Key Changes
Major New Features / Enhancements
- Post Before Registering
- Animated GIFs
- AdminCP Notification Center
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New Email Features:
- Email Statistics
- Email Advertisements
- Unfollow Without Logging In
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SEO Improvements:
- Improved pagination with page number now in path (rather than query string) and unique page titles for paginated pages.
- Improved use of canonical tags.
- Improved handling of empty containers and profiles to reduce soft 404s.
- Improved JSON-LD markup, adding @id tags and fixing URLs for comments.
- Removed page output hidden by JavaScript.
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Performance Improvements:
- Added Lazy Loading for images, which will speed up page rendering.
- Added HTTP/2 support with prefetch/preload.
- Added support for Brotli compression.
- Improved default profile photos to use inline SVGs rather than generated images, which will speed up page rendering.
- Improved browser caching of pages served by the guest page cache, which will reduce the number of requests reaching the server.
- Improved handing of session data for guests to reduce database reads for guests.
- Optimized images to reduce file size for faster page rendering.
- Other minor performance improvements to reduce database queries and fix unnecessary code execution.
- Commerce Store Filters allow customers to filter products by price, review, stock, or custom admin-defined filters.
Core
- Added setting to display user group formatting in more areas (see 6 New Micro Features).
- Added less intrusive browser notification prompt in Notifications menu (see 6 New Micro Features).
- Added ability to show sidebar blocks to only certain types of devices (see 6 New Micro Features).
- Added ability for club owners to reorder the navigation tabs (see 6 New Micro Features).
- Added ability for announcements to be linked to an URL or be a title only (see 6 New Micro Features), improved consistency in how announcements are shown in different areas.
- Improved UI for entering time intervals in AdminCP settings (see 6 New Micro Features).
- Added a new Icons & Logos section in the AdminCP which allows providing logos for use when sharing links from the community, adding the community as a home screen app on a mobile device (along with additional settings for a PWA manifest to control certain aspects the community’s behaviour when used in this way), and in Safari’s favourites menus and pinned tabs on macOS.
- Added a new UI for attachments, showing a box with some information about the file, rather than a plain line (see Turbo charging loading speeds).
Commerce
- Braintree Gateway including support for PayPal (with recurring payments), Venmo, and cards. Deprecates some PayPal features.
- Added ability to target bulk mails to members who have spent certain amounts.
- Added sidebar widgets for best sellers, latest products, product reviews and a featured product.
New Server Requirements: PHP 7.1.0 or higher required (7.3.x now supported). MySQL 5.5.3 or higher requires (5.6.2 recommended).
Removed Features
- Removed EmojiOne-style emojis due to licensing issues.
- Removed Gravatar support due to privacy concerns and performance issues.
- Removed password hashes when downloading a member list from the AdminCP. This is for security, to reduce the ease of obtaining sensitive data if the AdminCP is ever compromised.
- Removed the name of the content (e.g. topic) from the “Next Unread” link which could consume significant server resources on large communities.
