Hello there, we're back with our latest community platform update, and there's plenty to unpack since our last update, 1.9.03, which was introduced last month. Today we released update 1.9.04, which features a fair amount of updates to our blog articles, and some other usability improvements.
Our next update is planned for later for early October, with further planned improvements to Blueprints and User Groups. Your feedback is crucial; if you have ideas on how to improve the community, head to our Community Suggestions space.
Community Update 1.9.04
Blog Article Updates
We've made a raft of functionality and usability improvements to our blog articles, making it easier than ever to engage with the latest in intelligent automation. Let's have a look at what's changed:
Sticky Table of Contents
It's been a long-held ambition to make the Table of Contents section of our blog articles 'sticky', and with this update we've realised that. Along with some other additions to the left-side column (more on that below), the Table of Contents will now stay in place as you scroll through the article on a laptop or desktop browser.
Sharing and Engaging
As part of making the Table of Contents sticky, we've added easier social sharing options to the left-hand side. You'll now be able to share effortlessly to LinkedIn or send to a friend or colleague via email by clicking the relevant button. Posting to LinkedIn will open LinkedIn in a new tab/window with the post already linked, so you create a post with the full functionality of LinkedIn's platform. We see the majority of content shared via LinkedIn, but if you regularly share to other platforms, let us know via community suggestions and we can look to add further options in future. Please note, this option is currently only in blog articles, but we are looking to roll it out across the community in a future update.
In addition to sharing options, you'll also notice that the options to like and comment on a blog article are also now in the left-hand column. We wanted these options to be more prominent and accessible rather than being buried at the bottom of the article. Hopefully this is an improvement you'll find useful!
Read Time
We've added a brief read time indicator in the header of blog articles. We've built this as a range, as we know not everybody reading content uses English as their first or native language. Hopefully you'll find the range to be a good indication.
About The Author
The last improvement we've made to blog articles in this update is adding an 'About The Author' section to the bottom of each blog article. Here you'll be able to read a little more about the blog's author, and view their LinkedIn profile, provided they've chosen to share this.
Back to top button
It was recently brought to our attention that there can be a lot of scrolling required on certain sections of the community, so we've built a 'Back to top' button to help mitigate some of that scrolling when you simply want to return to the top of the page. We've built the button to be as unobtrusive as possible. As such, it only appears when you've scrolled so far down the page, and you scroll up again. The button pops up in the lower right corner, behaving the same on mobile and desktop browsers.
Blueprints: Subscribe
As part of further planned improvements to the Blueprints section, we've made it easier to subscribe to Blueprints by virtue of a new button on the Blueprints homepage. Stay tuned for further updates to Blueprints in coming weeks as we further customise this part of Community.
Other Updates
As usual, we've made several other minor tweaks to usability, fixed a couple of display bugs, and made some behind the scenes tweaks to improve day-to-day operations, and prepare for future updates.
To stay informed about future updates and be part of the continuing evolution of Community, be sure to subscribe to our blogs and keep an eye out for upcoming announcements.
Your feedback is also important to us, so please let us know in the comments if you find these updates helpful and if there's anything specific you'd like us to cover in future Community updates.
