Blog

BranchCMS is now fully supporting Twig version 3. The previous version that was supported was Twig Version 1. We recommend that all websites update to use Twig 3 as soon as possible. Upgrading BranchCMS to Twig 3 lets us take advantage of better templating performance and best practices. It's also where we'll be doing all of our future updates. Twig version 1 will technically still be supported…

We pushed out an update today that renames a number of the internal app API methods to some more intuitive names. Essentially we removed "Filter" from the API method names and made the API method names plural. Below is a list of the updated API methods. The old method names will continue to work but we do not recommend using them anymore as they are deprecated. App Old Method Name New Method…

Websites today rarely live in isolation. Often they are either integrating other services like a Facebook feed or Disqus comments, or they are pushing content to other services like a Customer Relation Manager (CRM). With BranchCMS you can easily send data to other websites or services using the Request Object. As an example, let's say that you have a form on your website where you collect…

We have been working on changing our template engine from Branch Code to Twig over the last few months. To make it easier for developers to update their code we built a tool that will convert Branch Code to Twig code. It's a huge time saver! To get there go to Site Manager -> Tools -> Convert Branch Code to Twig. This will bring you to the conversion tool. Enter your Branch Code in the field on…

Since January we have been working on changing the core template engine from our proprietary Branch Code to the popular Twig engine. We are about 95% done and figured that it was time to let everyone know about it. For those that don't know, Branch Code (and now Twig) is the code that is used in templates to build your site and display your content. Why Twig? Because it has an awesome name that…

Sometimes when you are redesigning a website you don't want to copy over all of the files from the old website to the new website. Often there is a lot of content and structure changes and it's undesirable to have to deal with legacy files. However, sometimes you are copying existing content over from the old site to the new site and you want to have an easy way to retrieve only the files that you…

The code editor for site Templates and Snippets has been in need of an update for a long time. We have been using the Ace editor for all other code templates for a while now, but for various reasons the editor for the Templates and Snippets hasn't been updated.  Well now it has. The same editor that is being used for app content templates, form templates and every other code template is now…

There are times when it would be nice to programmatically set the value for a form field when displaying it on a page. A recent release now lets you do that through the form's API tag.  Before we get into the details let me give you an example first. Let's say that you have a few product pages and you want to place a small lead-generation form on those pages for prospective customer's to easily…

Feature Enhancements for Branch CMS are flowing at an ever-growing pace; our clients expect it, and our partners depend on it. Our focus is on staying applicable to unique needs while remaining intuitive for the end-user. At Aptuitiv we understand that we have found our own success by providing the tools for our clients and partners to succeed. I'd like to show you some of the new features we've…

'User Activity' and 'Site Trash' are new tools available in Branch CMS. They provide you with valuable insight into how the software is being used, and a few ways to restore content if it was mistakenly deleted. Sometimes things get complicated, but we're here to help keep it simple. User Activity To view User Activity in Branch CMS, go to My Apps -> Users (Admin) -> User Activity. You will see a…

Sometimes when you're working on a new site it can be easier to work on a local site rather then having to FTP files up to a server. If you're on a Mac then here is some basic instructions on how to setup a local website.  To help make it obvious that we're working on a local site we like to use ".dev" as the TLD. In this example we're going to be setting up a local site called…

I'm sitting in an airport right now, waiting for a flight. Taking a quick glance around me, I see a handful of people doing who knows what on their tablets or smartphones. For all I know, they could be on your website. Whether the experience they're having is optimized for them is another story. Today people are reading, watching and buying on smaller devices and in more places than ever before…

Last week we introduced a small change to editing app layouts that should make things easier. In the past if you needed to change the template that an app layout used you had to create a whole new layout. That's not a terrible thing, but it was a bit inconvenient. We changed all that and made it so that when you edit an app layout you can now edit the template that the layout uses. When you change…

We recently added another API parameter to the Navigation API in Aptuitiv Studio that you might find useful. Say that you have a navigation menu that shows the primary navigation across the top of the website. The main navigation has drop-down menus so the navigation menu is configured to show all sub navigation. In this example you also need to pull in specific sub navigation into the left…

Global Tags While working on the new demo site for Aptuitiv, I came across an issue. I had designed the site to utilize the Accounts feature in the Site Template. As you may know, you can pull in account information of the user currently logged in by using Global Tags. I hadn’t featured this in any of my designs yet, so I thought I would try it out with the demo site. We are using a lot of the…

We've had our Navigation APIs for a while and this morning we just added some more functionality, so I figured it's a good time to give an overview of what our Navigation APIs are and how you can use them. The Navigation Menu API lets you do the following things. Use the same navigation menu in different areas of your website but display it differently each time. Pull just sub-navigation items…

One question that we often get from new clients is where to start when building a new site. A while ago we created a Getting Started Guide that can help. However, in this post I'd like to discuss things a bit more generically and talk about strategies for building sites with any Content Management System (CMS). When a CMS is used to power a site is natural to assume that in a lot of cases the…

Aptuitiv Studio uses TinyMCE as the rich text editor and we recently upgraded it from version 3.2.6 to 3.3.4. For the most part the upgrade was smooth and from an end user perspective the way the editor works stayed fairly consistent. There was however one thing that was significantly different and that is the Paste as Plain Text functionality. In older versions when you clicked on the Paste As…

The development of Aptuitiv Studio is mostly driven by the needs of our customers and recently a client had some special needs. We were working on a website for one of our partners and the section of the site we were working on was for staff profiles. We were using the Directory app for this one. The requirement that was giving some problems was that the design called for navigation that listed…

We recently published a new API for the Calendar that enables you to display a mini calendar grid anywhere on your website. We already have an API to display upcoming events but there wasn't any way to display those events in a calendar grid format.  The new API call will display the current month and you can have links to the days of the month that have events.  Pretty much anything that you…