Updates in Pages | Yext Hitchhikers Platform

What You’ll Learn

In this section, you will learn:

• An overview of the new Pages features from the Fall ‘23 Release

New Release Features

For a full list of features, visit the Fall ‘23 Release Notes .

Sign up for our upcoming webinar for a roundup of the new features!

PagesJS 1.0.0 Major Release

With the major release version of PagesJS, your developers can further optimize for page speed, scalability, and project launch velocity. PagesJS is a collection of frontend development tools that make it easy to provide better search discoverability, create more sophisticated pages that enhance the user experience, and improve speed with faster build and update times.

Highlights of new features include:

• New local development landing page - Provides many helpful links to the Yext account you are initiated with, previews of the web pages you are building and the underlying entities powering the content for each page, and the Hitchhikers documentation.
• Improvements to serverless functions -
  • Save functions within your source directory, which allows them to run in a Node.js runtime. This means now you can import libraries from Node.
  • We also have hot module reloading with serverless functions, which means you’ll instantly see changes saved to serverless functions in local dev, rather than having to restart the dev server to see changes.
• Consolidated configuration file - We’ve wrapped the multiple configuration files into one config.yaml file. This controls all the different configurations for your application. YAML files also allow comments, so we’ll have better documentation within the configuration.
• Various other improvements, such as: streamlined CLI commands, automated Yext account initialization, support for React 18 and Node.js 20, support for “primary language profile-only” mode, and utility function improvements.

How This Impacts You

We recommend all users building on Pages upgrade to the latest version. PagesJS 1.0.0 contains different developer productivity tools that makes it much easier and faster to build performant SEO-optimized pages. If you’ve been using the beta versions of PagesJS, you may have seen some of these features already, but with PagesJS 1.0.0, all features will be officially supported and documented.

Feature Availability

To use the newly-released major version of PagesJS, upgrade to the latest version.

Additional Resources

• Upgrading to PagesJS 1.0.0 reference doc

Authenticated Pages

We upgraded our authentication support, which opens up the door for you to take advantage of new use cases on your website. Website authentication is a powerful security measure that helps safeguard sensitive user data and protect against unauthorized access. This helps ensure a safe and trustworthy online experience for both you, and your online visitors.

With this update, you can specify that only certain pages on a website require authentication — as opposed to the entire website — or apply levels of personalization to grant access to certain users based on their credentials.

How This Impacts You

This allows you to host a website that has a mixture of both public and private pages, or surface personalized pages based on job role or customer type.

Feature Availability

Upgrade to the latest PagesJS version 1.0.0 to use this feature.

Additional Resources

• Authentication reference doc
• Upgrading to PagesJS 1.0.0 reference doc

Redirects and Rewrites Improvements

Redirects: Yext has added several improvements to our redirects functionality, allowing users to configure “splat” redirects and HTTP 200 rewrites, as well as improve the configuration interface via our unified config.yaml file.

Splat redirects allow you to configure redirects for path patterns. This is useful for setting up redirects for large sections of your site in bulk. For example, let’s say you have a website and you’re restructuring it. You might have old URLs like /products/shoes/sneakers and /products/shirts/t-shirts. With splat redirects, you can set up a rule like /products/* to catch all requests that start with /products/ and redirect them to a new location, say /store/*. This way, you don’t have to manually set up a redirect for every individual product category.

In essence, it’s a way to create flexible redirect rules to handle a range of URL patterns without specifying each one individually.

Rewrites: Rewrites allow you to fetch content for a particular URL from a different location. This is useful for proxying parts of your website to other services or websites, creating single-page applications (SPAs), or site migrations.

How This Impacts You

You can now use placeholders and wildcards to dynamically redirect groups of pages based on pattern matching. Previously, you could only create static redirects from individual source paths to individual destinations.

Feature Availability

Upgrade to the latest PagesJS version 1.0.0 to use this feature.

Additional Resources

• URL Routing reference doc
• Upgrading to PagesJS 1.0.0 reference doc