July 2019 Product Updates Post

Matt Aunger -

Wowee! July was bananas wasn’t it? 🍌 🍌
We shipped a bunch. We blogged a bunch. We dove through a pages and pages of job applications for both the Customer Education, and the developer roles.

On the product and shipping side there were so many updates it’s actually been difficult to keep track. 🔍

As is customary we shipped. And me oh my did we ship! 🚣‍♂️

Boat loads of awesomeness including updates to Lighthouse and Stale, and what feels like an endless list of minor tweaks.

So let’s just jump right in!

Lighthouse

First up let’s take a look at some tweaks shipped to Lighthouse.

This month was a fun one for our mighty knowledge base widget whose updates included a couple of much requested UI updates alongside a couple of tweaks to the code, and some fixes to keep things running smoothly. 👌

Go Back or Go Home

Every once in a while we get a comment about the back button inside Lighthouse.

The reason was that hitting the back button wouldn’t just drop you back a step or two in your navigation history, it’d throw you right back to the beginning.

Like all the way back.

We’re talking chisels and stone levels of Back.

Ok so it wasn’t quite as bad as being thrust into the Stone Age but it still wasn’t sitting very well with some of our customer’s users.

And what upsets our customers users usually upsets our customers. Which in turn upsets us!

So we figured we’d make a change 🤗

Now we’ve added a history stack. So when your customers hit the back button they will go back a step.

Feels nicer right?

I knew you’d be impressed!

But we didn’t stop there. Oh no!

We also recognised that for users who are three, four, or five levels deep sometimes they do wanna go all the way back.

So…cue the drum roll…we added a home button.

Now when your users hit Support—or whatever you might have changed the brand field to in the config—they’ll be magically transported right back to the beginning.

You may applaud now 👏

Lighthouse Tweaks

As mentioned before we also added a couple of minor tweaks. One makes Lighthouse look a ton better on mobile. And the other simply adds a title tag to the Lighthouse iFrame to keep Google happy

Stale

While we’re on the topic of things that we’ve tweaked to make even more awesome, we have a few updates to the way Stale works.

Flip-reverse it

This change came after we were made aware that our users were struggling with the Stale<>Fresh workflow.

The way we intended it to work was that an article editor set the article as Stale if they didn’t have time to edit an article and make it Fresh.

So, we naturally assumed that the next person to go in and save changes to the article would be making the updates it needs to bring it up to date. And in doing so would want the Stale status removed.

Turns out, we got that one a little wrong! 😬

Instead, it turns out it makes more sense not to make that assumption. And instead to make Stale state changes more a conscious choice.

Basically, we don’t automate the state changes and instead let you do it yourself 🤷‍♂️

Smaller, but No Less Important

  • STOP! Your Article’s become a novel. Long articles suck for everyone. They cause havoc in the text editor and trying to read them as a user can feel like pulling teeth. So we added an indicator that shows when article breaches 2,000 words so you know when things are getting a little long in the tooth 😁
  • Password Password 123? Improperly set passwords were causing sign up issues for invitees. So now we highlight password requirements on sign up account page so your team get it right first time 👍
  • Identify Yourself. Someone using our API docs wanted to know where to find their category IDs. So we start including them in the edit category sidebar 💪
  • References and References. We had a request to support more ways to reference. Particularly for things like footnotes. So we bumped Superscript and Subscript support up the roadmap. 🔖

Fixes

  • Be bold…wait…STOP! Unbolding didn’t work. Like, at all! So we fixed it. Now you can make things not bold. But only if they were bold first. 🤔
  • Do You Have a Permit For That? Our Front Extension wasn’t showing published articles to anonymous Front team members in the plugin. That was annoying so we fixed it. And we made error messages prettier too! Yanno…just in case! 😬
  • Avoid the Triple Threat. We noticed a bug where a Table of Contents was breaking when three of the same header existed in an article. Now we number them in the code so we can avoid all that mess 🔢
  • Drag and Oops. We were made aware that clicking outside the "Category Edit" sidebar closed the category edit window and wiped all inputs. That was super frustrating so we made it work better. 👍
  • Groupies Beware. A bug meant that admins couldn’t edit user groups in the edit user sidebar. We found the culprit and squashed that sucker. 🐛
  • Headless Breakages. Empty headings were causing some layout and table of contents issues. So no we strip them from articles altogether 👍
  • It’s Just Not Our Style. Robots.txt decided it was a good idea to block stylesheet from indexing. While this didn’t impact Google's ability to crawl, it was super irritating. So we fixed it. Bad Robot! 🤖
  • Where are we going? Lighthouse .navigate() was failing to navigate when you were on an article/category and trying to navigate to another article/category. It was weird. It’s no longer weird. 🤓
  • That’s Professor Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious to you! Long names were breaking the author dropdown selector inside the text editor.
  • Oh I Don’t See. SSO logins were redirecting to the wrong place on managed OIDC accounts. It’s ok though. We gave them a map and showed them the right way! 🗺️
  • Get Me the Data…Stat! There was a weird bug where Owners were unable to see stats for permissioned articles. Super weird. But another one bites the boot 👞
  • Save Me. Changing text to a bullet/ordered list wasn’t activating the Save button. That meant users had to make an arbitrary edit just to save the article. Say no to arbitrary edits 🙅‍♂️
  • The Curious Case of the Ghostly Articles. A teensy bug was causing recently deleted articles to temporarily show up on homepages. Obviously that shouldn’t happen. We called the Ghostbusters and got rid of those pesky poltergeisticles. 👻