Scrivito CMS UI closeup

A New Address for Scrivito’s Editing Interface

Scrivito Changes the URL of Its Editing Interface.

Currently, if your Scrivito website has the address https://www.mysite.net, the Scrivito UI for your website is located at https://www.mysite.net/scrivito. In the future, this will change, and the Scrivito UI will be available at https://edit.scrivito.com/www.mysite.net.

When will this happen?

edit.scrivito.com is available now, and you can try it out today.

Your existing Scrivito website will continue to work with the old address until you explicitly activate the new one in your application. Once you do this, the old address will automatically be forwarded to the new address.

Activating the new address is painless since no application logic needs to be changed. However, your application’s configuration will need a few trivial changes. These are described in our migration guide.

What will change?

  • The UI will become accessible without using 3rd-party cookies.
  • Updates for Scrivito will become available faster and require less effort to integrate.
  • Managing multiple websites in a single Scrivito instance will become easier.

Accessible without 3rd-party cookies

Whenever the Scrivito UI accesses the Scrivito backend from its old address, the browser considers this a ‘‘3rd-party request’’ since the UI and the backend reside on different domains. The cookie used for authentication is therefore considered a ‘‘3rd-party cookie’’.

In theory, there is nothing wrong with applications like the Scrivito UI using a 3rd-party cookie for legitimate purposes such as letting a user log in. Unfortunately however, 3rd-party cookies can also be exploited by ad networks to spy on users, tracking their behavior across the web.

Even worse, there is no way for a browser to distinguish between legitimate 3rd-party cookies and spying. Therefore, major browser vendors have decided to drop support for 3rd-party cookies altogether.

Safari has already started blocking 3rd-party cookies by default, and Chrome is planning to also do this in the future.

Even today, many users of privacy add-ons (‘‘ad blockers’’) have reported trouble logging into their Scrivito UIs, and the need to configure exceptions in order to allow the 3rd-party cookies Scrivito currently uses.

By moving the Scrivito UI to edit.scrivito.com, we are avoiding the use of 3rd-party cookies entirely, making Scrivito future proof and the UI easier to access for privacy-minded users.

Faster, easier updates

The User Interface (UI) is where editors author website content, while the Software Development Kit (SDK) is the JavaScript library web developers use to implement the look, feel and logic of the website.

In the past, for technical reasons, the Scrivito UI was coupled to the Scrivito SDK, meaning that we were unable to pass on UI improvements to the users without releasing a new version of the Software Development Kit and then asking all our customers to have their web development team update their web application to use the new SDK version.

In order to streamline this process, the Scrivito team managed to improve our UI technology, enabling us to decouple the UI from the SDK. This means that we can now offer bugfixes, improvements (sometimes even entire new features) to the UI, etc., without developers having to wait for a new SDK release and installing it manually.

In other words, Scrivito users can now instantly benefit from UI improvements without any further action on the side of the application developers.

Better multi-site support

In the old address scheme, each domain had its own instance of the Scrivito UI. So if you are managing multiple domains (e.g. mysite.com, mysite.de, etc.), each of these currently uses a separate UI instance (mysite.com/scrivito, mysite.de/scrivito, etc). This makes it difficult for editors to perform cross-site actions like copying pages between domains. With the new edit.scrivito.com address, you can use a single, unified UI instance across several domains (edit.scrivito.com/mysite.com, edit.scrivito.com/mysite.de, etc,), facilitating editing tasks that involve multiple domains.

LET US KNOW WHAT YOU THINK!

We hope that you’ll enjoy the improved way of accessing the Scrivito UI.

As usual, don’t hesitate to get in contact, and let us know your feedback!