This week’s release is a big one, and includes a redesign of our Newspack Dashboard, a “lite” version of your site for emergencies, and an option to set a fallback for missing images. We’ve also added a number smaller features and bugfixes since our last release.
Newspack Dashboard redesign
We’ve done some house cleaning in the admin side of Newspack to make your workflows smoother and more intuitive. This update ensures that your most-used tools are easy to find.
Here’s a breakdown of the changes:
- Your dashboard has a new layout with sections and cards for quick access to tasks like creating posts, drafting newsletters, and more.
- We grouped all the settings under one menu, including Connections, Emails, Social, SEO, and more.
- Your audience management tools (Reader Activation, Donations, and Subscriptions) are now clearly separated into their own sections under Audience > Configuration, Audience > Donations, and Audience > Subscriptions.
- As part of this update, we have renamed Reader Activation (aka “RAS”) to Audience Management.
- We reorganized the structure of the primary sections of the main menu, such as Newsletters, Listings, and Network.
Any big change like this takes some getting used to, which is why we created a handy cheat sheet to help you navigate the new menu, on top of some general FAQs about these changes.
A quick-loading site for emergencies (#3807)
Lite Site is a text-only version of this website that loads faster and uses less data.
It’s designed to allow your readers to still be able to access your content despite connectivity issues, poor network coverage, or in the event of natural disasters and emergencies. Read the documentation for more details.
Set a fallback image for missing media (#3811)
Sometimes image assets are deleted for various reasons, and if they were included in a post or page, a broken image element appears. This results in a poor user experience. With this change, the site editor will be able to mark an image as a fallback image in case the asset is missing.
To mark an image as the default image, visit its view in the Media Library, and toggle the “Is default image?” option:
Other features/fixes of note
Links in newsletter content get UTM params (#1776)
Links inside newsletter content authored in the Newspack Newsletters editor will now automatically get more UTM parameters appended for improved analytics capability. In addition to utm_medium=email, which was already being appended, links will have the following parameters appended:
utm_campaign– Should match the value of the Campaign Name field (but URL-encoded)utm_source– The ID of the top-level send list the newsletter is being sent to (but URL-encoded)
Note that the connected ESP or other third-party integrations may overwrite some or all of these parameters with its own. For example, if using Mailchimp with the Google Analytics extension, the GA extension will set its own utm_campaign and utm_source values, overwriting our defaults.
Campaign prompts merge tags
Campaign prompts merge tags allow you to add a few dynamic tags to the prompt that will be replaced on the fly by information that’s specific to the reader that is currently seeing the prompt.
This is useful to craft prompts like “You’ve read 15 articles, you should consider subscribing….”
A truly small featured image size (#2456)
The Newspack Theme originally used the same image size for both the ‘Large’ and ‘Small’ image placements (1200px wide). To avoid loading too-large images, the ‘Small’ image placement will now use a correctly-sized 780px wide image size.
Please note if your site is using CSS to scale up smaller image sizes beyond their 780px wide display, you may see a loss in quality.
Other changes
- [FEAT] Add a “reevaluate status” feature for Memberships (#3845): In case a membership lost its connection with a Subscription for a while and was manually relinked, you can use this feature to resync the Membership status with the Subscription status
- [FIX] Increased timeout for Mailchimp API requests (#1744)
- [FIX] Limited updated date to only standard post types (#2453): Prevents the updated date from appearing on other post types like Newsletters when enabled.
- [FIX] Increase content width size for Jetpack’s Image Accelerator on certain templates (#2454): This will help make sure wide and full-sized image blocks display with less image quality loss.
- [FIX] Use monospace font in republication tracker textarea (#241) :Some fonts use ligatures and will wreck the textarea with the post content, so it is now monospace.
- [FIX] Prevent five-column Content Loop blocks from wrapping incorrectly when borders are enabled (#2072)
- [FIX] Use JS for “time ago” dates instead of PHP (#2457): Caching could make the time ago dates wrong because the time ago was calculated on the backend. We now calculate it with JS on the fly.
- [FIX] Don’t show empty brand dropdown on posts listing (#69): On sites with the multibranded plugin enabled, the posts listing would show a tiny dropdown with nothing in it on the post listing if there are no brands or posts with brand. This removes the dropdown in that case.
- [FIX] Fix how the “Registration Page” metadata is synced to contacts that subscribe to newsletters (#1777)
- [FIX] Removes ad block recovery nonce field as it is no longer required (#940)
- [FIX] If a site is using WooCommerce with HPOS, the resubscribe link would not work. This is now fixed (#3822)
- [FIX] Don’t show instructions to send test emails to multiple recipients when Active Campaign is the ESP (#1784)
- [FIX] Prevent dashboard errors on sites using woocommerce-paypal-payments@3.0.0 (#3848)
