Deprecations

The Page Viewing Modes of yesterday have been superseded by the Universal Visual Editor, which unifies the traditional page-editing tools with the ability to perform in-context editing headlessly — likewise superseding Edit Mode Anywhere.

The UVE has been designed to be both simpler and more powerful than all previous page-editing tools, across both traditional and headless paradigms.

Edit Mode Anywhere has been superseded by the Universal Visual Editor, which is easier to configure, easier to use, and more versatile. The UVE even boasts a still-expanding JavaScript SDK for modern framework integrations.

The UVE has been designed to be both simpler and more powerful than all previous page-editing tools, across both traditional and headless paradigms.

File system management can also be handled via the dotCMS Command-Line Interface, or dotCLI.

WebDAV is an outgoing technology that faces declining platform-level support — e.g., it has been deprecated on the Windows platform, where it is no longer enabled by default.

Please use the official dotCMS Command-Line Interface (dotCLI).

The legacy CLI was a series of Bash scripts, no longer maintained, with fewer options and less overall utility than the modern, comprehensive dotCLI.

We're planning to move the future-focused section of the Time Machine to the scope of individual pages, where it will be handled through our Universal Visual Editor. Time Machine snapshots of past versions of a site will be removed altogether; to preserve static snapshots of existing sites, we recommend using static push-publishing.

The Time Machine feature is both expensive and unwieldy to maintain as the product continues to grow. Its utilities and functions, however, can be retained and sustainably provisioned in the recommended manner (i.e., static push-publishing and UVE).

Customers should consider all DWR (Direct Web Remoting) endpoints (those that begin with dwr/*) and DotAjax endpoints (those that begin /DotAjaxDirector) as deprecated and should instead use the REST API equivalents. If there is not a REST equivalent, customers are suggested to create a custom plugin.

dotCMS recommends the use of a third-party tool to perform link audits, such as:

• Google Search Console

• Semrush Site Audit

• Ahrefs Broken Link Checker

• Moz Link Explorer

• W3C Link Checker

• Screamingfrog SEO Spider

If you wish to run your own link-checking service, we recommend operating it externally as a microservice or serverless component — ideally from multiple locations — to better view your links in the same manner as the general public. This is more scalable and secure than running the process from the main application, and can help to avoid hard-to-notice discrepancies caused by corporate firewalls and similar factors.

It is usually better to perform link checking from outside of the server in question; as such, a third-party, off-site solution is more suited to the task. For this reason, we elected to halt maintenance of this feature.

Customers still using LDAP to integrate with dotCMS should migrate to a different Single Sign-On (SSO) solution, such as SAML (through Azure or another Identity Provider).

LDAP is more suited to self-hosted instances, while dotCMS is shifting emphasis to cloud solutions for a variety of reasons: consistency in support, moving to an evergreen release model, etc.

Perform content transformations either by scripts incorporating workflow operations (such as via the workflow API or viewtool), or by exporting the content, altering it in its CSV, and re-importing it to overwrite.

This tool was rarely employed, and carried sufficient risks as to urge a backup before attempting.

It broke when dotCMS began storing content as JSON; that this went unnoticed for years is a testament to its general disuse.

SAML authentication is recommended over CAS, which is deprecated on the whole.