Glide version 21: making the complex easy

A leap forward in system usability that makes some of the most powerful features in Glide easier to use - so you can focus on doing great things for your audiences.

by Glide Press Office

Published: 18:33, 30 July 2024

It's Release Week at Glide. That's not so rare - there have been 29 in the last year - but this one deserves its own release number: version 21. We call it the See More, Do More release.

At the heart of v21 is Widget Insight, a complete overhaul of the usability and speed which the game-changing system tools called Widgets can be created and used across Glide CMS in Articles, Collections, and Templates.

Widget Insight means you can see more about them, and expect to do more with them.

In addition to Widget Insight are exciting new additions to GAIA, Glide's AI Assistant, and to Template management, and a host of other smaller tweaks and tadges which make the Glide platform more usable. 

As with all Glide updates, these will flow to customers without their need to do anything except give us the thumbs up. 

Widget Insight

Widgets are one of the most helpful and powerful features of Glide. They bundle together any desired variation of preset configurations, business rules and logic, content of all types, and even externally-supplied data, in ways that can then be easily reused across sites and apps. Tasks that could have taken days or weeks in a traditional CMS can be wrapped into a Widget in a few minutes and placed wherever needed. They are absolute game changers.

In the same sort of way micro-front-ends let you break down the most complex sites into small manageable pieces, Widgets ushered similar thinking into the CMS interface. They now sit at the heart of composable content strategies.

The v21 GPP improvement Widget Insight adds to their power by enhancing the speed and ease Widgets can be leveraged, with a new card-style view that gives tons more insight at a glance into what the Widget is capable of doing in any given scenario.

Glide CPO Rich Fairbairn explained: "Because you can pretty much create a Widget to do anything you want, over time they have become much more powerful and sophisticated, but the original UX wrapper hasn't kept up. Customer feedback was 'We love Widgets, but they need a lot of clicks to manage.' Widget Insight adds a whole layer of information that makes site management much quicker and less clicky."

"One of the issues with generic headless CMS is that they can become very disorientating over time, and this focus on making the system more intuitive in doing some of the most complex things builds on our philosophy of Headless Plus - headless, but better."

A higher GAIA

Alongside the power of Widget Insight is a trio of new LLMs to try out in GAIA, raising the current number of LLMs to 21, alongside 2 image models. 

Fairbairn said: "With LLMs in a fast-moving war, users are already over the shock of the new and demanding improvements in capability, cost, and power consumption, for which all three new entrants - Claude Sonnet 3.5, Mistral Small, Amazon Titan Text Premier - really shine. Meanwhile, two older models are being cycled out, so the overall quality level keeps going up and cost coming down."

GAIA changes will appear for users as soon as the release is authorised by their organisations.

For full details and Release Notes, click to the Glide Support Portal and for more details about GPP or a demo of any of the new features click here or speak to your GPP rep.

About Glide Publishing Platform

Glide is a low-code cloud-native API-driven headless CMS leveraging Artificial Intelligence which removes the need for publishers to spend time and budget on publishing technology, to better focus on generating revenue and engagement.

As a Software as a Service (SaaS), Glide provides unbeatable scalability, robustness, and availability, featuring the backup enterprises need such as self-healing infrastructure, alerts, monitoring, and round-the-clock support.

Glide features AI assistance and tools which help content creators and publishers accelerate content turnaround and strip time and cost out of the process of getting content published.

The Glide platform features as standard a vast array of useful newsroom and content tools, such as Live Reporting, Digital Asset Management, and automatic SEO, all improving content output, speeding workflows, and accelerating the pace of new launches and product development. 

Glide is also available via the AWS Marketplace.