Release Notes: December 14 & 15, 2021

Please note that this week is the final week of Newspack releases for 2021. This week we had two rounds of releases, in anticipation of the holiday release freeze. Changes from both rounds are noted below.

Newspack Plugin

1.68.0 (2021-12-14)

  • Streamlined the way in which Newspack-hosted sites connect to third-party services.

Blocks

1.44.0 (2021-12-15)

  • Added a feature to the Homepage Posts block that lets editors choose whether to lazy-load images rendered by each block instance. Images are lazy-loaded by default (no change in behavior from before), but images that are visible above-the-fold should not be lazy-loaded, for maximum performance scores in Core Web Vitals.

1.43.0 (2021-12-14)

  • Added a feature to the Stripe donation platform that allows donors to optionally include Stripe fees in their donations.
  • Improved mobile styles for the Post Carousel block.
  • Fixed a bug that prevented the “Load More” buttons in Homepage Posts blocks from working properly in an AMP Plus environment

Newsletters

1.37.0 (2021-12-14)

Campaigns

1.47.0 (2021-12-15)

  • Changed the default behavior for post types supported by Campaigns. Now, by default, posts, pages, and any public custom post types with archive support will display prompts from Newspack Campaigns. You may still choose which specific post types to support when editing each prompt.
  • Fixed a bug that prevented prompt previews from loading in Chrome.

1.46.0 (2021-12-14)

  • Tweaked front-end styles for inline archive prompts.
  • Fixed a bug that caused some post content to be duplicated when displaying prompts.
  • Improved the behavior of prompt name suggestions when duplicating prompts.

Ads

1.24.0 (2021-12-15)

  • Re-added support for sticky sidebar ads in the new Placements UI.

1.23.0 (2021-12-14)

  • Added support for Google accounts which are connected to multiple Google Ad Manager networks; now you can switch between active networks and manage ad units from all networks from the Newspack Ads dashboard.
  • Added experimental support for header bidding via prebid.js.

Theme

1.55.2 (2021-12-15)

  • Added a performance enhancement to not lazy-load featured images on singular posts, pages, and for the first visible image on archives. This should help maximize performance scores for Core Web Vitals.
  • Fixed several style issues related to the Mobile CTA in the site header.
  • Other minor performance-related enhancements.

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