This release is the culmination of nearly 9 months of development. And, if we have done our jobs well, you should barely be able to tell that we did anything at all.
Before explaining the behind-the-scenes improvements, however, here are some of the bugfixes and feature improvements that you might notice from this release:
Features
App Disconnected Notice
Users will now be shown a notification when they are disconnected from Marketpath CMS. The notification will automatically be hidden when their browser is able to reconnect, or they can choose to ignore the notice and continue working (although they will not be able to save their changes or load any new content until the browser is reconnected).
Users will also see a warning icon in place of the activity icon as long as they are disconnected from Marketpath CMS. This warning will be displayed even if the user has ignored the notification.
Form submission spam filter
We have recently witnessed a dramatic increase in malicous form submissions. These submissions can appear very urgent and persuasive, and are specifically engineered to pursuade site administrators to download and open dangerous files on their computer. Furthermore, these forms are being submitted by actual people - which means that bot-prevention and captcha technologies do not prevent them.
As a result, we have included a simple form submission spam filter in this release. This filter was designed and implemented as a quick solution to a serious problem while we evaluate more advanced options.
When a form submission is flagged as "spammy", the system will do two things: it will prevent any form submission notification emails from being sent, and a warning will be displayed above the form submission in Marketpath CMS.
New UI Tool
This release also includes a new UI tool for the Marketpath CMS management interface. This new tool will allow the full Marketpath CMS team to push certain content updates to the Marketpath CMS UI without having to make any code changes - which ultimately means more often and higher-quality information for users. In particular this is intended to help users learn Marketpath CMS faster and to help them get more out of it.
Bugfixes
- Fixed a bug where some domains were not being properly published to either the preview or live environments when they were created or updated.
- Fixed a bug with invoice pdf line-item generation (pdf format only - the bug did not affect any billing functionality)
- Fixed a bug with editing and saving (replacing or copying) webp images.
- Bugfix for displaying multiple uploaded files in a single form submission field
Behind-the-scenes improvements
The vast majority of work for this release went into updating our solutions and infrastructure to take advantage of continuous integration and continuous deployment technologies. A handful of the benefits of making this change include:
- Improved infrastructure and security
- More reliable backend processes
- Better scalability to handle higher traffic and more demanding workloads
- Easier to maintain and develop some of our solutions
- Improved capacity and frequency of automated testing, resulting in fewer bugs caused by releases
- Faster and more customizable release process, enabling more frequent releases with less downtime
- Reduced reliance on a few individuals for knowledge on how to maintain our solutions
