Our Product and Engineering teams are putting the finishing touches on Evoq 9, a major release of our CMS. In this post, I share some Q&A I did with the leaders of our Product and Engineering teams. Want to see our new CMS? Register for our launch webinar, which will include a live demo.
Insights from the Product Team
Will Morgenweck (@wmorgenweck) leads our Product team. I asked Will how his team is doing, his favorite new feature, and more.
The DAYS leading up to a release can be intense. How’s your team doing?
You’re right, it can be very intense, but the team is doing great. Everyone is very excited about this release and committed to making it fantastic.
describe the theme of Evoq 9 in one word?
Refined. We’ve done good UI/UX in the past, but never like this. We rebuilt the entire administrative user interface. In the past, we redesigned the look and feel, but this is a complete rebuild.
We are using modern development techniques to deliver a user experience that is lightweight, fast and intuitive. We evaluated every screen, setting and pixel. We removed items that were no longer relevant in order to streamline the experience.
new feature You're most excited about?
Analytics. We redesigned our analytics system to leverage data from Google Analytics. Customers will have a consistent data story between Evoq and Google Analytics, but still have the ease-of-use of our in-page analytics, directly in Evoq.
one thing you’ll demo on the webinar that people can’t afford to miss?
The new content applications that are built with structured content. We’ll have dozens of built-in visualizers that allow users to quickly create rich image displays, galleries, slideshows, banner rotators and more.
Insights from the Engineering Team
Ash Prasad (@ashishprasad) leads our Engineering team. I asked Ash how his team is doing, and how his team approaches performance and security.
How’s the Engineering team doing?
It’s pretty intense right now. Having said that, this isn’t our first release. We’re entering the stabilization phase, where all aspects of the software are tested by our QA team.
Developers are on standby to fix issues as soon as they are found. We are also scanning for performance and security issues as well.
Describe the theme of Evoq 9 in one word?
It’s actually two words: structured content. Traditionally, content in DNN is associated with a module or page. One could not create content without a page. With Evoq 9, we’ve separated content from layout, making it available for re-use on multiple pages and in channels beyond your website.
What new feature are you most excited about?
Hmm, hard to pick from such a long list. Form Builder is is a game-changer for Evoq. It has an intuitive and modern UI to design forms. You can embed forms outside of Evoq, just like you’d embed a YouTube video. Similarly, once a form is created, it can be posted on any of your web properties independent of Evoq.
What approach do you take with performance and security?
Performance and security are very important. They’re part of the entire product development cycle. They require careful planning, team education, smart coding, and a lot of testing. We have bots running in our labs, doing performance and stress testing on all of our products.
Via these bots, we evaluate every code change to see whether it made the product faster or slower. We also observe response times visually. We run tests on both faster and slower hardware to see how the product behaves.
We also simulate heavy loads, such as millions of users, files, folders, etc. Some of the tools that we use include JMeter, Selenium and LoadStorm.
Register for Our Launch Webinar
We're doing a launch webinar for Evoq 9. Whether you're in Marketing or IT, we think you'll love the New DNN. Register below and see a live demonstration of our latest capabilities.
Title: Why Marketing and IT Will Love the New DNN
Date: Available Now On-Demand
Presenters: Joe Brinkman, Navin Nagiah and Will Morgenweck
How to Join:Register to View the Webinar Replay
The New DNN is like nothing you’ve seen before. Experience it for yourself in this DNN 9 launch webinar. See a live demonstration of new capabilities that IT and Marketing will both love.