6.6 release notes

The page builder in Matrix has been enhanced with several improvements to its existing features.

You can now edit the properties and personas of components in the page builder using inline edit mode.

The display conditions feature has been improved in both functionality and design. You can also now edit display conditions in inline edit mode.

Changes to the content within a component highlights the component itself to make it more apparent to the user which components have unsaved content changes.

How you save changes in the side-panel within the page builder has been improved. You can now make changes to multiple components at once and save them all together in a single action.

The additional save button inside the side-panel has also been removed.

Whenever you access inline edit mode on an asset, Matrix now automatically acquires the editing locks for you so that you can start editing straight away.

Matrix also automatically acquires the locks if you navigate to another asset while in inline edit mode. This improvement lets you quickly edit the next asset without first clicking the Edit button.

The new preview feature introduced in Matrix 6.5 has also been improved with several new features.

Additional preview settings now let you control the URL and context for the asset you want to preview.

If you are previewing a standard page with one or more content variations, you can now easily select which variation to preview.

Finally, the Squiz accessibility auditor has also been added to the preview screen so that you can run a full-page accessibility audit of your page to see how accessible it is against a particular standard.

This version of Matrix introduces several performance improvements.

Importing large sets of assets using the Import assets from XML tool is now a lot faster as Matrix processes more assets in each request.

Matrix is now heavily optimized to have less reliance on the file system when storing and reading metadata in the backend. This improvement means that Matrix can save or load asset metadata much faster than before. These performance improvements are most noticeable when you edit pages containing many component templates that use many metadata fields.

This improvement also means that you no longer need to regenerate metadata whenever you make changes to a metadata schema: the changes will be available straight away.

Furthermore, the Admin UI feels faster and more responsive thanks to some minor improvements to the performance of several actions within the general Admin UI.

The new custom edit layouts usage screen shows you all the places you use a custom edit layout within your Matrix system.

Each listed usage will also show you how many child assets that layout is cascaded to based on URL inheritance.

Several PayPal ecommerce packages are now classified as a stage one deprecation in this release. You will no longer be able to create PayPal assets using the Matrix admin UI. However, existing PayPal assets will continue to work.

You should re-implement any PayPal functionality with alternative solutions as soon as possible. The deprecated packages will be removed entirely from Matrix in a future release.

Read the Deprecated assets and features page for more information about packages deprecated as part of this release.

The system_integrity_fix_char_encoding.php script has been removed from Matrix because currently supported versions of Matrix only support UTF-8 character sets.