V4 Overview
With V4, Expression Studio and Web now come in slightly different
'packaging'.
'Expression Studio 4 Web Professional'
contains Expression Web 4 and SuperPreview, Expression Encoder 4 and
Expression Design 4.
'Expression Studio 4 Ultimate' contains Expression
Blend 4, SketchFlow, Expression Web 4 and SuperPreview, Expression
Encoder Pro and Expression Design 4.
Expression Web V4
has three main new features, as well as a number of
less obvious changes.
SEO Tools
Probably the most important of these new features for regular users is
the SEO Reports, which are found on the Tools menu. These check your site in
much the same way as a search engine and give you reports by current page or
the whole site. Over 40 'rules' are used for the report and a full
description of these is given in the Help documentation.
Start by launching the tool and selecting what you want to check.
Having made your selection the report might typically look like the
following. Note the link to a relevant Help topic
The new Add-In model
With V4, Expression Web now has an excellent Add-In model based on
HTML, JavaScript and XML which will allow both professional developers
and users to create a wealth of additional functionality. Several add-in
providers are already working with this and
WebAssist have announced both a free PayPal Button
Add-in and their commitment to bring new add-ins out in the very near
future, including CSS Sculptor which was very popular in it's V2
version.
At the moment the
published details of the Add-In model (SDK) needs more detail and
examples but this is sure to improve. There is a simple
demo of an add-in from one of the Expression Development Engineers. There's also
an Add-In Builder 'add-in' that the basis of an add-in for you. See the
XWeb Team blog.
(I have several Add-Ins for V4 in the Expression Gallery,
details here )
Add-Ins are installed and managed via the 'Tools - Add-Ins' dialog:
(more detail here)
SuperPreview
Introduced with V3, SuperPreview now takes a major step forward with
the ability to use browsers in 'The Cloud' to show page rendering in
browsers you wouldn't have access to without a different platform. The
first of these is Safari for Mac. To enable this feature you need to
open up SuperPreview and select "Sign up for the SuperPreview online
service" using the new icon shown below.
The
V4 Launch Video shows SuperPreview in action better than I
can put into words.
Other Changes
There are a number of other changes, bug fixes and improvements
you'll spot as you use V4. (We're told that 82 customer-reported bug
were fixed in V4).
Here are a few of the most obvious changes:
ASP.Net Framework 4.0: V4 supports Framework 4.0 and
gives you the option to create a web.config for ASP.Net 4.0
Auto-Styles: when EW creates styles for you these
are now named auto-style1, auto-style2 etc.
Help: Has been significantly improved
Publishing: The Site menu now has three new options:
- 'Publish Current File to xxx'
- 'Publish Changed Files to xxx'
- 'Publish All Files to xxx'
Page Tabs: These now have a right-click menu giving
'Save, Publish, Close'
Silverlight 3 Support: V4 now has support for
Silverlight 2 and 3 applications
And others .....