Back in March, Kentico Xperience 13 released Refresh 1 followed up by Refresh 2 in June. This month we’ve seen the launch of Kentico Xperience 13’s third refresh. Bringing with it multiple improvements, this update sees a number of refinements including widget zones and important changes to page and path selector functionality. 

In this blog, we take a look to see what’s new. If you haven’t already, it could be worth reading our previous articles on the first Kentico Xperience refresh and the second Kentico Xperience refresh to see what improvements have been made prior to this.

Improved page and path selectors 

Until now, users of Kentico Xperience 13 could only select a single page or path when using the appropriate selector. With this recent update, you can now select multiple pages or paths.

Developers using the platform have often queried why the return type of these selectors is a collection when only one item can be selected. However, Kentico 12 documentation hinted at the possibility of multiple-choice selectors in the future. It also states the reason for a collection return type is “due to forward compatibility” which finally gives the return type proper use.

Take the example below from the Dancing Goat sample website. Here, there is a café widget that makes use of the existing single Page Selector component. In this case, three instances of the café widget are shown - one for Boston, one for Chicago and one for New York - each configured to show a single café card.

As this particular widget was created prior to Kentico’s most recent refresh, it only supports selecting a single cafe at a time.

However, with the latest update, you can now modify the existing widget or create a new cafe list widget that’s configured in a way that the Page Selector allows for multiple pages to be selected.

How can this be done? Using the new ‘MaxPagesLimit’ property as shown below. By leaving this property out, the selector will default to single selection mode and by specifying ‘0’, it will become unlimited.

Once this has been done, the property is updated and now allows for multiple-choice or up to three cafe pages.

Widget zone restrictions

If you have too many widgets registered on your website, there are a number of techniques that can be used to improve the widget selection modal.

One of them is to use the allowed widgets property on editable areas allowing you to restrict the types of widgets that are available to choose from within that editable area.

Being able to restrict widget usage on an editable area is useful, but sometimes it felt too high up in the page builder hierarchy. But what if that editable area contains multiple sections and multiple widget zones? Fortunately, Refresh 3 has brought this exact functionality and it works in a similar way to editable areas!

It’s worth noting that widget zones with restrictions are merged with restrictions set on the containing editable areas, so you'll need to ensure both whitelists joined together to give the expected whitelist for your widget zone.

Widget zone and form zone identifiers

We don’t hear of many content editors complaining about widgets being incorrectly repositioned after changing sections. This could be down to content editors simply accepting that changing sections is a big enough change to warrant widgets being incorrectly positioned and they need to correct them manually.

To make things easier, Refresh 3 introduces zone identifiers for widget zones and form zones, meaning developers can now name them. When a content editor changes between sections, widgets and form components are now guided into the correct zone based on zone name.

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Another valuable platform update from Kentico Xperience! As a Kentico development agency, it has been one of our preferred CMS platforms for over 10 years. Our dedicated team of Kentico Xperience web developers are fully certified on the platform, allowing us to build fast and high performing sites for our many clients.

If you want to know more about Kentico Xperience, please contact our team who will be more than happy to share their knowledge.