We have been hard at work for the past couple of months preparing for the release of a new Zesty.io Instance Manager experience. As we move towards our target release date we are excited to start our open beta.

After an initial alpha test, the experience is now feature complete with parity to the existing experience and ready to be used. However, we are still polishing all of the workflows to ensure they behave as expected in various edge cases; this is where you, our fantastic customers, come in. Your unique use cases provide a myriad of edge cases and that will help us ensure the manager works flawlessly. By participating in our open beta, you will be able to see the new experience before it becomes the primary one, test your major workflows, and provide feedback on the product holistically. 

Note: This new experience is a user interface change only and will not affect the API and services which render origin requests, i.e. web pages and custom endpoints.

How to Access the Beta

Accessing the beta version of the Instance Manager is as simple as opening your instance settings and clicking on the "Manager Beta" link, located in both the grid and list views:

How to Provide Feedback

While using the beta please do let us know of any issues you encounter and what you think of the new experience(s). When providing feedback we ask that you either submit a bug on the public codebase, let us know on the Slack chat beta channel, or email your Account Manager directly.

What’s Included in the Beta

While this release is primarily based around unseen, "under the hood" changes, there are a few notable ones:

Overall Layout

We have a brand new "app shell" which changes the appearance and location of the  navigation. The first thing you will notice is the primary manager navigation is now left-aligned.

Global Tabs

One of the things we’ve observed while working with customers is that they would open multiple browser tabs when working in Zesty.io to be able to jump back and forth between different applications. E.g. a user keeps 3 browser tabs open: one for authoring code, another to author content, and one for Schema. Global tabs now allow quick access  back to areas you were working in previously within a single browser tab.

Contextual Help

There is now a single location to gain access to related documentation. Whenever you are in a sub application, the help icon will give you links to the related documentation on zesty.org.

Instance Quicklinks

In the global account menu located at the top right of the instance manager, you will now find a dropdown containing a list of all instances to which you have access Quickly jump to any instance’s manager using this new feature. 

Dedicated Favicon

We build Zesty.io for you and as such we wanted to put your business front and center. One effort to achieve this is with the new favicon selection experience which is accessed via the globe icon in the top left corner. This not only brings awareness to this important asset but also gives you an easy way to identify which instance you’re working in when developing more than one web property.

Lots of Bug Fixes!

Along with some of the new enhancements there have been a lot of bug fixes that have gone in the release. Typically we release bug fixes in an ongoing cadence, however when preparing for a release of this size we have to freeze any fixes going into the current version. This means that this release will have a sizable backlog of bug fixes from the past few weeks.

With More to Come

While we are squarely focused on releasing this new experience, we are also really excited for what is next. The rest of the year will be dedicated to an overhaul of our media application. We’re looking forward to building new experiences and enhancements coming through next year - more on that soon.