T4’s new and upcoming features – a T4 conference roundup
In May 2024, Richard Rooney and I attended the Terminalfour User Group and Learning Conference in Manchester for two days of demos, sessions and networking with other universities.
It was great to meet everyone from T4 and get insights from staff at other universities around content management, training and design systems. Most of the sessions were about new and upcoming features for T4 which we are excited to use. The following is what was shown.
The future of T4 Search
Although we’re not using TerminalFour Search, we got an insight into the infrastructure and the development plan. Improvements are coming to the backend user interface (UI) where indexing via the UI with granular controls is going to be implemented. User rights and roles are going to be looked at and improved. Different search results for different user groups was also discussed.
In the future, T4 aim to incorporate AI into TerminalFour Search which should help reframe ‘searching’ with ‘finding’, and they aim to allow the indexing of more sources to fuel search results, such as databases, XML feeds and documents.
Webhooks
On the afternoon of the first day we got to see the new webhooks feature for the Form Builder, which was released in version 8.3.19. Rather than have T4 handle form submissions, they can now be sent to a third-party service where different workflows can be completed based on the data. For example, if a School is selected in a form, workflows can be set up to send personalised emails to the head of that School.
Third-party services like Zapier and Power Automate can also integrate with other services to send the data, for example, alerting a channel in Microsoft Teams when a form is submitted, or automatically populating a spreadsheet with the submissions.
Although this feature is only available for the Form Builder, T4 are considering bringing this to other parts of the system to extend its functionality. In the future, we may get workflows based on when content types and sections are created, when publishes have completed or failed, and when content or page layouts are changed. It’s an exciting feature and I can see the team taking full advantage if and when webhooks are expanded outside of the Form Builder.
Improving the content editing experience
On the second day, Dave Larkan provided an insight into how they’re going to improve the content editing experience and the changes to content types to make this happen. They’re aiming to release this in the next version (8.3.20), arriving in October or November 2024.
Current problems
- Currently, all elements within a content type are always shown whether they’re needed or not. These optional elements can increase cognitive load and clutter the edit page.
- Repeating content type elements within a group is clunky. Currently, to get accordions and navboxes working we need a start and end content item as well as content items for each accordion or navbox within that group. For pages with a lot of accordions or navboxes, it can be tricky parsing which content item relates to which accordion or navbox.
- Additional information for content elements is only shown when hovering over the name of the element, which isn’t helpful.
Solutions
Conditional elements
Elements have the option to be shown or hidden depending on the rules that are set. For example, if ‘Display image’ is selected in our featured media content type, an element would show to insert an image. However, if ‘Display video’ was selected, the image element would be hidden and an element for inserting a video link would show instead.
Repeater elements
A new ‘repeater’ element is due to be added to content type to fix the issue around repeating content types. In the content type, you would add in the repeater element and then choose which other content type you would like repeated – think of it like a repeated content type within a content type.
When creating content, the repeated content type would contain all the necessary elements for it to output on the page. While the feature isn’t finished yet, the demo showed their plan to introduce controls, such as user restrictions and minimum and maximum limits for repeated content types.
Editing page improvements
Help text will now be under the ‘name’ of the content element rather than hidden away in a hoverable tooltip. This will be helpful if additional context is needed or for providing instructions on how to fill out a specific element.
To help give the editing page some breathing room, static elements are to be introduced to help section off and group elements better. Horizonal lines (like the <hr> tag) and spacing between elements were teased, but more static elements could be added before it’s released.
Handlebars
After the webhooks demonstration, Paul Kelly showed how Handlebars will work as a new content and layout processor in version 8.3.19, bridging the gap between T4 tags and programmable layouts.
T4 have built upon Handlebars to provide custom helpers that will give developers more flexibility in creating content and page layouts. They also showed how easy it was to convert T4 tags into Handlebars markup:
<t4 type="Content" Name="Name" output="normal" />
<t4 type="Content" Name="Content" output="normal" modifiers="medialibrary,nav_sections" />
{{publish element="Name"}}
{{{publish element="Content"}}}
More information can be found in Introduction to Handlebars in the T4 knowledge base.
Although this is just the initial release, T4 are looking to incorporate custom user helpers, partials for reusable code, and a T4 tag builder-esque UI for generating Handlebars helpers.
While we’ve used Handlebars for other projects in the past, we’re excited to use it in T4 as it will help clean up and simplify some of our more complex content and page layouts.
Conclusion
Although we still need to upgrade our T4 instance to the latest version, the team are eager to try out these new features. We’d like to thank T4 for hosting a great conference and hope to be at the next one.