2.7 Release Notes for Dummies

As you may know, some customers are needier than others, and though Linc did a great job sifting through all the commits and PRs that went into the 2.7 release to get us this lovely set of release notes, some are still asking for more clarity. I've gone ahead and done that to placate a needier VIP, and to prepare myself for any incoming questions.

This may be useful for those of you looking to understand a bit more about 2.7 and what's included, and for my fellow CSMs with similar clients that need a bit of handholding, so I thought I'd share it here.

Here's a breakdown.

New Features:

We released the first version of our Rich Editor. We're still adding some key features and ironing out some details, but communities who are happy with it are welcome to enable it on production. I suggest you test it out on staging first.

We've added some new features to the Groups add-on:

• a groups search module - making groups so much easier to search through.
• the ability to have a secret group (i.e. a group that people will only be able to see if they are members of said group)
• We've added invitation lists so you can keep track of who've you've sent group invites to
• You can join a group from an email notification

We have a new Firebase SSO add-on for Google’s Firebase product.

Product Fixes:

• Fix Advanced Search results double HTML escaping. - Here we were seeing search results rendering special characters as HTML instead of as plain text. That's because the HTML was "double escaped" which means it was being told to render as plain text instead of code. 
• Fix LinkedIn SVG. - This was an issue with the profile image URLs we were retrieving from LinkedIn
• Fix broken sign-out URL in embed comment form. - We fixed an issue with the sign-out URL in our Universal Comments plugin. 
• Fix category dropdown when editing drafts with old ‘DoHeadings’ setting enabled. - Here you weren't able to select a category on a draft post and were thus unable to post your draft.
• Fix handling of manually applied Ranks in edit user form that could block saving users. - This was an issue that prevented users from saving their profile edits if they had a Rank that a set to be manually applied by a moderator/admin
• Fix drafts double escaping special characters. - Here we were seeing draft posts where special characters were rendering as code on the Drafts page.
• ProfileExtender: add Instagram magic formatting.- You can now add a profile field in Profile Extender called Instagram, and if a user inputs an Instgram link in that field, it will automatically hyperlink.
• Tagging: Enable their use on Ideas.- You previously were not able to add tags to Idea posts. This is with our ideation plugin. 
• Bulk Users Importer: Do not validate usernames when importing users - This makes sure that if we're importing users, we're able to override username restrictions - this is useful for user who use SSO and need to import users with spaces or periods in their usernames. 
• Q&A: Fix recalculation of discussions’ Q&A status. This was an issue where if you edited a comment that had been marked as accepted or rejected, the user who asked the question who get the "There's an answer to your question" pop-up but wouldn't be able to accept or reject an answer, and would thus be stuck with that notification. 
• Steam Connect: Fix broken SSO connections (Steam’s endpoint moved to HTTPS). - We have an SSO plugin for Steam that wasn't working that now it.
• Ideation: Fix double index photos. (Cloud only) On Ideation categories, on mobile, we were seeing profile picture displaying twice. 

Changes

• Improve accessibility by adding placeholder/title for text areas. - Accessibility improvements.
• Add noindex to Reactions profile pages. - This makes sure certain links on profile pages are not indexed by search engines.
• Add translation support for “All” and “Following” in category following filter menus.- Our category following feature was missing translations.
• Disable hashtags within post contents by default. - Vanilla auto-links #hashtags to a search page. We were frequently seeing the results of accidental hashtags from writing numbers, e.g. #3, in the middle of a post. This is no longer a default feature, if this is desired functionality we CSMs can enable that via the config. 
• Add support for seconds-only time parameter to YouTube embeds - YouTube embeds previously only supported extracting the start time if it was in the minute-second format (e.g. 1m30s) and did not support extracting the start time when in the second-only format (e.g. 90).
• Add JSON LD microformat to discussion pages. - From what I understand, this will make it easier for us to extract certain types of data from discussion pages when making API and other calls.
• Make minor aesthetic improvements to Dashboard, including using Open Sans font. 
• Default Vanilla Stats to use HTTPS.- The Dashboard data now always loads over HTTPS, previously if you weren't forcing SSL and you loaded this page over HTTP you could run into errors. This change avoids that problem. 
• 
  

API v2

• Add ability to expand category to index of discussions endpoint. This allows you to get category info when making calls using our discussions endpoint.
• Fix filtering by Group on the discussions API v2 endpoint - This allows you to get discussions using a specific group ID
• Online: Add APIv1 capabilities to APIv2. - This I'll need to get more info on but probably referring to the fact that we've made further strides towards API V1 parity, which means we are closer to be able to slowly start phasing out API V1 because API V2 is now closer than ever to being able to do absolutely everything API V1 was able to do and more.   
• Fix some API schema documentation bugs. - Doc improvements. 

And then a bunch of stuff that might be relevant to developers, but won't have any affect on you or your end users, but if you have specific questions I can dig into these a bit more.

Developer Notes

• Add TypeScript, React, Redux, and WebPack support to core.
• Format drafts as plaintext instead of text. (vanilla/vanilla#7181)
• Add Parchment & Quill dependencies via new Rich Editor addon.
• Respect scalar type hints in endpoint parameters. (vanilla/vanilla#6922)
• Fix “Active” class on edit profile link not appearing under specific circumstances. (vanilla/vanilla#6907)
• Add ability to override theme per contoller. (vanilla/vanilla#7048) (thanks Csabbencs)
• Add ability to write integration tests on non-core repos.
• Add coding standards enforcement to product repos.
• Add PageScraper class (vanilla/vanilla#7104, #7139)
• Deprecate the val() function. (vanilla/vanilla#7534)
• Add classes to pager module to improve ability to style. (vanilla/vanilla#7608)