Spring 2009 has been (and continues to be) a large undertaking for some big-picture enhancements for Siteflex, primarily of which is our biggest server and back-end technology upgrade since launching the Siteflex platform. Windows 2008, IIS7 and SQL 2008 all being great steps forward to having Siteflex websites running quickly and smoothly.

There continues to be more and more incremental Siteflex enhancements rolling out, most of which has already been mentioned on Siteflex's Twitter page. Below are a few of the more noteworthy changes, with a little extra detail.

URL Enhancements

Product URLs - cutting down on the possibilities of duplicate Product URLs while keeping in line with the enhanced URL method as discussed previously.

The Product Code will be appended to the URL in any possible duplication situations, but avoided otherwise. Very handy for any site with a large amount of Products and Product Categories, such as JEM Promotional Products!

Enhanced URLs (now active on News and Products) now also:

• are case sensitive, further limiting duplicate content issues with search engines
• redirect old legacy URLs to the new enhanced URL (currently active on News, soon to be on Products)
• are required to be more specifically formed, giving a greater chance of 404 given an incorrectly formed URL - great for search engines!
• have an expanded set of security constraints

Pagination & Friends

As websites grow and expand it becomes increasingly necessary to provide the most relevant data while maintaining an accessible archive of more specific data should there be a need to access it. That's one of the main driving forces behind our new Siteflex standard Pagination method, which is now applied to Search results and Product lists.

We've now also applied the Pagination to further areas of Siteflex, namely the Tagged item list along with the Recent Pages list.

The Tagged item list displays a list of items (Pages only at this stage) tagged with a certain term or phrase. This type of Siteflex page will become more common as the Page Tagging functionality improves, which it already has been: thanks to the auto-complete prompt making it easier to reuse the same tagging terms.

The Recent Pages list has also received a great deal of recent upgrades, moving the Recent Pages suite of functions closer to something resembling the existing News system - offering Siteflex administrators the tweakability of Pages along with all the same benefits of News.

Speaking of News, we're looking forward to moving it to the new Pagination method in the coming months.

And Plenty More

Custom logos for 404 pages, Forgot My Password email enhancements, Siteflex Contact website logins being able to have an expiry date... it's all happening!

Keep an eye on the Siteflex Twitter for the latest Siteflex news and enhancements.