Hello Resellers and Developers! 

It's been some time since we've updated the blog with improvements that have been made to API. Here's a round-up of many of the improvements from our Foundations initiative:

• Nav items can now be set to link to any URL. This replaces the redirect template method you have used in the past and should make this process much much easier for your clients.
• Nav items can now be set to open in a new window. By default, this will add target="_blank" to the link element, but you can specify a different method if you like. See "Open in a new window" on the doc page for more information on how to set this up.
• Images can now be associated with individual blog posts. Find the new tags for show_postlist and show_detail on the doc page.
• Custom forms & events can now be copied.
• Link list items can now be set up to open in a new window. This capability will require changes to Link List getContent calls to work, see link list docs for more info.
• Required fields on custom forms will now automatically display an asterisk adjacent to the label. If you've added asterisks via CSS or directly in the field label, these can now be removed.
• Members API: You can now input a variety of information about users based on their profile information. See the full documentation. (Note that this page used to contain API documentation for /me/ pages. Those docs have been moved here.)
• A "groupby:group" parameter is now available for Blogs, Blogposts, and Sermons. More information is available in the documentation for Blogs and Sermons.

I also wanted to highlight two of our larger features that have API implications.

Easy Edit

Easy Edit helps people get to the content they want to edit faster and easier. By placing edit links directly on the client site, it's no longer necessary to hunt for that content you want to edit in the backend. ("Was it a Link List or a Section?") Click on an edit link and be whisked right to the edit screen in question. It's really that easy. Go ahead and try it out by clicking on the "Easy Edit" link in the backend's very top menu bar. 

We've received great feedback from users on Easy Edit. Options that are available to the developer specific crowd can be seen here: http://developers.monkcms.com/article/easy-edit/

Image Resizing API 

What this will allow you to do is specify certain height and width parameters to API tags which return image elements or URLs, and have those returned images be automatically resized. This means you no longer have to worry about the size of the images your clients are uploading; you can tell the API exactly what you'd like.

You can read up on the new parameters here: http://developers.monkcms.com/article/image-caching--thumbnail-creation/

Please keep the following several things in mind:

1. All sites must have a monkimage folder with permissions set to 777. The script that generates the thumbnails will attempt to create this folder, but some server configurations can prevent this. If the folder doesn't get created automatically, you can simply create it manually.
2. Images contained in the WYSIWYG interface will be dynamically resized after the release, depending on the height and width set by users.
3. "SMALL-" versions of images will no longer be created. Instead, the API tag that previously returned the "SMALL-" version will begin returning a dynamically resized version of the original image, using the same height and width as the "SMALL-" versions were previously returned as. You can still use those tags that currently return the "SMALL-" version, but their use will be discouraged in favor of the standard image and image URL tags with height and width parameters applied.

We hope you find these improvements to be as exciting for the advancement of the CMS as we do. As always, let us know if you have any comments or questions.

Thanks!