🪵 January Changelog Rollup 🌯

Happy February, y'all! 💖 We're sharing this a little later into the month than we'd hope to, but without further ado, we present the changes we shipped in January!

This edition of our changelog is split into functional sections, which we hope will help you easily identify the relevancy of each change. If you'd like to see them presented differently, we'd love to hear from you in the comments below!

Accessibility improvements

• We added a skip link to the Admin area, so that Admins don't have to navigate through the entire sidebar menu to access the main region of the page
• @alvaromontoro reminded us that the upload image buttons were missing a focus state to let users know they'd navigated to it, so we added a focus state to upload image buttons 🖼

Bugs

• Thanks to Anshuman71 on GitHub for flagging to us that the series count on dashboard includes empty series - and contributing a fix for this! 🙌
• @djuber discovered why users aren't getting onboarding broadcast messages and patched it 🙏
• Dan also figured out (and resolved 🥳) why people's RSS feeds weren't importing from DEV to CodeNewbie

Dependencies

• In order to help with Bootstrap loading, we removed font-awesome from the admin section
• For those of you who don't want to use Google Analytics, we also disabled the JavaScript for GA when Admins leave the input box blank for View ID under /admin/customization/config > Google Analytics

Moderation

• The DEV Admin team has been eagerly awaiting the ability to change all of a user's posts to Unpublished (draft) status with one click. We're thrilled to share that this is now possible 🎉
• You may have noticed that the 🤢 emoji has been fully replaced with the 🧐 emoji now. (If you do spot any errant 🤢 emojis in the Admin area of your Forem, please drop us a bug report with a screenshot and the path to locate it for ourselves!)

Options

• Several of you will be pleased to know we've remove the hardcoded home link from sidebar navigation. We're looking at you @ildi!

Podcasts

• We updated the way Podcast feeds are pulled in so they account for RSS feeds that aren't chronologically ordered

Contributing

• We made some tweaks to the how the development version of Forem installs on macOS (please note that this does not affect the self-host version that is recommended for a production Forem)

SSO

• We brought in Google OAuth - read more from @joshpuetz about this here

Tags

The team has been working really hard on making several changes to the way tags behave and function. Check these out, and comment below with any thoughts you'd like to share 👇:

• Add search field to /tags page
• Make order of Tags on Top Tags page (/tags) easier to understand
• Tag autocompletion component improvements: UI, UX & a11y
• Add the new tag autocomplete into the V2 editor
• Changing the logic that selects which tags show up in My Tags in left-hand sidebar
• Fixed an underlying issue with the Follow button on a tag as well as the Follow button on a profile. Both are now working as expected.
• Fixed an underlying issue so that filtered tag pages don't return a 404 if they're empty

Usability

• We've updated some fields in the Admin Config with dropdowns instead of open text fields
• We removed the redundant duplicate "Verify Email Ownership" button in User Admin
• We fixed an issue preventing Forem Admins from updating/overwriting the Terms of Use and Code of Conduct during New User Onboarding.
• We made it possible to skip creating Navigation Links for previously default links like Code of Conduct, Privacy Policy, and Terms of Use, which should resolve the issue of them coming back after being removed 🤞
• We updated the way validation errors are displayed with actions in the Mod Tools (shield icon)
• Finally, we removed the duplicate sign in/up link in Nav menu for non-logged-in users, so now there's just the one in the left-hand modal.

Phew! It was a busy January and the year was just getting started...

We will be sharing the February changelog rollup 🌯 in just a couple of weeks. Look out for these posts towards the start of each month. We published our February rollup in time for Valentine's Day because we always love to read your comments in the discussion below — a little gift to ourselves. 😍

Until next time!