This release sees the biggest leap in Affino’s usability we have ever made. There have been hundreds of improvements made so that Affino is easier to learn and use. The biggest change is the complete reworking of the Control Centre, and although many of the changes are subtle, everything is now within easy reach. Two clicks and a swipe when using tablets or mobiles.

The usability changes go further to make it much easier to set up security, build page designs, style your sites, run stores and tailor the SEO on each Zone. We also removed a great deal of legacy functionality which has allowed us to streamline Affino further and innovate the new flat navigation that you get in this release.

Ecommerce is the second area which has seen some dramatic improvements. We now have Timezone support for the first time in Affino, so that you can run sites and stores across multiple regions on the same instance. Campaign driven commerce is greatly improved with better campaign management, catalogue management, coupon and order management, product search and product drill-down menu.

We have also improved the shopping experience with a great new drop-down shopping basket and the login overlay which allows for improved direct selling of subscriptions / memberships from the login page.

A major new feature is the introduction of the Funding Platform into Affino. People familiar with KickStarter and similar fundraising sites will be at home using the Affino version.

Many more elements have been Zoned particularly within lookups and Analytics, where Channel, Content and Site Analysis are all now Zoned for the first time. This takes Affino further towards our goal of being able to Zone the whole Control Centre. Watch out also for the tweaks we’ve made to the App Bar, they take a bit of getting used to, but you’ll notice that you speed up over time.

Altogether there were nearly 300 projects completed for this release, and we had to re-write the Affino updater to be able to handle the scope of all the changes, making this by far the biggest update yet.

We see Affino 6.0.13 as great foundation release to build on this year, and the changes we’ve made will allow us to drive forward on the plans for 2012 and accelerate Affino’s development moving ahead. Expect another release later in March

This release is primarily focused on Usability, with a whole range of updates for campaign driven ecommerce sites. We continue to be driven by the desire to speed things up for our users, removing un-used functionality is a major aspect of that, and this release is the biggest ‘spring clean’ we’ve ever done for Affino.

With Affino evolving to be more and more touch and mobile driven we have completed a major review of all the aspects which need to be updated over the coming year. Along the way we have identified dozens of little used Affino elements which we have decided to remove rather than update. This will allow us to focus our resources so that we can update all the elements which are used heavily both faster and to make them better than ever. It also clears out a great deal of ‘clutter’ that was serving no great purpose.

Key Enhancements

Control Centre - Less is More

We have removed a fifth of Affino’s Design Elements and reorganised the rest; removed 40% of the Security Clearances and reorganised the rest; reorganised the Control Centre whilst removing 15% of the Controls; simplified Form Styles to make them mobile and tablet optimised; and simplified dozens of interfaces to remove complexity and ‘gotchas’.

In removing and reorganising all these elements and many more, we have greatly simplified Affino and reduced the learning curve for all users and especially new ones. The day to day impact on existing sites will be absolutely minimal since we have extensively researched how Affino sites are being used and which elements are under-used.

A great deal of our focus has also gone into improving the usability of the existing elements. Dozens of management interfaces have been improved, ranging from minor fixes such as adding new filtering options through to complete overhauls. These will add up to a great deal of time saved each day for actively managed sites.

The Control Centre has now been firmly built around each of the ken key management screens, e.g. Publish, Promote, Communicate. Each has its own video guide and all the management tools for that area are immediately accessible from each Centre.

We cover each element in brief which has been removed below, and in more detail in a separate Blog post.

Ecommerce

This

It’s taken a while, but we’re very happy with how Affino is now running on the Amazon and Yotta clouds. There’s been a solid couple of years effort now to tune it and optimise it, and things are working out extremely well right now.

It means that it’s time to update some of the key platform elements so that we can take advantage of some of the great new developments from our infrastructure partners and software providers. The key benefits we can see are going to be faster development, more effective scaling, better cloud handling and improved performance.

We will also be converting all our display code to HTML 5. This is going to be a massive project but is key to a lot of developments we will be undertaking, primarily the new adaptive mobile and tablet interfaces.

HTML 5

The single biggest project we will be undertating, i.e. a couple of man-months of development will be to re-code Affino into HTML 5. As mentioned, this is key to our Mobile, Tablet and App developments; it is also key to our migration from Flash / Flex, which much as we love it, is clearly struggling to get any traction on the new post PC devices.

There are a lot of related projects here such as re-working the Control Centre to use dynamic HTML, updating all the charting components to use images or HTML 5 and the mobile APIs.

ColdFusion 9

We’re very happy with ColdFusion 8, it does pretty much everything we need of it, and it seems to us that the development platforms have become pretty mature in the same way that the underlying web servers are now mature technolgies.

We really like some of the new developments in ColdFusion 9 though including the indexing / search developments; improvements in the cloud licencing; and it’s ability to expose functionality as services. i’m sure we’ll discover a host of additional ones once we have it in the hands of our development team.

SQL Server 2008

SQL Server 2008 brings a lot to the table, but for us the overriding factor is the improved performance we’ll be able to deliver to the Affino community.

Affino 6.5