Platform Upgrade News
This is our last site update before we embark on a platform upgrade to Jive 9. However, early indications are that the upgrade from Jive 8 to Jive 9 will be nowhere near as complicated as our previous upgrades have been. In the past we've jumped from Jive 4.5 to 6, then from 6 to 8. Those were been big projects and took quite some time for us to integrate our changes back into the platform. Since we've been able to stay current on v.8 point releases within our regular release cycles, the changes from the latest version of 8 to 9 are not as significant. More details on the timing of the upgrade will be forthcoming.
Latest Site Update
The site update we did last night primarily focused on getting the video upload feature to work with the latest Brightcove API version, which we needed to do since Brightcove are retiring their legacy API at the end of June. We also made some performance improvements which should make the site more speedy for logged-in users. There was also a bug we needed to squash, where users were getting logged out, seemingly at random, which I'll explain further down in this post.
Improvements
- Migrate to new Brightcove CMS API (before old API is retired in June)
- Improve code for our countdown clock
- Any Webex failure emails should to go to a central email address
- Featured Content search speed improvement
- Allow videos to be embedded from sites like YouTube on a mobile device
- Responsive product images on Design Center pages
RoadTest & Design Challenges
- Contestants Widget, Add Proposal Link
- 404 received from RoadTest links on Content page
- Issue with cached Roadtest applications
- Optimise the performance of the Create Review link code
- RoadTest error handling investigation (stop it surfacing SQL in the error message)
- Increase application Postal Code field size
- + 3 other improvements
Other Fixes
- Duplicate cookie issue causing random logouts in certain situations
- Unfollowing from Connection Streams was also unfollowing from Inbox
- Images in Design Center search are appearing too large - workaround applied
- Update heading on MDK trial landing page
Seemingly Random Logout Issue - Investigation
You may be interested in what our team sometimes has to investigate.. this is a 'fun' bug we looked into and fixed last night.
Some of our team found that we were getting logged out of the site at odd times.. yet other team members weren't. We'd not had members report it in Feedback & Support, so we knew it wasn't a widespread issue.. but it was annoying for the people affected, and there was a problem somewhere... we just couldn't work out where.
After a couple of days of it happening, I'd only seen it affect Chrome, and when it happened, it not only logged me out, but also presented the EU Cookie Directive message, which I always dismiss. Dismissing that dialog saves the choice in a cookie, so this led me to look at my cookies for the site. In the developer tools they looked okay, but then looked in Chrome's built-in 'Cookies and site data' dialog, it told me I had 170 cookies for this site
When I expanded that section it showed a one particular cookie getting duplicated... what is going on??
There were a couple of odd things about each one; the path for the cookie was set to the full URL of the content I'd looked at (it shouldn't be), and it was a session cookie which should be cleared when I restarted my browser, and they certainly weren't being cleared.
After some Googling, it turns out that when Chrome is set to 'Continue where you left off', it keeps all the session cookies even when you completely restart the browser, so these cookies were never getting cleared down.
What seemed to be happening was that Chrome kept collecting these duplicate cookies until it hit a threshold, then it cleared out as much as it could (logging you out in the process) but didn't clear all the duplicate cookies. The Chrome team should maybe look at fixing that (I'll see about raising it as a bug), but our platform shouldn't be saving the cookie with a path like that, so there was still more work to do to find out why it was doing that.
It turned out the platform vendor had made a small change to how that path was calculated, and in most circumstances it works...but not for our site. I put a breakpoint in the code, and saw it was setting the cookie path to;
https://www.element14.com/community
Yet when I looked at it in the cookie dialog it had the full content URL. After a bit more thought, I realised that the path needs to end with a slash.. when it looks like this, it works as intended!
https://www.element14.com/community/
The fix is trivial, but as you can see, tracking it down and working out what was going on took quite some time!
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