Today we launched Aggiorno 1.3beta.  Wow!  Things are moving fast!  I think it is good to summarize what has happened with Aggiorno since its release a few months ago and also to introduce its newest feature the Smart Search and Replace.

Let's review the main themes of the previous versions:

Aggiorno 1.0: Clean Up the Web.  The main focus of Aggiorno 1.0 was to provide enough functionality to easily convert your pages to XHTML compliance. Many developers do not care about web standards but they SHOULD care a lot more.  It is certainly important to Aggiorno.  We need pages that are at least structurally correct so that we can begin to fill our vision of providing lots of Transformation with encapsulated knowledge to maximize the productivity of webmasters.

Aggiorno 1.1: Internet Explorer 8 Compatibility.  The main focus of Aggiorno 1.1 was to help with the adoption of IE8.  Aggiorno support IE8 in several ways.  First, IE8 by default renders pages in standards compliant mode, so, if you use Aggiorno to clean up your pages your certainly making sure your pages will render correctly in IE8 (and most other modern browsers).  Second, if you are not ready to make your pages web standards compliant, then you can use Aggiorno to add the IE7 compatibility flag.  Your pages will immediately render correctly in IE8 even if you force the browser to emulate its previous version.  Aggiorno makes the adding of the flag a breeze.  Third,  Aggiorno also has a feature to simplify adoption of a new very interesting feature of Internet Explorer 8: web slices.  Aggiorno makes it very easy to introduce slices on your pages.

Aggiorno 1.2: Enabling Every Day Workflow.  The focus of Aggiorno 1.2 was to build the basis of Aggiorno as an everyday assistant for webmasters.  We focused on improving the interface making it more user friendly and we also improved the overall performance 4x.  Features like converting Text to Paragraphs or Text to List become really useful.  Once you use them you will never want to go back and format text in any other way!

Until this version, Aggiorno was exclusively available to Visual Studio users as an add-in.  Aggiorno 1.2 also introduced a standalone version so that non Visual Studio users can also take advantage of Aggiorno.  We provide a basic HTML editor so that you can open your web sites in an integrated environment and also benefit from Aggiorno.  Aggiorno Stanalone is based on Microsoft Visual Studio Shell technology.

Aggiorno 1.3:  Enabling Extensibility.  Up until this version all the Transformations came prepackaged.  Users could only manipulate them via a number of options (btw, check out the Aggiorno options for a breath of customization possibilities).  With this version we are incorporating a new feature that we call Smart Search and Replace which is basically a mechanism to write your own Transformations.  Read on to learn more about this awesome feature!

Aggiorno 1.4: Many more supported scenarios. What to expect from the next version?  Still to early to be specific but you will see many more Transformation to assist web masters in even more daily activities.

Smart Search and Replace

From the perspective of Aggiorno, Smart Search and Replace is a way to expose all the inner infrastructure to webmasters.  Aggiorno comes with a very powerful web source code parser and transformation engine that has a deep knowledge of every piece of information in a page and that is expressive enough for web developers to use directly.  

From the perspective of a web master, how would you describe Smart Search and Replace? It is very similar to Regular Expressions but with a deep knowledge of the markup syntax.  Smart Search and Replace lets you write sophisticated patterns to extract parts of your html knowing that you are searching on a markup not on plain text.  What does it mean?  It means that you can easily write things like the following that would be very difficult with normal reg exps:

• Find all heading 3 and change them to heading 4.
• Find all the content in a table and extract it into divs.
• Find all tags with a certain attribute and change that attribute.
• Find all text that is both Bold and Italic and convert it into a span with a class id.

With Smart Search and Replace you do not have to worry about trailing spaces, changes of line, text that is part of a string or a value.  You write the expression almost as writing HTML with variable content.  It is very easy and very powerful.  We have a good tutorial with samples and videos that you can follow.  I really encourage you to look at it.  It will save you many many hours of work!

In the coming days and weeks we will be publishing many more knowledge capsules in our blog and they will also contain Smart Search and Replace patterns so you can use them directly or tweak them based on your needs.

Let us know what you think and let us know if you use Smart Search and Replace to solve a specific problem.

Enjoy Aggiorno 1.3beta!