Jahia 8 offers simplicity of use for digital marketers, designers, and content authors while retaining the power of the underlying platform. Developers can take advantage of new React interfaces that make it easier than ever to extend Jahia's default interfaces with customizations required for individual use cases. System administrators will benefit from infrastructure updates and Docker product images.
In parallel, new add-ons and updates to modules have been made across the application ecosystem including:
jExperience & jCustomer (powered by Unomi) has been updated to version 1.5.1 with support for Elasticsearch 7.x and improvements to profile events for use with StackConnect
Jahia StackConnectfor Jahia 8 offers a no-code method of automating processes based on visitor interactions with your websites and applications and provides a simple way to aggregate visitor data to enrich profiles and improve content personalization.
Augmented Search based on ElasticSearch 7.x offers a GraphQL API and sample user interface to help you deliver search capabilities that help your visitors find the right content fast.
SiteImprove integration provides you with another stackable solution component, integrated directly into the Jahia interface, to help your content authors with SEO, accessibility, and readability.
We're quite proud of Jahia 8! Check it out!
When should existing customers move to Jahia 8?
For everyone
Whether working on new or existing projects, you can always try out Jahia 8 through our Free Cloud Trial environment, we welcome you to take advantage of this opportunity to get hands on with Jahia 8 and give your users a head start on learning the new interfaces. Guided tours and new tutorials are available to support you.
For new projects
New projects are a great opportunity to get started with Jahia 8. Start your new project with this new version and take full advantage of the updates.
For existing deployments
For existing projects that are already deployed we recommend that you treat your move to Jahia 8 as a MIGRATION project.
Jahia 8 contains a number of changes to the technology framework, supported environments, and module ecosystem (applications, extensions, and templates). We've created a comprehensive migration guide as well as a migration assistance module to help you assess the scope of what Jahia 8 means to you. Some work will be required to update your modules. For users of jExperience, Jahia 8 requires the latest version of jCustomer (1.5.x) based on ElasticSearch 7.4.
Please review our documentation and consider all the components in your ecosystem as you plan your path forward.
Summary
Jahia 8.0 includes significant UI changes and back end upgrades.
New navigation menus and experience
In Jahia 8.0 we’ve taken significant steps to update our navigation interface to make common tasks more efficient for users. The new navigation provides better organization and improved accessibility based on common patterns for placement of standard items such as ‘settings’.
New content editing interface
Content Editor, initially released in 7.3.1.1, is now the default editing experience for content. More functionality will be released through module releases, however, in the interim any functionality or tabs that were previously available can be located in the Advanced options tab in Content Editor.
Connectors
Previously Jahia offered dedicated connectors to Salesforce.com & Google AdWords as well as numerous other services built offerings. We are pleased to now offer 250+ connectors via a new offering Jahia Stack Connect and recommend clients evaluate these offerings and consider migration if appropriate.
Custom modules
Jahia introduced support for OSGI 6 and recommends all new module development follow the published guidance for OSGI.
To ease the migration of modules built using Spring, Jahia 8.0 includes support for modules built with Spring 3.2. We are also making Spring 5.2 available, in case you need it.
Using the Spring Framework and/or Blueprint in Jahia to declare services and handle services lifecycle and wiring is not recommended and is deprecated starting with Jahia 8.2. Consider using OSGi declarative services instead, you can find examples of implementation in Jahia's OSGI Modules Samples repository.