On Tuesday night we deployed our last site update of the year. It includes a fair number of new features & improvements. These include;
- Home users in the UK & US get the opportunity to buy certain products from our sister companies, CPC & MCM
- Design Challenge "Enroll" button added SuperWidgets
- Various SEO improvements for Design Center and Events
- The Ben Heck Show gets a specific "Suggest a Build" form
- There’s a new widget on the homepage that shows 'What's Popular Now'
- We now track problems with registration so that we can detect any issues early on
There are also a number of improvements within the Design Center area;
- Design Center: Ask a Question widget added to the sidebar on products detail pages to create new question appropriately tagged.
- Design Center: Reduced the banner size for the internal Design Center pages to allow more room for content and get it further up the page.
- Design Center: Blog Posts automatically pulled into the detail pages alongside suitably tagged discussions.
- Design Center: 'Film Strip' added for product images & videos to save space and to feature videos more prominently.
- Design Center: Quick View added to search results to allow instant price availability checks.
- Design Center: Changed the way the search filters interact to intelligently disable filters which would result in a zero response .
- Design Center: Modified the search results table to make it less verbose and add sorts for various columns.
- Design Center: The header/menu is fixed in IE8
There have been a number of bug fixes and small improvements which include;
- Moved the 'Post Reply' button on the Advanced Editor to make it easy to see
- @Mentions were being removed in 'Recent Blog Posts' widget
- Dreamboard display issues (turned out to be the cookie banner causing issues)
- Dreamboard didn't work in Safari
- When choosing country as "Other Not Listed" you were unable to purchase items
- Raspberry Pi products within Design Center weren’t giving people the ability to choose MCM/CPC
- Design Challenges in a private space were showing on the Now Enrolling widget in Roadtest
- Hide create RoadTest review option if user cannot create a review
- Wasn't able to pick users in the Blog Post widget
- Allow stand alone YouTube videos to be embedded into content
- RoadTest - wrap the main description to make better use of the page
- RoadTests displayed in the Activity Stream were wrapping onto 2 lines
- Content language wasn't being consistently set
- Status update were never being saved
- HTML was showing in the Activity Stream
- Spillage of Roadtest Title inside the Enrolling Now Widget
- Count down timer option for Design Challenges
- Video Plugin: "undefined" JavaScript error occurs
- When using Syntax Highlighting option, the 'View Plain' popup does not support clipboard well in Chrome
- Font size on Feedback & Support confirmation message was way too large
- Product prices were showing without 2 decimal places in certain circumstances; fixed for UK + US
- Email template for Recover User/Password improved
- Events in Related Content are now confined to show results from the last year.. not forever
- Update text Design Challenge Enrolment form Directions
- Migrate Old Design Challenges
- Update list of Open Source Hardware products
- Google Translate button breaks out of top bar in Webinars Training
Thank you to everyone who reports site issues or improvement suggestions to us.. those help guide our development efforts and make the site better for all our members.
One issue we had following the site update was browsers having a cached copy of some old JavaScript that stopped certain site features from working. Hitting CTRL-F5/Shift-F5/Refresh cleared this JavaScript out and everything started working normally. We'll see if there's anything we can do to prevent this from happening in the future.