Welcome to our 1.16 release notes! Curious and want to learn more? Discover Open Social.
Discover the new improvements and features in this release!
Push notifications
Open Social now supports push notifications via a browser. Push notifications are great for personalized communication and help deliver the right information at the right time. Users will be prompted to enable push notifications to keep up to date with community activities.
Users can enable or disable the push notifications on their settings page.
A push notification can be sent for the same activities that trigger a notification email for users (e.g. another user likes their event). Push notifications can only be enabled for devices that support them. These include most android devices and the Chrome browser on a desktop machine. Two current notable exceptions are iOS devices and the Safari browser, which don’t support push notifications yet.
Before activating this feature, you will need to configure it at /admin/config/system/pwa! Read more about this here.
Add your community to the home screen
Together with the push notifications, we also added a functionality to let users add your community site to their device’s home screen. The browser of a user will automatically display a button that nudges users to add the community to the home screen. This occurs when the browsers detects that the button is beneficial.
Inline Form Errors
Inline form errors places form submission errors in line with the form elements, which improves accessibility and usability. In other words, any accidental errors you make using a form will be highlighted properly (for example, an invalid email address). On a form submission, an alert appears at the top of the page with a list of fields that have errors. Clicking on each item in the list takes you to the specific form element, which is both highlighted and includes an error message in a tooltip.
Notification emails for a logged-in user
There was a delay of 15 minutes before logged-in users would receive email notifications about platform activity. We changed this to 90 seconds. When you are logged out, it still sends the notification emails without any delay.
Configuring email notifications for likes
There was already a functionality in Open Social that allowed users to choose whether email notifications should be sent immediately, daily, weekly, or not at all. We added notifications for the likes you receive on posts, comments, and content to this list.
Redirect to group page after creation
When a group was created, the user used to be redirected to the group overview page on their own profile. We realized that this was not logical and therefore, the user is now redirected to the group they just created.
Header menu adjusts to small screen size for logged in user
On small mobile screens, the header menu appeared as two rows because the number of menu items did not fit in the allocated space. Now, when the viewport is too small, the user menu becomes a dropdown menu.
If the user has notifications for private messages (and more) in the notification centre, the menu icon will reflect that there are new unread item. When the menu is expanded, the user can see where the notifications are present.
Post images viewable in a lightbox
When a user clicks on an image in a post that’s on the stream or detail page, it should open in a lightbox using the Photoswipe library.
Private message inbox text
When a user does not have any private messages, a description text is displayed explaining that there are currently no messages. This description has been improved and includes a reference to the New Message button.
Updated activities for moved content
When an event or topic is moved to another group, the activity surrounding the creation of the content will be deleted in the previous group and created in the new group.
Landing page block names
When creating a landing page, you can add several blocks to it. We renamed these blocks to make them more descriptive.
Primary blocks field:
Secondary blocks field:
Group stream comments
We reduced the amount of duplicate content in the (group) streams. For example, when adding a new comment to the last post it will no longer display a message about the creation of the last post and the added comment.
Tags category fields for search content filters
We made some improvements to the content tags when the Allow Category Split checkbox is checked on the Content Tag settings page. We added a field for each content tag group instead of a single field on the search content page.
Accessibility improvements
We made some major improvements to the accessibility of Open Social. For example, we added missing top level heading and descriptions, made helper text more readable, made buttons reachable using a keyboard, and many more. This way, Open Social will comply with WCAG2.0 AA.
Bug Fixes
- Set border radius to 0 works again: Previously, when the border radius was set to 0, the theme was not affected. This has been fixed.
- Landing page intro text line removed: By removing the vertical line in the introduction text block, the block becomes wider and still looks great with a lot of text.
- Bug that caused profile images to be hidden from anonymous users is fixed: The default profile image was, in rare cases, not shown to anonymous visitors. This has been fixed.
- URL containing ‘edit’ won’t block access anymore: We fixed an issue that caused URLs containing “edit” to hinder a page from loading.
- Private message recipients on one line: When multiple recipients were selected for a private message, the names appeared separately on new lines. They are now in a single line, separated by commas.
- Dutch translations: We solved a handful of missing translations for Dutch platforms.
- Group membership dropdown menu not displaying all items: The Edit button on the Group membership page dropdown now displays the full list of menu items without being cut off.
- Hero title placement: The hero title is aligned towards the top of the hero area which often makes the text illegible, despite the original attempt to increase legibility with the background gradient. We fixed this by aligning the text to the bottom of the hero area.
- Improved mentioning users: There were several issues with mentioning users. We replaced some of the code, which means it should now work better. Also, you should now have a visual indication that you mentioned someone.
- Landing pages with multiple buttons were not always aligned properly: When adding multiple buttons in the landing page hero, the buttons are now placed nicely on the next line if there is not enough space on a single line.
- Site manager will stay on the users profile after editing it: As a site manager you can edit users profiles. After saving a profile, you would previously be redirected to your own profile. This has been fixed and you will stay on the profile of the user you just edited.
- Notifications page title corrected: We corrected the page title for the Notifications page (/notifications). It was mistakenly named Activity Stream.
- Link to navigate back to content visible again on preview page: We made sure that the ‘go back to content’ bar is not behind menu when you’re viewing a preview of a topic or an event.
- Social Login wasn’t working with Russian names: When users have Russian names, the automated generation of a username after signup with social network did not work. We have fixed the issue.
- Duplicate ‘Add comment’ link removed: When a node is displayed in the book module, then the "Add comment" link was displayed at the bottom of the node. This is unnecessary when the comment already exist, so we removed the link.
- Several Internet Explorer incompatibilities fixed: In Internet Explorer, several issues were fixed. The manage members table for groups and the filter button on search pages were not displaying correctly. And the mention dropdown did not show all users when there were a lot of suggestions.
- And many more….
Enjoy Open Social!