Sprint 2020.023 Review
Sprint Goals:
- TS/Chimera collaboration on new widgets and theme options
- Navigation Link Manager with Mega Menu support
- Widget Management with Pockets
- Accessibility Improvements
- Search testing, feedback and refinement
Demo:
- Recording - https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1t5jj_FkRGWgGwpdXSiMa0rROtlEFTUA2
- Slides - https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1t5jj_FkRGWgGwpdXSiMa0rROtlEFTUA2
TS/Chimera Collaboration:
Over the next several months Andra and Val will be working together to plan collaborative sprints between some members of the services team and Team Supreme in order to build out our theming options and widgets. Services devs will be joining TS sprints to make progress towards customer themes while working with the team to drive Foundation forward. Here are some highlights from our latest collaboration:
Navigation Link Manager:
Foundation gives customers the ability to more easily customize their out of the box themes. A huge part of any theme is their navigation links, and we're frequently asked about how to customize these links. Over the last few sprints we've been working on a new component for the Theme Editor to allow users to configure their own navigation link without requiring any coding.
Now, in the Theme Editor's Title Bar section, you will have a "Navigation"
Click the Edit button to open the Navigation Link Manager. Here you can edit or remove our default links, or create your own.
Drag and drop your links in the order you'd like them to appear. You also have the option of nesting links to create dropdown menus. We currently support up to 3 levels of navigation links.
Apply the changes, and save your theme, and you will now have a customized navigation menu.
Widget Management with Pockets
CSMs, Sales & new customers have let us know that a blocker for the adoption of Foundation as our defacto theme has been the fact that we are not able to add theme modules to their template.
For those of you who don't know, Vanilla has a set of modules that can be used in custom themes to integrate things like:
- Leaderboards
- Recent Discussions
- Promoted content
- Who's online
Until today, the only way to add these to your theme was to get it done as a service, or to edit your theme's HTML and add-in your smarty code. For a walk down memory lane, check out these instructions -
Since Foundation's HTML cannot be edited, customers wanting to add some of these modules to their themes would turn to Keystone. Of the customers onboarded between April and October 2020, about 40% chose Keystone.
With release 2020.023 we wanted to introduce a simple way for users to manage our out of the box modules as widgets. We wanted this to be simple enough that no dev resources would be required to add or edit a widget.
What we've done is we've extended our Pockets add-on to support different Pocket-types. When you add or edit a pocket, the first update you'll notice is to the UI. Pocket settings are now organized in 2 tabs:
Content: This is where you'll set your pocket type and settings.
- We've added a set of available widgets here to start including:
- Leaderboards
- Tag Cloud
- Event List
- Featured Categories
- When the widget comes with configurable settings these can be edited here
Placement & Conditions is where you'll configure the pocket's placement, permissions and other advanced settings. You can place a widget using the same placement options and conditions we use for our existing Pockets functionality.
We'll continue to add new widgets as they become available. Here's a list of our top 10 based on current demand:
Those in red are currently being requested for theming projects. Please continue to submit your feedback and use cases to product@vanillaforums.com
Elastic Search Dashboard:
When search issues arise it has historically been a game of telephone.
- Customers would flag the issue
- A support ticket would be crated
- That ticket would get escalated to R&D
- R&D would then ticket Ops to get information about the errors received in our logs.
With Elastic Search released to a few beta customers, and as we prepare for our GA in 2021, we wanted to implement a dashboard that could be used to give Admins, CSMs, Support Agents & R&D a view of what may be going on in search.
This new dashboard can be accessed on the "Search" page of your sites settings. Here you wwill see a breakdown of all the indexes and their latest status. An index can be:
- Success: the indexing is complete and saw no errors
- In progress: there is currently reindexing going on
- Error: the indexing failed
Our staff can now grab the errors for the failed indexes and include them in support tickets. This will make it easier for R&D to assess the problem and propose a fix.
Accessibility Improvements: Skip to Main Content
Accessibility is a big focus in our UI. We want to ensure a good user experience for all of our users. With this sprint we added in an enhancement that allows users navigating the site with their keyboard, or a screen reader to skip the navigation and jump to the main content.
You can test this out or demonstrate this by loading a page, hitting the tab on your keyboard, and hitting enter. Notice your URL is appended with #MainContent and you a dropped to the main content of the page. Previously users were forced to first tab through all the navigation before they could jump into the main content.
Feedback, Questions and Comments
Will Custom HTML Pockets still support JS?
Yes, the Custom HTML widget type is still the Pockets you know and love. No functionality was stripped with this update.
If I place a Event List, Tag Cloud or other modules which are added to the theme by default, will the default widget settings be overwritten?
For context, we have add-ons like Online, Popular Tags, Groups & Events and Badges that automatically enable a module in customer themes. With this update to pockets, customers now also have the option to place some these modules as "Widgets"
Currently we do not override the default locations of modules that are placed by add-ons. Customers will have the option to place a 2nd widget of the same type in a different location if they'd like. We'll discuss this as a team and determine the best course of action. Options seem to be:
- Deprecate add-ons that are purely decorative like "Popular Tags," and allow customers to opt-into them through Pockets & Widgets
- Integrate Pockets into core and make sure a related Pocket is created and placed in our default location when specific add-ons are enabled
Why did R&D make the decision to build widget management with Pockets rather than with them editor?
There are a few reasons for this.
- This is a short term solution. Our ultimate goal is to deliver a more visual way of managing your theme layout, pockets & widgets with our Widgetized Pages
- Pockets offers us a lot of flexibility.
- Customers can place widgets is locations that have already been predefined by our Pockets add-on
- They can leverage a lot of custom conditions for the widget to render such as:
- Only display on mobile vs never display on mobile
- Only display in x category or subcommunity, or to users of x role
For Featured Categories, I want to have a tile that links to an external, or non-category page, how do I do that?
It is possible to set up a category as a container. We have a Category as Link add-on that adds a "Redirect URL" field to Category settings. By specifying a Redirect URL for your category, you essentially override the default URL that is set for that Category, and whenever a user sees this in the navigation, they wiil be redirected accordingly.
success.vanillaforums.com has an example of this. One of our Featured Categories is "Release Notes." You'll notice clicking on this tile does not bring you to a category but leads you to our Release Notes KB.
What if I only want my Pocket or Widget to appear the homepage?
We are looking to add an option for a "Homepage" location.
What if I want my Pocket or Widget to appear on all pages, except for 1 or 2 categories?
We have not yet implemented any options for exclusions. This is good feedback we'll take into planning.
Can I place a widget in a non-Foundation based theme?
Yes you can. This update applies to all themes. Users still on Keystone or other legacy themes can place widgets iin their themes using this update.
It is still recommended the customer test this out on staging first. If the customer has a custom theme built by Vanilla or through self-dev, they can still place widgets with Pockets, or they can insert widgets using Twig/Smarty as they could previously.
"I'm very close to never mentioning Keystone again." Now if I could use the Multilingual Add-on with Foundation, I would never mention Keystone again.
For some context here, Multingual is an add-on that some clients will use if they have a multilingual audience, but do not have the resources to host separate language communities with a feature like subcommunities. Multilingual gives users their choice of language for the UI, while allowing user generated content to remain in its orginal language. This language chooser was rendered by default in the theme footer.
When Foundation was initially released, the "Foot" location in the theme and Pocket locations was no longer supported as we added freeform HTML/CSS support for the footer in the theme editor. CSMs & Sales submitted feedback letting us know that this caused an issue with our Mulltilingual plugin as it could no longer render the language chooser in its default location.
On the Product side we are not a fan of this add-on, and where we can want to encourage customers to upgrade and use subcommunities. That being said, some prospects and customers have shared feedbacck with us regarding their desire to move more towards a Facebook-like service where their users can interact, read and comment on content in their preferred language. We also recognize that some of our customers do not have the staff or resources to host separate language communities.
With this releasee, we have readded a "Foot" location to the Foundation theme, allowing for:
- The Multilingual language chooser to render in its default locaation
- Customers to place pockets, widgets and ads before their theme footer.
2020.023 Bug Fixes & Support
- Vanilla - Unable to remove products from sub community - support#2397
- Success KB - Some images no longer embedding properly in posts - support#2628
- The Bump - Searching Speciaal Characters Results in Errors - support#2994
- IBM - Message icons & links should be removed when Conversations is disabled - support#3077
- TeamViewers - “Products” section appears with sub communities when products is disabled - support#2954
- Oracle - Search filtlers on homepage not being respected - support#2988
- Oracle - Group Invitees Given Unexpected Avatar - support#3022
- Charter - Accessibility P2 - Search label persistency - vanilla-cloud#127
- King - “(Image)” text appearing in KB Featured articles - support#3017
- MSE - RCA Rquest - Cloudflare “Gateway Time” Error on Searches - support#3020
- Oracle - Editing an event and removing the body/details breaks the event - support#3026
- Oracle - Cancelling a poll/question post in Groups redirects user to /sociall groups category - support#2980
- Minted - Search result issues - support#2981
- Oracle - Intermittent search errors + logging - support#2879
- F-secure - articles not listed on sitemap - support#2908
- MSE - Search Queries returning fatal error - support#2937
- Oracle - Filtered Search results only return one idea - support#3009
- Multiple - Language chooser not available in footer for Foundation theme - knowledge#1787
Comments
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The team has made some improvements based on our feedback during last week's demo and managed to get those in before the release went out, so some nice updates here.
- 2 new page options for Pocket location -
- Site Home: This will allow those using a subcommunity set up to add pockets & widgets to the site's main page (this is available if you do not set a default subcommunity.
- Home: This will add a pocket or widget to your configured homepage. If you are using subcommunities, you can use this to add pockets or widgets to each subcommunity's homepage, or it can be paired with the "Subcommunities" setting to target specific subcommunity homepage. Your homepage can be configured on the Layout page of your Dashboard settings.
- Updated UI for Pocket preview for widgets:
- A few other widgets were completed in time for the release as well including:
- Online Users - To add a list or grid of currently logged in user
- Subcommunities - To add Subcommunity Tiles as a widget
- Articles - To add a list of KB Articles, or Recommended Articles
- Help Centre Home - To add a Help Centre KB's categories and articles as a widget
Elastic Search: Boolean search logic
- To go along with exact text matching, users can now include or exclude exact queries from their search using + or -. e.g.
- I can search for "Analytics Improvements" to find any discussion or article that uses this exact string
- i can search for "Improvements"-"Analytics" and I should find all content matching "Improvements" but all content that has "Analytics" should be removed.
- I can search for "Release" + "Pockets" and I should find content that includes both words
0 - 2 new page options for Pocket location -
