While we have always posted detailed release notes for major version along with a blog post highlighting major features, we don’t generally talk about our 10+ beta releases leading up to the major release. After hearing feedback from members of our community, we’ve decided to try something new moving forward. We’re going to share release notes for each beta. They’ll feature the beta’s “Greatest Hits” - explanations of new changes that we think everyone should know - as well as a list of smaller changes that don’t need quite so much detail.
New features in 1.9.0.beta15
New Composer Style
Our old composer was full-width and very, very grey. We decided it was time to give our composer a fresh set of paint! The new design removes the “sea of grey”, and also removes full-width so the composer looks much nicer when viewed on wide screen devices.
New Select Boxes
All over Discourse we use dropdown, list, multi-select, and other types of fields where you enter and select items. The old select boxes were not easy to work with, and required numerous special cases in our code to make them work properly. So, we decided update all our select boxes to a new custom select-kit developed ourselves. Not only does the new select-kit not require so many workarounds, it’s also much easier for site designers to customize! Check out some examples over here.
Improved Stage User UX
If you allow non-users to start a new topic via email, we automatically created a “staged user account” for them. This keeps all their emails in linked, and allows them to take ownership of the emails if they eventually sign up for an account.
Staged users are now clearly identified on their user card, and their email is displayed for site staff.
Search Logs
A frequent request from Community Managers here on Meta is better visibility into what users are searching for. To share that data, we’ve added a new Search Logs page to the Admin panel, located at /admin/logs/search_logs. The search logs are still a work in progress, but we encourage you to give them a try and share your thoughts, feedback, and suggestions in the Search Logs Page topic here on Meta.
Reading is Fundemental
Here at Discourse we believe that Reading is Fundamental. We want to incentivize reading. So we now display each user’s total and recent (last 60 days) of read time on the user profile,
“Blocked” renamed to “Silence”
We’ve heard feedback over the years that “block”, the staff tool to prevent users from posting on the site was unclear. Without knowing what “block” meant in a Discourse sense, one could just as easily infer that it mean block the user from using the site (which is a suspension). As such, we’ve renamed “block” to “silence”.
Additionally, when silencing a user you now have an option to set a time limit for the silence, just like you could when suspending.
Dismiss All Notifications Button
Discourse has had a Dismiss All notifications button on the user page for years now. Turns out not everyone knew it was there! To make it easier to reach “inbox zero” we’ve added another dismiss button to the notification dropdown when you click on your avatar.
Old:
User Selectable Homepages
Another frequent request, users can now select their own default homepage. Users can now set any of the top menu locations as their prefered homepage when visiting the app. Prefer the top view over latest - go for it! To change your homepage on Meta click here, or go to /my/preferences/interface on your own site.
Plugin improvements
Discourse Assign
- Add Archive tab for assigned topics
Discourse Chat Integration
- Fix images sent to Mattermost and Rocket.Chat
- Improvements to Slack transcript posting
Discourse Canned Replies
- Focus on filter when opened
Discourse Push Notifications
- Now doesn’t break “Add to homescreen” on Android.
Discourse Patreon
- Use Webhook instead of API sync all
- Increase API page size per Patreon guidelines
- Numerous minor fixes and improvements
Discourse Saved Searches
- Fix error if saved searches PM is deleted
WordPress Discourse
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Version 1.5 released
- Changes to Discourse User creation via plugin
- New functions for themes and plugins
Additional Features and Fixes
Click to expand
New Features
- Use short filename when uploading photos from iOS
- Uploads are processed a lot faster
- Featured links can be removed by editing a topic
- User directory returns staged users during search
- Count of topics viewed is now shown on user summary
- Category setting for mailinglist mirror
- Option to export multiple categories using export_category method
- Do not send notification emails to users who are included in the To and CC header of an incoming email
- New API to search for a user by email
- Removed obsolete settings ga_tracking_code and ga_domain_name. Use ga_universal_tracking_code and ga_universal_domain_name instead.
Bug Fixes
- Infinite loop when poll step is zero
- Increasing overridden label contrast in site settings
- Unable to remove existing user title
- Future date input selector was not respecting timezone
- Link from flagged topics to user was broken
- Error if queued post not found while updating
- Displaying wrong avatar and letter avatar
- Various issues when editing category permissions
- Missing likes count on top topics in user summary
- Youtube playlist videos were not functioning properly in fullscreen
- Re-enable invalid interpolation keys check and allow default keys to be left out of translation overrides.
- Quote dropped when replying as new topic
- Numerous fixed for select-kit
- Admin strings in plugins should fallback to english when untranslated
- Incoming and outgoing emails got lost when post was moved
- Invited users were not granted trust level based on their group
- Do not move small post actions
- Ensure discobot always has a primary email
- Allow login required sites access to attachements
- Some badge routes were still working even with badges disabled
- Category descriptions should display html
- Stop counting PMs, deleted topics and whispers in directory and user stats
- Sometimes quote button did nothing on Firefox
- More accurate counting of posts read.
- Properly handle too large & broken images in posts
- Moderators couldn’t delete spammers via flag modal
- Expansion of user posts was broken
- Don’t crop iPhone X screenshots
- Add error for suspended users attempting to login via sso
- Import/export theme should work with uploads
- Redirect /admin/users to Admin Users List
- Don’t show Create Topic button on full search page to users who can’t create topics
- Sometimes viewing a user’s action logs would reset to view all
- CheckUsername, delete and dismissBanner not working with users with .
- Change password form validation should instruct admins to use min password length for admin accounts
- Validates attachments against current authorized extensions
- Do not generate multiple detail blocks when the selected input
- Unable to invite groups that are not public visible into pms.
- Improves icon alignment
- Support /my routes with subfolders
- Badge description links broken on subfolder
- Deleting staged user of rejected email shouldn’t delete incoming email
UX Changes
- Add tooltips for messages and notifications in header
- Better help text for composer collapse / discard
- Show error message when no gravatar is associated
- Preloaded gravatar was appearing on the right instead of the left
- Replace heuristic solution for extracting root domain.
- Sync input and preview when user is typing.
- Improve handling of tiny and tall onebox images
- Auth complete page/modal has a link to continue to the site to accomodate auth methods that can’t automatically redirect to Discourse
- Use date picker on full page search
- There were many places where username formatters were not applied
- Sort search logs results by unique searches
- Support for custom error pages and headers in plugins
- Make flag dropdown actions more clear
- Support for custom 404 pages
- Expand parent category in full screen search results
- Warn that something must be selected with safe mode
- Generic onebox treats all square images as avatars and renders them smaller
- Widget options to disable FAQ and About
- Change composer button text to ‘whisper’ when whispering
- Include the flagged person’s username on the flagged post
- Allow collapsing of group posts after they’ve been expanded
- Use down chevron button instead of “show more” text to link to full list of notifications
- Increase max length of topic titles in summary email html by 40 characters
- Wrap columns on categories/latest if the browser is too small
- Hide category badge colors if the style is none
- Correct regression with twitter onebox
- Autobiographer badge description should link to profile preferences
- Onebox images no longer cause jiggle
- Various admin class and structure improvements for styling
Performance
- Hijack onebox requests so they do not use up a unicorn worker
- Stop running background work between requests
- N+1 query when fetching search_logs
- Exact email match bypass