Litium 7 introduces many new features, new data modelling capabilities and many improvements to help you build even better customer solutions. Enjoy the new modern and efficient API in the Websites area, that makes the Litium developer experience more unified and consistent. Build efficient content structures using the new page and block data model, and combine it with the capabilities of the new Globalization area to configure complex sales scenarios and to publish content and products across several digital channels and markets. Add to that, two new field types to enhance the data modeling capabilities of Litium.

Highlights

• Re-designed Websites area.
• New API and UI for Websites.
• New data modelling for Websites.
• New Globalization area to configure sales scenarios for multiple digital channels and markets
• Improved support for headless solutions with the Globalization area.
• A set of new tools for editors to craft the customer experience.
• Blocks functionality including a new WYSIWYG editor.
• Re-usable global content blocks for pages.
• New page preview modes.
• Two new field types: Pointer and Multi field

Re-designed Websites area

• New Websites UI.
• New block feature.
• WYSIWYG block editor.
• Improved content preview functionality.

New UI

The new graphical interface introduces improved processes in Websites for search, filter, navigation, editing, publishing and previewing.

Search

Search results display the hits of Pages and Blocks as prerendered thumbnails. Searching for Pages or Blocks has been improved to use the filter on entity fields like in the Products area. 

Blocks

Pages can be made up of blocks. A block is an independent part of a page. Blocks can be global, and a global block can be used by several pages. Both pages and blocks can be activated for different channels. Both pages and blocks can be time activated for the different channels. It is also possible to show or hide blocks for certain audiences, by connecting blocks to Litium groups of persons or to anonymous visitors through the Litium target groups. Blocks can be edited in a WYSIWYG mode and they can be dragged and dropped to different locations on the page.

The WYSIWYG block editor

Blocks can be added from the Blocks menu by drag and drop. This mode visualizes the page result while working on it, and it enhances the overview of your page content.

New preview modes and the experience bar

The preview of content has been largely improved in effort to bring the editors as close to the customer experience as possible while building the experience in the administration. New preview modes have been added, like previewing a page in a new tab that facilitates editors to have preview tab open next to the editing tab in the browser. There is also a preview mode of a draft as it would look without any back office graphics around the page. The preview mode has a new experience bar where the editor can select to preview how a page will look at a certain time, for certain audiences, in different digital channels and for differerent devices. The available preview devices can be set up by the customer project itself, to support different screens like mobile devices, tablets, desktop screens and in store displays.

New API and data model in Websites

• The new API that was introduced in Litium 5 now covers the Websites area.
• The new data modelling introduced in Litium 5 now covers the Websites area.

New Websites API

The Websites API is completely new. It follows the architecure of the API introduced in Litium 5 for Products, and covers the new data modelling and the block functionality. Learn more about the Litium API.

Websites data modelling

The entities website, page and block now all support the new data modelling introduced in Litium 5 for Products. This means that one website can have several languages set up. The same page structure can be used for several languages, and the customer or project chooses which content fields are language dependent or not. 

When publishing content, the content for all languages is published. Pages and blocks can be shown or hidden for different channels or languages. 

A project running previous versions, and that have set up a solution where there is one website per language, can choose whether to keep the current setup or switch to have all languages in a common website and page structure.

Globalization

• Easier sales and marketing configurations for multi channel and multi market scenarios
• New entities: market, country, channel, tax class and domain name.
• Increased support for headless implementations.

The new Globalization area facilitates the configuration of product sales and content publishing. In the first step you define the markets, countries and channels where the customer will sell their products. The next step is to configure how pricelists, currencies, tax classes, inventories, languages, payment methods and delivery methods are connected to countries and channels you defined. When ready and the content work starts, the customer can choose to publish products and page or block content to these different markets and channels (languages).

A difference from previous versions, is that all entities connected to how a merchant is both publishing and selling products, are now separated from the website entity. The purpose of this is to separate the configuration of Litium’s product areas, Sales, Websites and Products, from each other. This allows merchants to configure multiple sales channels other than Litium websites, and still feed these channels with products and sales configurations, without depending on a webiste instance. It is also possible to feed these channels outside of Litium with content from the Litium websites. For example, a merchant might need different sales configurations for selling through Facebook Marketplace, than when using Litium websites. Also, this makes it easier to support scenarios where a merchant would like to only use parts of the Litium platform in a larger system context. One such example is a so called ”headless CMS” setup of Litium. Even when running a "headless CMS" scenario, it is possible to produce the CMS content in Litium and have it sent to the external presenting channel.

Learn more about the Globalization area.

More enhancements and features

New field type - Multi field

The Multi field let's you combine several fields into one. This is useful, for example, when for modeling and storing data for a Slider, where each Slide could have several fields like "Text", "Image" and "Link". Since the Multi field has a setting "Array", you can easily model this type of data and Litium will display a dynamic UI for the user where he can add and remove Sides. 

New field type - Pointer

The Pointer field type is replacing many previous pointers in Litium. In the CMS of previous versions there were pointers from the Page entity in CMS to Person, Group, Organization etc. These are now consolidated into one field type that can be used by all entities. Still the number of entities that can be pointed to is limited to some degree.

Price lists setting for including VAT or not

You can configure whether VAT should be included in any pricelist.

Removed or deprecated features and concepts

Page responsibility

Use pointers instead. You can choose to use a person or group pointer to set page responsibility. This provides a more flexible solution for different workflows.

Page notes

This feature has been removed to streamline the product. There are plenty of other notes applications on the market to cater for your needs.

Translation pages

The new data model has integrated support for translation, which makes this feature obsolete. Read more about working with languages in the Globalization and Configuration scenarios sections.

Content and settings fields for pages

The new data model provides a more robust way of grouping fields. More info in the Websites section.

Master and shared pages

The new data model of the Websites area, with global blocks, is a more convenient way of working with shared content. More info in the Websites section.