This is mostly a maintenance, stability, and performance release, but it does include a few new significant features.
URL Monitors
New in this release, users now have the ability to define custom URL monitors on their site! URL monitors periodically scan the specified page using an external service for health issues and will send an email if a problem is detected on that pages.
This is intended to provide an extra layer of confidence in the reliability and performance of Marketpath CMS websites, as well as to provide timely alerts in case there are any issues preventing your website from working properly.
Some of the issues this can detect include DNS or SSL issues, slow or unresponsive pages, server downtime issues, HTTP errors, and liquid errors on pages.
Plans and Billing
This feature is only available for paid sites - free sites will have to upgrade to a paid plan in order to use URL Monitors. Additionally, sites on the Standard plan will only be able to use 1 URL monitor (typically the home page) that checks the page at most every 4 hours while sites on higher tiers will be able to add multiple monitors that are executed more frequently.
Sites on the Standard plan or higher will automatically configure a URL monitor on their home page when their site is activated if they do not already have a URL monitor on their site. Additionally, after the initial feature release, existing sites on the standard or higher plans will also automatically have URL monitors configured for their home page, although initially notification emails will only be sent to Marketpath administrators so that we have time to correct their configuration and use if there are any issues.
One important note about URL Monitors. Url checks are counted as normal pageviews. This is due to a number of reasons, and should not make a significant impact for most sites. However, if you find yourself wrestling with the pageview limits and trying to find ways to prevent overage fees, you may consider increasing your url monitor intervals or disabling them entirely. For reference, each URL monitor that executes every 4 hours will result in approximately 183 pageviews/month, while the same monitor executing every 15 minutes will result in approximately 1825 pageviews/month. URL monitors have separate healthy vs unhealthy intervals, so if you are increasing intervals then you may consider increasing the unhealthy interval as well - or you may decide to keep it short to notify you sooner once the page is healthy again.
Configuration and Features
There are a number of options for configuration of URL monitors, including the frequency which it will execute, how to identity when the page is unhealthy, how long it should take to return the page, how often to send health-related emails for the monitor, temporarily or permanently disabling monitors, and more. This is a new feature with little documentation (we plan on writing most of the documentation following the release), so we recommend that the best way to familiarize yourself with it is to start playing with it yourself! To do this, simply
- Sign in Marketpath CMS
- Navigate to Site -> Url Monitors
- Create a new URL Monitor (or edit the existing monitor if one has already been created for you)
One final significant feature of URL monitors is the ability to edit all of the URL monitors for your site at once. This may be useful to temporarily (or permanently) disable URL monitors while performing site maintenance, reduce the impact of URL monitors on billing, change where health alerts and sent, and more.
Textlist Fields
We have added a new field type in this release. The textlist field is a simple way to allow users to enter multiple text values in a single field. It is currently only used by URL monitors, but can also be added to templates and custom site settings. This field is compatible with all of the relevant conditions and validators - such as for min and max items.
Stability and Maintenance
While we typically strive for 0 downtime during deployments, there are a few changes required in this release that necessitate live site downtime. These changes are necessary due to changes forced on us by Microsoft due to their retirement of certain existing Microsoft Azure infrastructure offerings. We have scheduled the release for a low-traffic time period and expect the downtime to be 5-15 minutes (though we are hopeful that it will actually be less than 2 minutes). There are a few minor benefits to these changes, but the main benefit is simply that Marketapth CMS will still be able to continue serving live sites in the near future.
Additionally, there is a second major stability improvement for live sites in this release related to how SSL certificates are generated and installed. Due to the nature of the issue and the fix, clients should not notice any difference in service but live sites should be less likely to go offline as a result of SSL updates, and the Markepath development team should not have to manually monitor live instances for the root of this issue or apply manual foxes for it any more.
Finally, there are some additional backend changes in this release that should be transparent to Marketpath customers (many of which have actually already been unceremoniously deployed and in production for some time).
Bugfixes
This release includes a few notable bugfixes:
- Bugfix for custom field values when copying a site
- Bugfix for keeping object references and properly updating menu item URLs when copying a site
- Bugfix for re-compiling parent stylesheets when a child stylesheet is re-published. Due to the nature of the bug, parent stylesheets may have to be published before recompilation can be triggered by child stylesheet publishes.
- A few minor UI fixes and improvements
