SDL Tridion today officially launches the new version of its flagship product, R5. The new features and enhancements include a new approach to templating and improvements that will allow customers to streamline business and collaborative processes.

“With the new version R5.3, SDL Tridion introduces Modular Templating, a groundbreaking approach to templating. Modular Templating will allow our customers to provide the highly engaging and interactive Web presence that today’s markets demand, in a faster, cheaper and more controlled manner,” said Erik Aeyelts Averink President Product and Solutions at SDL Tridion.

Modular Templating truly separates the design, code and applications of templates into template building blocks. Together with native integration with market-leading design and development tools, (including Adobe Dreamweaver and Microsoft Visual Studio .NET), Modular Templating gives designers, developers and programmers much greater control over each aspect of their template design and code.  By combining and reusing template building blocks, Modular Templates can be assembled for a variety of uses.

SDL Tridion R5.3 ships with a variety of standard template building blocks for frequently used applications. These foundational building blocks in combination with application, design, or code specific building blocks provide tremendous flexibility and responsiveness for adding the latest Web developments such as new interactive applications and tagging for third-party Web analytics tools. While re-using template building blocks within an organization already provides substantial benefits, SDL Tridion will foster its community of customers and partners to contribute template building blocks, which can be re-used across the community.

After an initial demo session, Marc Goblot, chief architect at SDL Tridion partner Reading Room comments: “R5.3 has great potential to change and improve the roles and resources within a project by the new compound template building blocks separation, TOM.NET and design and development tool integration, and provides a packaging approach and interface for our existing SDL Tridion class library. Not forgetting the other abilities in globalization, workflow, binary publishing and more.”

On the technology side, R5.3 provides support for the latest major platforms and enables customers to exploit the newer capabilities of .NET and Java technology.

In addition, 5.3 responds to business needs for content compliance when it comes to ensuring control over online content and maintaining records for the complete content life cycle. In combination with Archive Manager, which provides Web site archiving, R5 Workflow now offers greater auditing and tracking capabilities that allows managers to ensure that all Web-related content follows required processes.