New Features
- Announcement: New Lithium Customer Blog
- Authoring experience enhancements
- Studio Publish enhancements
- Salesforce Connector updates
- AngularJS library upgrade coming in 18.8
- Improved access to Product Catalog import tool
- API changes
Announcement: New Lithium Customer Blog
Last week, we launched a new, customer blog where we plan to share details about what we’re working on and what’s on the horizon. In case you missed them, here are the first 3 posts:
- Lithium 2018 Roadmap
- Lithium Communities 2018 Roadmap and mid-year update
- Social Media Management 2018 Roadmap and mid-year update
We recommend checking them out and subscribing to the Lithium Custom Blog for future announcements and product previews.
Authoring experience enhancements
As part of our ongoing effort to improve the overall authoring experience on Lithium Communities, we have add these improvements:
- Auto-save for Blog, Idea, and TKB comments
- Enhanced image hyperlinking behavior for Media Experience
Auto-save for Blog, Idea, and TKB comments
Prior to this release, auto-save was supported only for topic messages and replies in Forums and Groups and topic messages in Q&A. Now, the auto-saving of posts and comments is supported for all discussion styles, including Blogs, Ideas, and TKBs.
To enable autosave for all discussion styles and set the autosave time interval, you use the existing admin settings you used for Forums and Groups under Admin > Posts & Topics > Settings:
When enabled, comments are saved automatically, and users are prompted in-line, if there is an autosaved comment that can be recovered and used:
Note: If you have styled the message auto-save component (Autosaved Drafts), the auto-save component for comments and replies apply the same styling.
Image hyperlink changes for Media Experience
We’ve released a new version of the Media Experience (version 5.1). In Media 5.1, clicking images in posts now behaves differently depending on whether the image includes an embedded hyperlink or not. Specifically:
- Images without hyperlinks open up on the lightbox experience when clicked
- Images with embedded hyperlinks open the linked page when clicked
In previous versions of Media Experience, linked images presented two actions on the image when the user hovered over it--one to visit the site for the embedded link and the other to view the image in the lightbox.
If you opened the image in the lightbox, you had to exit the lightbox, hover over the image again, and click the URL to open the linked URL. To opt for the new image linking behavior, you can enable Media version 5.1.
To enable Media version 5.1:
- Sign in to your community as an Admin.
- Go to Studio > Features.
- Scroll down to Media and set value to 5.1.
- Click Save.
Learn more about the differences between different versions of Media Experience.
Studio Publish Enhancements
We have made internal improvements to how we load plugins. We believe these improvements will prevent or greatly reduce the “Server Too Busy” status messages experienced by some customers upon publishing to production with Studio Publish. Customers with a large number of complex skins in Studio might notice a slightly longer wait time during Preview Accept, Go Live, and Rollback Studio Publish actions. We recommend removing unnecessary or unused skins from Studio.
As a result of this enhancement, you will see a new alert message in a yellow banner in Studio Publish that says, "Studio Publish is temporarily disabled while a publishing action runs. Refresh the page in a few minutes to see if the action completed." The alert is designed to let you know that an action is in process. Simply wait a few minutes and then refresh the page. When the alert no longer appears, the publishing process has finished.
You can export unused skins to the SDK plugin using this command:
li export-studio-plugin --points "skin" --force
Salesforce Connector updates
As part of the 18.7 Release, we are upgrading our Lithium-side usage of Salesforce APIs from version 7 and 32 to version 42. Lithium uses these APIs to power multiple integration use cases through our Salesforce Connector. There is no change on the Salesforce side of installed packages.
- Why: Salesforce regularly upgrades and retires platform APIs used by our connector. To avoid deprecation related issues and impact to our customers, we must stay up to date.
- Impact: These updates only impact the LIA backend; we don’t expect any impact to existing installations.
- Recommendation: We have tested the core use cases our product supports. Even though we don’t expect any impact to customer installations, any customizations you might have made to your Salesforce Connection might not work after the upgrade. To mitigate any potential problems, we recommend testing out the upgrade in your stage environment first.
AngularJS library upgrade coming in 18.8
For the next Community release (18.8), we will be upgrading the AngularJS libraries from 1.4.8 to 1.7.3. As part of the upgrade, we will test all customer Angular integrations and solve any issues with the upgrade that we find.
Improved access to Product Catalog import tool
You no longer need to have Ratings and Reviews enabled for your community in order to integrate your Product Catalog using the Product Catalog import tool.
API changes
LiQL Updates
We now support MATCHES with the title and description fields on the Boards and Categories collections. This change has also been backported to 18.6.
Examples:
SELECT id FROM boards WHERE title MATCHES 'Developer'
SELECT id FROM boards WHERE description MATCHES 'REST APIs'
SELECT id FROM categories WHERE title MATCHES 'Support Center'
SELECT id FROM categories where description matches 'Find solutions and support support for Lithium products here'
You Found It. We Fixed It.
- Lithium Community’s Value Analytics enable you to customize the text in the response options for some survey questions. However, the customized text was not being reflected in LSI reports or CSV exports. We have fixed both of these issues and now customized survey text displays in LSI Value Analytics reports and exports.
- We have fixed the issue where a community user’s Value Analytics survey submission resulted in an error message stating that the survey could not be submitted.
- Previously, on non-responsive community sites users received an error when uploading videos for a contest entry. This issue has been fixed and now videos upload fine.
- We have fixed the issue where some member accounts were not being completely deleted when using the Admin Close Account feature when GDPR was enabled. This issue has been fixed, and now the accounts are completely removed and no longer accessible via the profile page.
- We have fixed the issue where the second question in the Value Analytics survey did not display properly when using a right-to-left language (like Arabic) in the Chrome browser. Now, the question displays properly.
- Previously, posting a message containing an image was not keyboard accessible. This accessibility issue has been fixed.
- We have fixed the issue where the Value Analytics CSV export displayed random characters in the username column instead of the proper username.
- We have fixed the issue that was preventing the timely delivery of some email notifications and/or notifications being displayed in the notifications feed.
Review release notes and updates for all of our products! Select a label to browse by product or resource type.