October Updates

Hello! A pretty mixed month in terms of platform updates & development. I’m going to try and keep this as short as possible so that I can get back to it ASAP. These update posts are supposed to be published on the first day of each month and I always find myself putting it off in favour of more important things, so I’m currently writing this as a network-wide backup is taking place so that I can’t be distracted.

Here’s what’s new…

First up: SendGrid. I announced back in March that emails from That Website Guy would be delivered through SendGrid to ensure security and reliability among other things. One of those other things was email tracking, and a few of you pointed out that the links in the emails were masked with SendGrid URLs which is actually how we’re able to track if you click on them, though that seemed to confuse some of you and question the email’s legitimacy. To ease confusion these links are now masked with thatwebsiteguy.net URLs instead. We’ve also tweaked our email headers to get rid of “via SendGrid” which showed up in certain email clients and also caused some confusion.

I’ve also been going through sites on the platform and adding a nice little CSS snippet to sites that use the Performance app’s “LazyLoad” feature for images. If you’ve been using this feature, now when you load up a page you should find when your images come into view they no longer “snap” and just appear but instead elegantly fade-in which creates a nice effect.

The Ecommerce product variation preload threshold has been increased to help with sites that use products that have a lot of variations which caused an issue previously.

Another bug has been stamped out. It was discovered after enabling a CDN with the performance app that it caused issues with the page builder by resetting the selected thumbnail size of an image each time the page builder is opened up due to the image having a different URL. This issue has now been resolved by disabling the CDN on a page where the page builder is open.

The platform core has undergone another preventative security patch.

A new caching method has also been enabled platform-wide called OpCache which caches behind-the-scenes server processes and enables the server to function faster and much more smoothly. If you’re using the Performance app you may have noticed a new option for “Purge OpCache” in the Admin bar’s Performance dropdown – though most of you will likely never need to use it.

And finally the Google Analytics Integration app has received an update after a bug was discovered which caused an error message to show when a product was displayed on a page using a shortcode. We’ve also made sure all external links on the app’s settings page now open in a new window, and added new options to track 404 (Not found) errors, and toggle Enhanced Link Attribution. ID and SKU data will also now be used in a consistent way so that all products are correctly tracked.

That’s it for October! See you all next month!