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What has been improved?

Discover the new improvements and features in this release!

New Functions

Add an additional header and footer to emails
You can now adjust your notification emails to members. We have added the possibility for you to add an additional header or footer to email notifications. This means you can provide a personal touch to your platform notifications with your own branded imagery in emails.

Choose who emails are sent from during email bulk operations
When sending emails to one or more members of the platform (using either the people overview, manage members or manage enrollment mailing options), you are now able to configure the “from” email address (in other words, from who the email is sent from).
This way, users can reply to a different email address than the sitewide one and you can choose who can best manage the responses of members for different announcements.

Show the visibility type of content in content overviews
We now clearly indicate the selected visibility of content (as seen in the bottom left-hand corner of the content previews in the image below, for example) in overviews and on the stream. This helps indicate which users are able to see the content.

More context and information in email notifications
We have improved email notifications for new posts, comments and replies so users understand the context of the notification immediately.
For example, when someone adds a comment to an event you’re following, you will now see something like this:

A new group type: secret groups!
There is now a new group type called secret group. The function of it is secret…
Just kidding! This group and its content is only visible for members, content managers, and site managers to ensure its privacy.

Performance & UX improvements

Improved search relevance
We have improved the search relevancy options for the default community search:

The creation date has more relevance now, meaning the newest created item is displayed first.

When your search term is part of the title, it gets ranked much higher than before.

If you search for content types like events as part of the search, it will rank all events higher.

Comments sorted in ascending order on the activity stream
Comments that are shown in the activity stream used to be sorted from newest to oldest. This can be confusing when trying to follow a thread of comments.
We have now ensured the comments are sorted the other way around (oldest to newest), which provides a more natural conversational flow of comments.

There’s a loader indicator when loading an image
When uploading an image in any type of content as a file attachment (post, comment and topic, for example) there is now a loader which indicates that the user should wait for the image to upload.

Lazy loading embedded media
We will help increase performance of your communities by starting to implement something called lazy loading. This means that we will only load embedded media assets, like videos, when they are visible on your screen.

General Improvements

Renamed menu item: We have renamed the menu item ‘Swiftmailer settings’ to ‘Email settings’. This reflects the purpose of this menu item where you can remove Open Social branding from your emails.

Open menu items in the main navigation on focus without JS: If you have javascript disabled, menu items will now dropdown on focus like you are used to!

Add sorting option for topics in a group and community level: You can now sort topics according to the published date for group topics and all topic overviews.

The icon for search buttons should reflect the color scheme: If your color scheme involved a white header, the search button would disappear due to it being white as well. We have now ensured it will follow the color scheme settings for all the links in the header menu, so it will have the same color as the other links.

Add label to search forms: The search forms now have a hidden label, thereby increasing accessibility.

Improvements to the Path manager: If you have a custom URL that contains the words edit, delete or update as part of the URL the hero region might have been removed. We have ensured that this is fixed.