This Bug Fix and Performance Release includes a number of essential fixes and performance enhancements.
Unusually there is also a small number of new feature improvements which will have a significant quality of life impact on elements including subscription management.
We do recommend that everyone updates to this release for the summer as there are significant performance and uptime enhancements in this release that everyone will benefit from.
Equally when used alongside the main 8.0.31 feature release, there are a number of transformational services in particular for analytics and insight, subscriptions, ecommerce and messaging.
For more details see the Affino Updates.
Geo Targeting Design Element (new) - this new design element automatically ID's the country a user is coming from and if there is an alternative page which better targets their country then they are advised to switch to it, similar to the experience on many sites e.g. Apple.com. This is a great universal design element as it will work on any page and with any content, and delivers key usability to international stores. The dialogue can either be displayed at the top of the page or as a takeover.
Account Engagement Dashboard - new look and feel with dark mode, much faster performance.
Analysis Dashboard - multiple updates including the new dark mode, and Registration Wall stats.
Article Export - added Source URL and the Canonical URL with the full article URL using the Zone Domain.
Article Import - we have re-introduced the Zone selector to the Article Import, and refined the duplicate name validation to permit multiple articles with the same name and instead generate unique screen names.
Menus - it is now possible to edit menu items; you can now add an Exclude security field so some menu items are restricted from some groups; menu items can now also be made live / non-live for seasonal and event based menus.
Messages - Note that Affino now only calculates the message reach on demand rather than each time a message campaign or message is edited. This is to speed up the editing process.
Orders - new Member Type and Contact List filters on Orders for analysing orders by audience segments.
Product Listing - new Supplier filter option now available.
Subscriptions - new ability to auto-assign account-based paid or free subscriptions depending on the user's IP address, in a similar way to the existing email based subscription assignment, except the user simply has to be on one of the account's IP addresses or IP address ranges.
Subscription Payments - new ability to self-manage subscription payments which have been created incorrectly by Stripe and GoCardless payment gateways. To-date these have had to be done by the Affino team. The new highly secured service supports editing the Subscription ID and generating renewals (following a host of checks). It is now also possible to switch Payment IDs on select orders. Note that only experienced and trained staff should use these capabilities.
Topics Channel - new approach to the Topic Channel, which now pre-calculates the number of articles on each topic. Note that Affino now displays a default explainer text on the Topic channel, which you can edit simply by updating the channel detail text.