1. Overview of 1.84
1.84 is due for release on December 6th 2014.
In this release Ubiquity have introduced functionality to show or hide mailout content depending on if the email is being viewed online or in an email. A number of other enhancements, bug fixes and security improvements are also included.
2. Show or hide content when viewing online or shared emails
You can now show or hide additional content in emails when the email is viewed online or is being shared to Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn. This could be useful if you want to add or remove personalised information, or include items that don’t display consistently in email e.g. Flash Video.
To use the new show and hide functionality, simply wrap the chosen content in the appropriate ESL filter as shown below:
{{ ShowIf("Online", "Email", "Share") }}
Insert content here
{{ EndShowIf }}
You can also hide content using the HideIf keyword.
3. Honey-Pot Captcha for Forms, Events and Surveys
In order to better protect Forms, Events and Surveys from spam attacks or bots, we have implemented a honey-pot captcha. This works by adding a secretly hidden field to the Form that cannot be seen by users and is not meant to be filled in. Spam bots written to fill all fields with spam will populate and therefore invalidate the field. This helps ensure all information and responses are genuine and accurate.
4. Enhancements
| Other Enhancements: |
|---|
| Add extra Event registrations after regular registrations are closed: Administrators can now add extra registrations to an Event if the registration date has passed, all available spaces have been filled or the Event is inactive. Simply use the ‘Register for my Event’ link on the Event dashboard. |
| Filter trees will now remember your last position: When you are trying to build a combination of filters it can be frustrating that the filter tree does not remember your previous location, causing you to make a series of additional clicks to return to where you were previously. We have implemented changes that will ensure the filter tree returns you to the previously used location.
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| Include scheduled Mailouts in Mailout Folder reports: This allows you to schedule a mailout and create a folder report that will include the results of the mailout without having to wait until the mailout has been sent.
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| Larger Push message sizes for Apple devices: At the same time as the iOS8 release, Apple expanded the size of their push message capability from 256b to 2kb. This allows for significantly larger push messages sent to all Apple devices. |
| Additional Database logging: We have implemented extra logging in the database history so that you have more visibility of changes in the database. These include tracking bulk changes to contacts or changes to the database structure.
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| Additional columns in import history: We have added columns to the import table that will detail how many rows were ‘Inserted’, ‘Skipped’ or ‘Updated’ making it easy to see at a glance what changes are being made in the Database.
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| Expanded bounce reason details for messages: Often the reason returned for bounced emails is “the message was undeliverable”. Ubiquity have now expanded upon this to display more reasons, giving you better visibility of why your message was not delivered. |
5. Technical Enhancements
Pre-populate Event fields from URL: It is already possible to pre-populate an Event with details from the database, however if you’re sending the Event invite out through a different Engage account or through an external system the Event form will be blank for those people. You can now pre-populate the Event fields by passing data through on the URL making event registration even easier for your contacts.Simply append the details to the Event link through the use of merge fields in query string parameters, so an Event URL added within a mailout might look like this:http://engage.ubiquity.co.nz/Events/EventID?[FIELD ID 1]=[Database.First Name]&[FIELD ID 2]=[Database.Email]This would populate the chosen fields with the contact’s first name and email address.
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New API calls for saved filters: You can now retrieve the details of all the saved filters on an account using these two new API calls.
You can view these calls on our Resource Centre once the release has gone live. |
New ESL command: Join: Significantly improving the ease of creating joined strings of ESL code, these changes remove the need for excessive statements, loops and combinations that rapidly become large and complex. You can now perform joins using a join function like:
[| Join("separator", [parameter1], [parameter2, [parameter...]) |]
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6. Tweaks and Bug Fixes
| General: |
|---|
| Fixed a hole that allowed images to be pasted directly into the content of CKEditor when using certain file types in Firefox. |
| Database: |
| Will now throw a friendly error message preventing you from creating nameless columns in the database. |
| Importing password protected files now has a more accurate error message. |
| Importing will now better identify the columns being imported. |
| Filtering on the time element of a date time field, now works on dates before the year 2000. |
| Now able to filter on Transaction ID. |
| Email: |
| Saving your mailout will no longer return you to the mailout dashboard. This makes it easier to save your work regularly while working on your mailout. |
| Special characters can be used in URLs and tracked without needing to encode the URL. |
| Fixed a bug that allows you to select but not use templates from account that you don’t have permissions to. |
| Mailout send time on the mailout details page now reports the time the mailout send was completed, rather than the current time. |
| If automated mailouts were scheduled to send on a day that doesn’t exist (e.g. 30th Feb) then accessing the mailout details would previously throw an error. Months where the date doesn’t exist will no longer error and no mailout will be sent.Note: you can use the ‘Last day of the month’ option to make sure an automated mailout sends at the end of every month. |
| Forms: |
| Field labels will now consistently turn red on Forms/Surveys/Events when the validation fails for a field throughout Engage. |
| Copying a Form triggered email will include all articles. |
| Error message for invalid entry into a time field is now more helpful and descriptive. |
| Form validation containing a Database field condition will no longer return an invalid warning if the page was left open long enough. |
| Fixed a bug where using HTML in the label for radio buttons, wouldn’t allow you to click the label. |
| Survey: |
| Fixed a bug where merging a ‘don’t know’ result would return the response value instead of the display text. |
| Fixed a logic bug when comparing two dates that would always say they were invalid even when they weren’t. |
| Survey downloads would break on some filters where the filter could return a contact multiple times. |
| Fixed an issue that allowed some deleted Survey responses to still be visible within Engage. |
| The mandatory field asterisk in Surveys will now behave as it does in Forms. This brings it in line with how we currently display this in Forms and Events, ensuring a consistent display across all products. |
| You can now copy Survey pre-logic Survey into post-logic and vice versa. |
| Event: |
| Previewing an Event will now work even if the Event has reached capacity. |
| Fixed a bug that caused anonymous registrations not to be removed from the summary widget. |
| No longer able to register more anonymous tickets when they would exceed the total allowed registrations. |
| Dummy invoices will no longer appear when previewing the confirmation page on Events that contain no paid elements. |
| Previously it could cause confusion that in a scenario where 3 people registered for an Event the number of places would read 3 for each registrant, suggesting 9 people would be attending. This has now been cleared up. |
| Social: |
| Fixed an issue where manually selecting the third default social icon could cause the page to hang. |
| Push: |
| Fixed an issue where Push messages might not send if the scheduler was reset within 10 seconds of the expected delivery time. |
| TXT: |
| Fixed a bug that meant you would not instantly see the correct results in a filter if you changed the conditions. |
| Where two txt programmes are using the same keyword, we have cleaned up the error message to be more user friendly. |