SDL releases Tridion Sites 9.5

SDL Tridion Sites 9.5 marks a major step towards a fully rejuvenated user experience for SDL Tridion practitioners, while also including improvements in Search and Content Delivery.

Experience Space – our new and improved user interface
How the Dynamic Experience Delivery component has been improved with better search and easier headless publishing
How the functional and technical features of each release compare in simple summary tables

Please refer to the community link for the announcement

What’s new in SDL Tridion Sites 9.5

Refer to my blogs Link for more details and you can download the datasheet from our website refer to link

Tridion Sites 9.5 Semantic Content Models

Semantic Content Models

.

Semantic Content Models’ allows you to define a mapping between the Tridion content fields and how they are queried through the GraphQL API.

This abstraction mechanism removes dependencies between the two, so that future changes to your content model don’t directly impact your front-end applications. As a result, your front-end developers can build engaging digital experiences more easily, without needing to know the inner workings of SDL Tridion

  • Customers can define their own semantic content models using GraphQL Schema Definition Language
type Post {
     id: String!
     title: String!
     publishedAt : DateTime!
     likes: Int! @default(value: 0)
     blog: Blog @relation(name:"Posts")
}

Allow customers to query filter using familiar concepts ( for example : Article , News,Post,Blog etc.)

type Blog {
  id: String!
  name: String!
  description:String
  posts: [Post!]! @relation(name: "Posts")
}

Semantic Content Models in DXD

Semantic content models exposed natively in the content API

page(namespaceId: 1, publicationId:2 , pageId:76 {
 content {
     ... on UntypedContent {
          data {
          }
        }
    }

Refined GraphQL API to support custom schema types within existing root queries ( Items,component,page

page(namespaceId: 1, publicationId:2 , pageId:76 {
 content {
     ... on Post {
          id
          title
        }
    }

Tridion Sites 9.5 Search

Why SDL Tridion Sites Search

.

SDL Tridion Sites now ships with out-of-the-box support for Elasticsearch-based search for published content, helping you find published content within pages, components and binaries. You can also search for content from SDL Tridion Docs, providing federated
search capabilities across both unstructured and structured content. People searching on your website or other digital channels can now find all the relevant information quickly and easily, without the need to perform multiple searches across your marketing content or
in-depth product and service information.

  • Customers currently have to implement their own solution ( SI4T or custom Deployer extension)
  • Optimized for SDL Tridion Sites data model
  • Makes use of existing Elasticsearch infrastructure (XO and Tridion Docs search) – upgraded to Elasticsearch 7
  • Exposed through existing Content Service ( GraphQL)
  • Predefined Content Service
  • Configurable using profile
  • Uses Data pipeline ( requires existing sites content to be re-published
# Content Service
applications.properties
# broker: default
profile to enable broker results
# search: enables search
spring.profiles.active=${springprofilesactive:broker,search)

GraphQL Search

  • New root queries to support search across both Sites & Docs
  • Supports combining results with broker
  • Supports cursor based pagination
searchById(indexName,identifier):
[Result]

searchByField(after,first,indexName,field,strict,value,resultFilter,sortBy):
SearchConnection

searchByCriteria(after,first,indexName,field,strict,value,resultFilter,sortBy):
SearchConnection

searchByRawQuery(after,first,indexName,field,strict,value,resultFilter,sortBy):
SearchConnection

SDL Tridion Docs + Tridion Sites

  • Find matching content across Tridion Docs Technical & Tridion Sites marketing publications
  • Retrieve matching topics & pages
  • Response will include matches across both namespace

Tridion Sites 9.5 Semantic Data Publishing Models

Publishing Model

New data publishing capabilities allow you to define – at the content schema level – which fields need to be published to DXD, as well as which ones are searchable. This highly granular control over what data is transferred to DXD adds extra security to your
environments.

Data Publishing

Publish content as structured date ( JSON) next to the existing rendered content

Standard data model – no need in data modifications or custom tem

Benefits of Data Publishing

  • It is enabler for strongly typed models that we will cover today as well as Tridion Sites search – out of the box search on content delivery side .
  • Data publishing is a publishing content as structure data in JSON format next to existing rendered content
  • We use standard data model so no need in data modifications or any custom template

New field properties for the Schema

Applicable for semantic content models

Each Schema field will have checkbox to specify

  • if it should be published
  • if it should be indexed on DXD

General Settings for Schema

  • Possibility to exclude item from publishing or indexing
  • Applicable for Component Schema , Metadata Schema and Multimedia Schema

ECL data publishing

  • Connectors defines if binary should be included or passed by reference
  • External metadata fields are always published and indexed

Template-less publishing: future is near

  • Before SDL Tridion 9.5 – contains static and dynamic components
  • Data publishing is template-less publishing – no more templates . All components and or dynamic
  • Template resolving behavior is still preserved
  • Possibility to not specify a template

What’s new in SDL Tridion Sites 9.5

  • Experience Space – our new and improved user interface 
  • How the Dynamic Experience Delivery component has been improved with better search and easier headless publishing 
  • Access Management
  • Searching in headless world
  • How the functional and technical features of each release compare in simple summary tables

A new user experience


SDL Tridion Sites 9.5 focuses on delivering major improvements for employees who work in Content Manager Explorer (CME). We have gathered input from a large number of customer interviews, user experience (UX) sessions, and through an extensive pilot period – combined with ideas and enhancements for usability improvements that we collected previously through Support, SDL Ideas, the SDL Community and other channels.

Experience Space – an exceptional new way of working

The name of the new user interface is Experience Space. It’s a workspace that helps you build great experiences faster
and easier, with less clicks and better defaults. It also speeds up onboarding of new employees and reduces
training needs.

Experience Space broadly offers the same capabilities of the current CME – referred to as the Classic UI from now
onwards – but with some important features added, such as an improved BluePrinting® viewer and an in-context page
preview with clear actions and panels.

Besides offering easier content management, it also ships with a brand new Rich Text Editor that improves accessibility
checks, copy/paste and table editing, and support for certain touch-enabled devices.

The new user interface supports your existing page and content models to facilitate a smooth transition. SDL Tridion
Sites 9.5 ships with both the Classic UI and Experience Space so they can be used in parallel.

Dynamic Experience Delivery (DXD)

Dynamic Experience Delivery (DXD) is the content delivery component of SDL Tridion. It has been improved in two key areas – querying content through the GraphQL API and
Elasticsearch-based search.

Headless Content Publishing

To make headless content publishing even easier, SDL Tridion Sites 9.5 redefines the way content is published from your content manager to your content delivery (DXD) environments – as well as how it can be queried from there.

New data publishing capabilities allow you to define – at the content schema level – which fields need to be published to DXD, as well as which ones are searchable. This highly granular control over what data is transferred to DXD adds extra security to your
environments.

Content is published to DXD in JSON format for easy headless content consumption. The new JSON publishing (depicted in green below) runs in parallel with your existing template/rendering mechanism, to ensure backward compatibility.

Once JSON content has been published to DXD, a new feature called ‘Semantic Content Models’ allows you to define a mapping between the Tridion content fields and how they are queried through the GraphQL API. This abstraction mechanism removes dependencies
between the two, so that future changes to your content model don’t directly impact your front-end applications. As a result, your front-end developers can build engaging digital experiences more easily, without needing to know the inner workings of SDL Tridion.

Search

SDL Tridion Sites now ships with out-of-the-box support for Elasticsearch-based search for published content, helping you find published content within pages, components and binaries. You can also search for content from SDL Tridion Docs, providing federated
search capabilities across both unstructured and structured content. People searching on your website or other digital channels can now find all the relevant information quickly and easily, without the need to perform multiple searches across your marketing content or
in-depth product and service information.

Since SDL Tridion Experience Optimization uses the same technology, you can also personalize the customer experience across various content types, all using the same technology and infrastructure
footprint.

Access Management

A new Access Management UI allows you to configure external identity providers such as Auth0, PingIdentity and Microsoft Azure AD – supporting protocols including SAML 2.0, OpenID Connect, Windows Authentication and LDAP. SDL Tridion also keeps an audit
trail of changes made to identity provider settings and user profiles, so you can always see who has changed what and when.

Summary of features launched per release