Vanilla Release Notes

Release 2019.003

Note: Starting in 2019, Vanilla Cloud releases numbered using a build number, rather than any particular version number. Builds 001 & 002 were released previously as 2.8.dev.5 & 2.8.dev.6 - See the 2.8 release notes. Therefor this represents the 3rd cloud release of 2019.

Vanilla 2019.003 was first deployed on March 6th, 2019.

Theming

Allow keystone to be used as either a responsive theme, desktop theme, or both. Improve padding and alignment for the keystone theme.
Improve styling of the breadcrumbs.
Add styles to support the CatalogueDisplay Addon
Fix duplicate sets of ThemeOptions showing up in the dashboard when keystone is being used as both the desktop and mobile themes.
Fix duplicate link to mobile themes page.
Fix error with Keystone theme that could cause issues for signed out users trying to sign in.

Advanced Search

Allow selection of all types of categories in advanced search.

Rich Editor

Fix bug that preventing uploading attachments with uppercase extensions names.
Fix tab inserting a tab in Rich Editor code blocks.
Fix tabbing in a Rich Editor multi-line code block pulling the menu to the first line.
Rich Editor now clears its contents after making in a post in a private conversation.
Rich Editor now clears its contents after making a post on the profile & activity pages.
Fix bug where changing from a code block to normal text formatting, did not fully remove formatting from the block.
Fix Rich post formatting on the Best Of page.
Fix Rich post formatting when displaying notifications.
Fix Rich post formatting when sending email notifications (Also applies to Markdown & BBCode formats).

SEO & Performance

By default Vanilla blocks a page from rendering until most of its javascript is loaded. This is not considered best practice, because it negatively impacts user’s page load times. Search engines like google penalize sites that do this.

Site’s may now opt-in to better behaviour here and load all scripts after the main document loads. This can be done by setting the configuration value.

$Configuration['Feature']['DeferredLegacyScripts']['Enabled'] = true;

or in JSON (Vanilla console)

  "Feature": {
    "DeferredLegacyScripts": {
      "Enabled": false
    }
  }

If this is done properly all scripts in the of the page should have the defer attribute set.

This can lead to large increases in score on google’s page-speed index as well improved load times for users, especially on mobile.

Warning: This may not be compatible with certain custom Pockets or custom themes. Please test on staging environments first.

Dashboard

Keep left panel of the dashboard pinned to the side when scrolling on long pages.

Knowledge Base (Beta)

Knowledge base continues to be under active development.

Implement better support for multiple knowledge bases.
Implement URL canonicalization for knowledge bases.
Implement error consistent error pages & states when no content exists yet across the knowledge base.
Make breadcrumbs more consistent across knowledge bases.
Implement JSON-LD support for breadcrumbs (SEO).
Add image banner and search box at the top of Help Center type knowledge bases.
Add links to the next and previous articles at the bottom of an article (mobile only, Guide type knowledge bases only).
Add the ability to react an Article.
Improve search result algorithm.
Implement robust error handling on the organize-categories page.
Add the ability to select the exact location of an article while creating it in manually sorted knowledge bases.
Fix notification sort order in MeBox
Limit knowledge base sorting type manual to only be applied to Guide type knowledge bases
Improve Search engine to update more often.
Fix numerous other bugs

Other Fixes

Fix administrator permission error when accessing pockets
Fix permission check for /api/v2/discussions/search
Fix user profiles with duplicate user titles
Fix permission check when adding a feed

Technical Notes

New Database Tables

This release has a few new database tables being used in upcoming projects. Their usage isn’t exposed anywhere in the UI yet.

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GDN_reactionOwner

If you were using a build in between the 2.8 release and the 2.8.1 release, you may need to drop these tables and recreate them.

Other

Add cache options to SQL driver to cache getProviders query response