow process or the version history of pages.
 
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Jakub Oczko

Jakub is a Chief Technology Officer at Kentico.

Comments

emanuele.firmani-aduno-gruppe commented on

I'd like also to have for Widgets:
- a collapse/expand feature (useful when there are lots of widgets)
- a configurable css in editing mode, so that I can box the content with black border (done it at the moment with a K# macro for Container property)

roel-ibl-software commented on

Looks really great... to bad we have to wait so long for the release of v8. Two more wishes:

- Please add a 'Move up' and 'Move down' too! ;-)
- What can we do to support widgets which don't have the full width of the site, and make it possible to move widgets horizontally?