New “What’s New” Release Notes visible within SmugMug

leftquark

One thing that I’ve always wanted to improve was how frequently we communicate new functionality and changes and I’m excited that starting today there will be a new “What’s New” menu at the top of the SmugMug header when you’re logged in.

Clicking on “What’s New” will open a menu with a list of recent changes, improvements or new features. We’ll be posting release notes as we launch them for all of you, rather than waiting till the end of the month to post monthly release notes (we’ll still do the monthly release notes on the blog though).

If there are new items you haven’t read, a small badge indicating the number of new items will be displayed. The badge will disappear when you read the release note. Using multiple computers may cause the badge to reappear. The “What’s New” will not be available within our iOS or Android apps but will display if you use Safari or Chrome on your mobile devices when logging into your smugmug account.

Allen

The very first thing I did weeks ago when I saw that new "share" button was remove it everywhere.
It interfered with the large photo in the Smugmug style.

Jtring

A thank you. The What's New feature helped me today.

Today's bug fix included a small feature change -- moving photo titles in galleries from the body font to the heading font. I have no problem with that. It is consistent with the lightbox display. But I needed to adjust my custom CSS to accommodate the change. Having mounds of custom CSS, I expect to have to do that from time to time, so no complaints. The timely notice meant I could do the needed fiddling promptly.

(I made one other custom CSS change. Intended or not, today feature change also updated the font for gallery, folder, and page titles in the navigation content boxes. There I opted to insert some new CSS to return those titles to the body font. The issue is really just my personal choice of heading font, Andika. It's kind of a fussy font. A little is nice. Too much is not. On the navigation content displays, this change landed me in the "too much" category. But again, good to be notified so I could take action promptly. It's not real hard to change the font-family for that display.)

leftquark

Glad it could help! We had y'all in mind when we pushed the change live and knew we wanted to inform you as soon as possible. I uncovered that my own CSS needed updating while I was doing QA and we made sure to send the message out right away.

Is there anything I could do better to call out improvements that might impact custom CSS?

Jtring

@leftquark said:

Is there anything I could do better to call out improvements that might impact custom CSS?

The main thing is keep the notices complete and timely. I have two admittedly rather minor suggestions. First, when there are updates that include both bug fixes and feature adjustments, as was case Monday and was in the "Weekly Bug Fixes and Updates" from two weeks ago, you might include both the orange "Fix" and the blue "Improvement" flags. (Or, of course, break things up into more than one message.) It's the improvements that are more likely to need user CSS re-tweaks. Second, give the actual date of the message. That's a little easier to work with than the "19 days ago" or "a month ago" labels.

Added note: Let me emphasize the value of the "complete" part. Monday's notice didn't flag that the titles of galleries, folders, and pages in navigation content boxes would also change. All it mentioned were photo titles in galleries. Now that former change was obvious, so it wasn't a big deal this week. But I can imagine such secondary changes -- the ones that follow along but were not the things motivating the update -- might not always be so obvious. Flagging these helps a bunch.