In December 2024 we delivered our new release Tridion Sites 10.1. Our key theme for this release is Granular BluePrinting.

In addition, this release also adds BluePrint management support in Experience Space, various other features and usability improvements, a new UI extension point, UI extensions Framework enhancements and overall Architecture updates.

Granular BluePrinting

Localization is a powerful feature in Tridion Sites, but the all-or-nothing nature of localization introduces challenges when there are fields that should have the same value in the parent and child items. In particular,

• Changing the value of field in the parent item will not update the value in localized child items.
• Editors may inadvertently modify fields or page regions in localized items that should remain synchronized with the parent.

To address these challenges, Tridion Sites 10.1 introduces Granular BluePrinting.

Granular BluePrinting allows content modelers to selectively choose which fields or page regions you want to keep shared when localizing the item.

All content fields, metadata fields, and region structures can be individually configured so that they are localizable (the default) or non-localizable.

Let’s consider a simple example to explore how this feature works.

Imagine you have an article with Title, Body, Images and Author fields which you would like to localize for a specific market, for example, a French language website. You don’t want to localize the entire article’s content, but only Title and Body while keeping Images and Author controlled globally.

You can now set Images and Author fields to be non-localizable in the schema by unchecking the newly introduced “Localizable” option.   

You localize the component in the French website to update the Title and Body to suit the French market. The Images and Author fields remain shared and inherit the values from the parent. Also, these fields are disabled in local copies so editors cannot accidently change them. If there is a need to update a non-localizable field, for example you would like to add one more image, the change should be made in the parent article. When you do so, the French copy is automatically updated to reflect this change.  You can identify non-localizable fields by means of an icon and tooltip.

You could manually add the same image into the French copy. However, if you have hundreds of local copies of the article across different websites and languages, updating them manually is time consuming and error prone, and that is where using non-localizable fields helps.

With Granular Blueprinting you can now localize the page to translate the title, file name or some metadata but keep the page content (component presentations), or certain regions shared and controlled globally. Any updates to the list of components in a shared region would be automatically propagated to local copies of the page.

Here is how you can configure the region to be non-localizable.

Consider using Granular BluePrinting to enhance your content management strategy, as it offers numerous benefits:

• Efficient Content Reuse: Updates made to shared fields or page regions in the parent publication automatically propagate to localized items in child publications, minimizing duplication and simplifying content management.
• Reduced maintenance: There is no need for separate items to manage shared content, reducing the overall number of schemas and simplifying content structure.
• Controlled Editing to Prevent Errors: Shared fields remain locked in child publications, safeguarding against accidental modifications and preserving inherited values from the parent publication.

BluePrint management support in Experience Space

To support BluePrint management in Experience Space we have added the following features.  

Promote (move items and dependencies to a higher publication) The main benefit of the new promote functionality in Experience Space is that when any of the selected items have dependencies, we will list those dependencies and offer to promote them automatically. For this we are using the new dependency graph endpoint.

This feature can be used, for example, to roll out a successful local campaign to a wider audience. Simply add the pages you want to promote to a bundle and then promote the bundle.

Demote (move items, including non-empty containers, to a lower publication) Any warnings, for example, about the loss of previous versions, are displayed to the user who can then choose whether to proceed or cancel the operation. Support for demoting non-empty folders and structure groups is only available in Experience Space.

When selecting a publication from the tree, “quick create” for child publications will become available. This will create a new publication with the selected publication as the parent. In addition, it is now possible to add a parent publication. A list of all suitable parent publications will be displayed to choose from. This is the same for the removal of parent publications.

In the BluePrint panel view and update parent publication priority and primary item link (relevant when using Granular BluePrinting) were added and item names are shown in the list.

Configurable lists, where used panel and other usability improvements

Configurable lists now support column resizing, sorting, re-ordering (via drag and drop) and resetting all to default. When changing your settings, these will be saved per container type on your device to enable the user to define their own preferred settings.

We have updated the where used panel – “Used by” list – which now by default only displays items that are currently using the selected item. In cases where users also want to see items that used the selected item in the past, they can switch to the ‘detailed’ view by using the toggle switch. This view also includes version numbers so that, for items which used the selected item in the past, users can see which versions used the item. This panel now also includes the option to export the list.

Target group support was added in the form of an additional tab to the page editor that can be used to associate component presentations with target groups. This tab will be hidden for publications that do not contain any target groups.

We have added new editors for multivalued select box and tree fields. The new select box field editor resembles the Classic UI ‘List mover” and is convenient for selecting values from a flat list of options.  While the select tree offers an editor for multi-value, hierarchically structured taxonomies. Both editors feature a typeahead filter.

 Additional UX improvements introduced in this release include:

• Search data request filter to enable the user to display more results if needed
• Added a free text filter for the table in the main Content Explorer table
• Changed tab names to identify Experience Space and added link to Experience Space in Classic UI
• Keywords can now be created from the editor
• The rich text code editor is now displayed inline, and we have given editors control over whether mark-up is wrapped in a block-element
• Relaxed panel resizing constraints
• Schema/metadata schema column updates
• Added the item path column in the Publishing queue
• The history panel now includes the revisor name

UI extensions enhancements

Extensions now have access to the modal component, e.g., for displaying confirmation dialogs.

We’ve also introduced a new item editor extension point.

Use cases include:

• showing a warning to the user when attempting to open an editor for archived content, and
• programmatically modifying editor fields, such as the default metadata schema.

Translation Manager: Non-translatable fields

We have improved how Translation Manager handles non-translatable fields.

In Sites 10.1, fields that are not configured for translation no longer have their values overwritten with the value in the parent on each translation round.

To illustrate this change, suppose you have a component with some translatable fields and a PDF link field. In the English website you add a PDF document that is suitable for the English market. In the French publication you translate the component and manually update the PDF link to reference a document that is suitable for the French market. If you subsequently update the original component’s translatable fields and translate it to French again, the PDF link field will not be overwritten with the English PDF from parent item but preserves French PDF you previously specified.

With this improvement you can translate the item multiple times without needing to manually correct non-translatable fields in target publications afterwards.

Translation Manager: Contextual views for translators

We have introduced a couple of improvements in the integration of Translation Manager with Trados Enterprise.

Sending attachments in Translation Jobs. Users can now attach relevant materials such as PDFs, screenshots, or other documents to translation job metadata. These attachments offer translators additional background information, technical details, or visual references, helping them better understand the content they are working on.

When the translation job is sent, the attachments are included as reference materials. In Trados Enterprise, translators can access these attachments, which are listed in the files section.

Sending preview URLs. Translation Manager can include “View on Site” URLs in the translation job that it creates. Trados Enterprise extension presents the relevant URL for each item in the Trados Online Editor, so translators can navigate to the staging website and view the content in the context of the entire page. External translators will need to have access to the staging website. Tridion users can use the Translation Manager capability to automatically publish content to the staging server or publish it manually.

Architecture updates

Tridion Sites 10.1 ships with significant platform updates. Let us highlight the most important ones.

Dynamic Experience Delivery (DXD) components have been migrated from Spring 5 to Spring 6, which in turn involves moving from the javax namespace to jakarta. You will have to ensure you are using compatible libraries.

On the Content Manager side, we have upgraded Search components to SOLR 9.7, Apache Tomcat 9, Apache Tika 1.28. When upgrading to 10.1 you must perform a full reindex.

On both sides there is now Eclipse Temurin 21.0, Oracle JDK 21.0 supported.

We have introduced .Net 8 support for Add-ons, Access Management Service and Tridion Integration Framework.

For the full details of platform support updates please refer to the documentation.

Next steps

To discuss your upgrade to Tridion Sites 10.1, contact your account manager. 

For a more detailed demo of all the new features please watch our Tridion Sites 10.1 Bootcamp recordings.

From the Product Team,

Nataliia and Daniëlle