MM5.8 Major New Features
- Gosia Creosteanu (Unlicensed)
- Tracey Spencer
Media Manager 5.8.0
Accessibility
The Digizuite team has begun a journey towards greater accessibility of Media Manager and related products. We have selected to base the changes on Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). These guidelines are acknowledged worldwide and are the foundations for the major local accessibility frameworks.
Our ultimate goal is to become compliant with the WCAG 2.1, conformance level ‘AA’, and in version 5.8 we have made a significant progress towards achieving that goal.
We have created a brand new Design Guide that takes into consideration the abovementioned guidelines. The Guide defines every design element in the system such as buttons, lists, spacing between elements and colors. Throughout the process of implementation of the new principles, Media Manager was regularly tested with the recommended tools for checking the accessibility of the application with great results.
Some of the focus areas include:
headings: we have added semantic tags, wherever it was possible
keyboard focus: Media Manager can be navigated by using keyboard only
color contrast: we have removed customs color from most components as well as adjusted our greyscale tones to fit the accessibility guidelines
spacing: we have applied an appropriate spacing for for every single component, which is especially important for small components such as buttons and checkboxes.
The users will immediately notice significant design UI changes to the different areas of the Media Manager such as:
top bar
menu navigation
filter panel
filter chips
pagination
tabs
asset card
breadcrumbs
task page
lists
notification dialogs
folders
metadata editor.
Configuration moved to Media Manager UI
As part of our journey towards the goal of unified UI, we have moved large parts of the configuration from the DAM Center to the Media Manager UI.
The following sections are now available in Media Manager’s settings under ‘Settings’ → ‘Portal config manager’:
ConfigManager is now available under the tab ‘Configuration’
Label configuration is now available under the tab ‘Labels’; label configuration has simultaneously become much faster and more intuitive.
Administration of the cropping presets is now available under the tab ‘Crop presets’
Administration of templates is now available under the tabs ‘Mail templates’ and ‘HTML templates’.
The changes mean that the administrators of the systems can now change labels, add new cropping presets, administer AI functionality, enable or disable out many customizations to features, create new templates and much more without ever leaving Media Manager.
Other improvements
New login button
We have re-designed the top bar to make the process of logging in to the system more intuitive. When the user is not logged in, there is now a large ‘Log in’ button, language selector as well as ‘About’ button located on the right side of the top bar.
Changing the password
When the user changes the password to the system in the profile administration, there is now a dialog shown to confirm the successful change.
Changes to the list view
It is now possible to fully control the width of the columns in the asset list view. Thanks to this the users can, for example, see the entire asset titles, even the very long ones.
User preferences
User can now perform a factory rest on their custom preference from their profile page. This will reset: filters, sorting, the default view mode, metadata editor width, pinned metadata fields and auto-expanding of metadata groups.
Collection sharing
When a user receives an invitation to a collection via email, they will be prompted to log in upon clicking the share link.
Deleting workflow tasks
The users can now multiselect and delete workflow tasks on the task page. Until version 5.7 it was only possible to delete 1 workflow tasks at a time.
Related assets
The users gain the ability to customize what information is shown for assets in the ‘Related assets’ tab, just like it was possible to do for a standard asset list.
Media Manager 5.8.1
Advanced search
In version 5.8.1 we have added much more flexibility when searching for the right assets by introducing an advanced search functionality. Advanced search is a powerful tool that through a variety of queries allows the user to narrow down the search results much more precisely than just when using an ordinary free-text search functionality.
Advanced search can be used either as part of free-text search as a way to further narrow down the results or independently of it, i.e. no keywords are needed to run it.
Each new line of a query consists of 3 elements:
metafield: select one of the metadata fields existing in the system to be the basis of the query
operant: dependent on the metadata field type
value: the filter which decides the search results.
As an example, the user could search for assets which do not contain a particular keyword and then further narrow down the results by specifying that another specific metadata field must be empty.
Sorting in filter values
The work with filters that contain many values has been simplified by re-introducing the ability to sort the values within a filter in two ways:
by usage: the most commonly used values appear at the top of the list
alphabetically: the values appear from A to Z.
Manual selection of thumbnails for video assets
The users have now a greater freedom when selecting how video assets are represented on the homepage. Apart from the ability to generate a new set of random thumbnails and selecting one of them, the users now have another option. By clicking on ‘Specific frame’ tab in the thumbnail selector, the users can select any frame from the video manually and save it as the new thumbnail for this video asset.