Our fourth (and final) site update of 2024 is due for deployment on the 12th November 09:00 UTC, we have a number of improvements and bug fixes which you may be interested to know about. There are plenty of others that are less obvious, won't impact you directly, or affect things behind the scenes, but I'll list out the ones I believe you'll be most interested in.
- Font sizes within content have been reverted to the platform/vendor defaults. This matches the sizes our company uses across our online stores. If you desperately need to have a larger font for content I've put together a guide for how to do this using a Chrome extension called TamperMonkey.
- Layout of headings and content have been improved to minimise big gaps, inconsistent indenting & font sizes.
- Margins on RoadTest, Review and Design Challenge titles has been reduced, and we tried to make elements sized more appropriately for mobile.
- The RoadTest Reviews list has had its layout improved.
- Printing a page now won't include site & webinar notifications.
- The tabbed content lists now exclude irrelevant sub-areas of each group (like the 'setup' wiki).
- Action links/buttons are now consistent in how they're presented & we've made them buttons rather than just text links to make them stand out more (but not too much).
- The table of contents navigation (often used in documents and RoadTests) won't display if there's only 1 heading in the content.
- Twitch can now be embedded into content (just like we can do for GitHub Gists, Twitter, etc (it's in the Insert > External Content menu).
- We've improved error trapping for content that uses forms to capture information (like RoadTest entries, Quizzes, eBook registration).
- Search on mobile was too cluttered with filter options; we've hidden these under a Filters toggle so you can access them if you need them.
- Messages in a conversation can be reported to a moderator, and you can unfriend & report users from there too.
- There has been a focus on streamlining our infrastructure; reducing our costs whilst retaining performance. This is something we've done over the past 6+ months, making small changes, testing & monitoring (to make sure it hasn't had a negative effect for our members) before moving onto the next resource.
- In August, we addressed a performance issue by deploying a targeted fix outside of our regular release schedule. This intervention led to a 42% decrease in page response times and a noticeable reduction in performance spikes. Here's a graph of response times.. can you tell when we deployed the fix?
Overall, our team has actioned over 180 Jira tickets for this release! Plus we have an exciting new area of the site waiting in the wings.. that's going through testing before we make it live sometime in 2025.
Sincerely,
The element14 Development Team
