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Release Notes
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15.3 Release Notes

JohnD's avatar
JohnD
Khoros Alumni (Retired)
10 years ago

The 15.3 Release has several new features and enhancements that drive engagement not only in your community but also on your product pages. Our new Product Mentions feature enables users to mention products not only in reviews but also in forum posts (similar to our existing Mentions feature). This feature helps to drive traffic from a product discussion in the community to product pages, increasing conversion on your dot com site. Additionally, we are rolling out our new Review Invitation feature that you can use to encourage users to write reviews for products they’ve purchased.

 

In addition, there are some key features and improvements for developers and admins include OAuth support for Community API v1, several API v1 and v2 calls, and productivity improvements for working in Studio.

New features and enhancements

New Product tab in Community Admin

We have decoupled the product catalog from Ratings and Reviews. Now all customers can integrate their product catalog with their Lithium Communities.

Decoupling these features enables all customers to use our new feature, Product Mentions.

 

If you have Ratings and Reviews, you will see that we have moved the Product Editor and Product Catalog subtabs from Community Admin > Features > Reviews.

 

There is now a new tab, Community Admin > Features > Products. The new tab contains the Product Editor and Product Catalog subtabs.

Product Mentions

Our new Product Mentions feature is similar to the @Mention feature. With Product Mentions, community users can call out specific products in their posts and link to the associated product page on your dot com site. When the user mentions a product, an image of that product appears in the post and that image links to the associated product page.

 

The table below shows the discussion styles that support product mentions. Some conversation styles allow users to mention a product, but do not support the product image carousel that displays the rich snippet image(s) of the mentioned products in the post. Product mentions cannot be made using the Quick Comments or Quick Reply features.

 

Discussion Style

Product Mentions

in posts

Product Carousal 

in posts

Product Mentions in comments and replies

Product Carousal in comments  and replies

Blog
Review
Idea Exchange
Q&A
Forum
TKB
Contest
Group
Chat

 

To use Product Mentions, you must have an integrated product catalog with valid ID and URL to the associated product page for each product. You can integrate your catalog using Community Admin, the Community API, or through Professional Services.

To find complete details, check out these Lithium Community Documentation articles:

Review Invitations

Some of your customers are naturally inclined to write product reviews. It's in their nature to share their experience and opinion. Other customers need an invitation or a reminder to prompt them to write a review.

Our new review invitation feature enables you to generate fully qualified, tokenized URLs that take your customers to a page where they can write a review and give a product a 1-5 star rating. The feature enables community members and guests to write a review without having to sign in to the community.

The URLs are generated from a CSV list of email addresses and products uploaded by you in Community Admin. You can use the tokenized URLs in a review solicitation campaign using a CRM system or campaign tool of your choice.

This feature includes a new page quilt called Review Solicitation Page. It’s the default page your customers see when they follow the tokenized URL. The quilt is available in the Page tab in Studio under the Reviews section of the page selection pop up.

If you are using the Product List or Product Rating Summary ActiveCast widgets on your dot com site, the ratings given via the Review Solicitation Page factor into the 1-5 star rating average and rating histogram displayed by the widgets.

Reviews submitted via the tokenized URL appear in the Latest Reviews component.

Note: To use this feature, you must have an integrated product catalog and be using version 2 of the Reviews feature (set in Studio > Features). We also strongly recommend that you have the Moderation Manager package before using this feature and that you enable pre-moderation for reviews. At this time reporting is not captured for reviews generated via a review invitation.

For complete information, read Invite users to write a product review on the Lithium Community.

Auto-detect image upload setting for user albums

We have added a new image upload option to more easily control which album (Private or Public) users upload images to by default.

With this new “default user album” setting, you can set up your community (category or board) to auto-detect whether the user is uploading an image to a private or public location and automatically set the default album selection to a Private album when posting to a permissioned category or board and a Public album when posting to a publicly viewable area. The new system default for this setting is Auto Detect.

Of course, users can always override the default setting when uploading their images.

 

To set the default user album to use when users upload images:

  1. Go to Community Admin > Features > Images.
  2. Set the Default user album to place uploaded images option.
  3. Click Save.

Studio components search

In our continued effort make building pages in Studio easier, we have added the ability to search for page components by name. For example, let’s say you want to find all components related to Kudos. Instead of opening the folders to find the one you want, you can now search for it.

 

To search for a component:

  1. Go to Studio > Page > Canvas.
  2. In the component search field, start typing the name of the component.
  3. Hover over the component you want to add to your page and click it.

The component is dropped onto your page.

 

Enhancement to the Studio API Browser

You can now submit LiQL queries in the API Browser using the Enter key. To add a new line, use Shift+Enter.

Community API v2 updates

Release 15.3 includes these Community API v2 updates:

  • New resources
  • New search query parameter for reporting

New Community v2 resources

15.3 introduces these new Community API v2 resources:

You can use these resources in LiQL calls to retrieve data relating to products, product categories, reviews, and review ratings. Continue to use the Community API v1 calls for CRUD actions. In addition to the articles above, read Products, Ratings, and Reviews: Moving to API v2 to understand how to use the API v2 resources to retrieve the data you previously obtained with API v1.

Community API v2 search query parameter for reporting

We added a new query parameter to use with LiQL calls when the LiQL call is backing a search component in the user interface and you want the search events captured in LSI search reports.

The new parameter is:

api.for_ui_search=true

The parameter is supported only for LiQL calls that use MATCHES when filtering on a Message collection. For example:

<#assign x= rest("2.0","/search?q=" + "SELECT * FROM messages WHERE body MATCHES 'wireless' OR subject MATCHES 'wireless'&api.for_ui_search=true"?url) />

This query parameter is documented in Using LiQL.

New coreNode FreeMarker method

We added a new method on the coreNode FreeMarker context object. The new method is hasAncestor. It returns true if the given display ID is an ancestor of the core node. This call is useful for navigation and breadcrumb logic in custom components.

Example: ${coreNode.hasAncestor("foo")}

OAuth Support for Community API v1

OAuth 2.0 is the authentication protocol used for Community API v2. Now you can use it for Community API v1 calls as well. Lithium supports the OAuth 2.0 grant authorization flow, which is useful when developing integrations with third-party systems or native mobile applications.

To use OAuth with API v1, you need to use a different URL format that runs through the Lithium API proxy instead of the standard API v1 URL format.

Note: You must contact Lithium Support to register your application before you can use the proxy. For details read OAuth 2.0 authorization grant flow.

 

In your header, include the following:

Header

Value

client-id

The client ID provided by Lithium Support when you register your app.

Content-type

application/json

 

Construct your call using this format:

https://lithium_api_domain/product_name/version/tenant/object_path/method_path?query_parameter

 

For example:

https://api.lithium.com/community/v1/my_tenant_id/users/self?api.pretty_print=true

 

Here’s the breakdown of each piece of the URL:

lithium_api_domain

For production

  • api.lithium.com - if your community is hosted in the San Jose data center
  • eu.api.lithium.com - if your community is hosted in the Amsterdam data center

For stage

  • api.stage.lithium.com - if your community is hosted in the San Jose data center.
  • eu-api.stage.lithium.com - if your community is hosted in the Amsterdam data center

product_name

The Lithium product you are using: community

version

The version of the API: v1

tenant

Your tenant ID is provided by Lithium Support when you register your app

object_path/method_path

The ObjectPath and MethodPath together specify a resource or "call" within your community that retrieves or modifies data. If the MethodPath is empty, the call returns the object with its properties. If the ObjectPath and MethodPath are both empty, the request returns your top-level community object.

query_parameter

In addition to query parameters described in the API documentation, you can use api.pretty_print=true to provide read-friendly formatting in your response.

New Community API v1 calls

In this release, we fixed a bug with two of our Metrics APIs where the calls returned incorrect counts:

The calls have been fixed, and we have added two more:

The legacy calls return an integer. These APIs work best with non-formulaic metrics. The new calls return a double, which can support floating points.

New Community API v1 Parameter to show hidden boards

You can now pass the query parameter show_hidden=true to any Community API v1 call that retrieves boards at the community, category, or node level in order to retrieve hidden boards. These calls require Administrator permissions.

Examples include:

/restapi/vc/boards?show_hidden=true

/restapi/vc/categories/id/boards?show_hidden=true

Updates to Facebook's API that affect Lithium LevelUp

Availability Update: The Lithium's Facebook Integrations for Communities (also known as LevelUp) is no longer available for purchase. This information applies only to existing LevelUp customers.

 

Starting April 30th, 2015, Facebook is automatically upgrading all its API calls to use v2.0. Learn about all the details here.
As part of this upgrade, Facebook no longer supports the ability to link multiple Facebook apps to one Facebook account. Due to this change, Lithium no longer supports the ability to sign in to one community with multiple Facebook Apps.
For example, if a community has a Facebook Contests app and uses a different app for regular sign in, members will need to sign in to each with a different community account. This change only affects members who have never approved their Facebook apps before. Members who have signed in via Facebook should continue to function properly.

You Found It. We Fixed It.

  • Previously, in communities using Top Level Categories with the Show community name in breadcrumb links setting disabled, the community name was still being displayed in the breadcrumb. This display issue has been fixed and now the community name is not shown in the breadcrumb.
  • We have fixed the issue where Private Message Preview wasn’t working and was taking users back to the Rich Text Editor view.
  • Previously, when you were using the desktop community view on an iPad or iPhone, you could not click the Save button when trying to crop an avatar image on the Crop Profile Page, and the page froze. This issue has been fixed.
  • When attempting to view Admin Metrics in Community Admin > Metrics, the displayed metrics were not updating as you clicked different metrics from the tree. This issue has been fixed, and now the metrics update as you select different metrics from the tree.
  • Previously, the colon in the lithiumSSO:commid cookie was causing issues with some API integrations. Specifically, the COOKIE_NAME was set as static in our Java library. We have updated our Java, .Net, and PHP libraries to have the default value for COOKIE_NAME to use a URL encoded colon.
  • We have fixed the issue where private message notifications were not including the body and subject for communities using the English UK language.
  • The activity-stream component uses the ActivityStreamFeedMessage quilt to display each message item in the stream. Previously, when a user viewed this component from a mobile device, the MobileActivityStreamFeedMessage was used even when mobile was disabled for the community. We have fixed this issue and now the community uses the desktop version if mobile is disabled.
  • Previously, if you tried to edit a TKB article that included a video, the Tiny MCE editor would not open properly, and you could not edit the article. This issue has been fixed.
  • We have fixed the issue that a user’s group roles were not being returned with API calls.
  • When an idea status is created and set automatically for new ideas, the idea status count increments to record the new idea. However, if the new idea is sent to quarantine as spam, the status count was not being decremented to remove the idea from the count, resulting in the status count being inflated. We have fixed this counting issue, and now the idea status count does not include any ideas identified as spam.
  • Previously, when a user signed in to a community using SSO and Safari and there was a component using REST API v2 to display content in the community, the component would not behave correctly after they initially signed in. Specifically, it did not show the content as expected and sometimes produced errors. However, if the user went to another page then returned to the page with the component, it loaded as expected. This issue has been fixed, and the component now loads properly the first time.
  • When exporting a CSV file from the Search Options > Export Search Results as a CSV File, not all of the content was always presented in the exported file. We have fixed this issue, and now the exported CSV file includes all the appropriate content for empty searches and well as searches for specific terms.
Updated 5 months ago
Version 15.0
  • Great to hear about the COOKIE_NAME fix! Where can I download the updated Java library?
  • This is a great release and fixes some of our issues, thanks. However, it appears that the WYSIWYG editor icons have changed and the "Insert Code" and "View Source Code" have the same icon now. Before they were different from one another. This can be confusing.