Happy new year! We’re excited to announce new features, bug fixes and exciting future plans in our quarterly Indie Tech release note. From a backend that’s optimized for publishing content on-the-go to enhanced security on Indie Tech Pay, get ready to experience all the enhancements our team has worked on over the past quarter.
✨ What’s new:
- Mobile-friendly backend: You asked and we listened. Now, you can fine tune your post’s content right from your phone! As a complement to the powerful desktop editor, our light mobile editor is useful for quick or last minute edits, with a focus on text editing tools. Our new mobile-friendly backend also allows you to easily navigate to the dashboard and posts/pages lists.
- An enhanced and more reliable co-author functionality: Instead of creating Guest Authors that conflict with SEO and aren’t supported by Indie Tech Blocks, now you can create Contributors. These are users with limited backend access, who can write and manage their own posts but won’t be able to publish them.
- Extra security on Indie Tech Pay: We added new layers of security to avoid card testing. Publishers that are on the Indiegraf Cloudflare account also have a more robust rule that controls bot traffic on their “Support Us” page. Other Indie Tech Pay enhancements are: collecting shipping and billing addresses, displaying a plan’s features in a checklist, supporting Link and Google Pay, and auto updates, which will reflect new releases to your website payment system almost immediately.
- Google and Apple News linked in the footer: With a goal to increase our publishers’ distribution channels, readers are now just a click away from following your content on Google and Apple News
- Good looking quotes and pull quotes: We reviewed the style and updated the formatting for a better mobile view.
- Image rich RSS: You can choose to display your posts’ featured images on your RSS. This is fit for publishers that run automated RSS newsletters!
- Automatic updates: Indie Tech Blocks now includes an auto update feature to improve our maintenance time and assure scalability.
🐞 Bug fixes:
- The Recirculation and Featured Post blocks no longer overlaps post titles on the search fields.
- You can easily hide the latest published post on the Latest Post block by setting the offset field to 1.
- Now, content displayed under the “Load More” button will remain with their audio/video post format and sponsored content labels.
- Text colors for the input fields were adjusted to increase legibility on Forms.
- You can add any type of user, including Contributor and Author, on the User List block.
- Author box on the content editor is now fixed at the very top of the post’s sidebar for easy access.
- RSS emails are no longer displaying low-resolution featured images.
✅ What’s next:
- Underwritten content block: We’ll introduce an easier way to properly credit underwritten stories.
- Landing page templates: our team is studying new solutions to easily create landing pages!
