Lithium is moving all customer communities to full HTTPS encryption. This change better protects your organization and your end-users, while paving the way for performance improvements and great, new features.   Lithium is deprecating support for the following community configurations with Community release 18.2 (March 2018): HTTP-only community mode "Mixed mode" HTTPS support These configurations will remain available through 18.7 (August 2018). After 18.7, support for these configurations will be removed.   Lithium is reaching out to impacted customers over the next several weeks with instructions to initiate their migration to HTTPS. Customers will only need to take a few simple steps in order to complete this important change.   What does HTTPS do? Authenticates the website to the end-user Encrypts all data and communication passed between the end user and the community Safeguards customer data, preventing attacks Why switch to HTTPS now? Major browser and search vendors are making changes to flag pages that are delivered over HTTP as 'not secure' after July 2018. HTTPS is also a factor in search engine ranking. It's presumed that search vendors will add weight to HTTPS in their ranking formula this year.   Simply put: moving to HTTPS is the right thing to do for you and your customers. Protecting your end-users online is an absolute priority for us at Lithium. Moving Community to HTTPS-only support is the next, right step toward keeping your end-users and their data safe. ... View more

With Community release 18.1, we are announcing a deprecation path for referencing assets within Community skins using the asset FreeMarker context object get method. Lithium is enforcing this change to improve Studio Publish performance and reliability and to ensure that SCSS compilation (translating SCSS to CSS) is done as efficiently as possible.   While we generally recommended against using FreeMarker to reference assets in skins, we have supported the .get(“destination_url”) method in CSS/SCSS files.     We will continue to support the FreeMarker technique in CSS/SCSS until 18.8.   Important:  asset.get("destination_url")remains the recommended way to reference assets within FreeMarker code for templates such as custom components, endpoints, a skin’s header/head/footer/hitbox, and the page initialization script.   We have updated the Other Assets tab in Studio > Community Style > Asset Library to include the correct syntax to use with both FreeMarker and CSS files for a given asset uploaded to Studio.      Deprecation path for Freemarker asset technique in CSS/SCSS We will end support for asset.get("destination_url") in skin CSS/SCSS with Community release 18.8.   Lithium will migrate any existing skins containing asset.get("destination_url") to the new technique as part of the 18.8 upgrade process.   The migration will change a reference to an asset like this: background-image: url(${asset.get("/html/assets/disappear.gif")}); to this: background-image: url(asset("/html/assets/disappear.gif"));  If your community maintains your skin in Studio, no action on your part is required after the 18.8 upgrade. If your community maintains your skin using the Community Plugin SDK, you'll need to pull the updates to the skin from Studio, review for changes, and merge any local changes.   After the 18.8 upgrade, browsers will ignore CSS declarations using asset.get("destination_url"). ... View more