After a huge 2018, we’re kicking off 2019 in a big way with Version 2.17, including a new events page and feed, two new content tools, updates to Gather and changes to file permissions.

This update introduces a new way to promote your face to face events, allowing you to better integrate your traditional and digital activities. The Events features will work similar to the Newsfeed tool, with a new Events page type and an Events Feed to display your events.

Events pages will display an image, venue information, a map of the location and a prominent call to action button that can be used to link to third party event management services.

The Events Feed tool will allow you to display an attractive feed of events, with options to filter events by selected projects, project status or event type.

Adding an event page is much the same as creating a project sub-page or news page. When you create an event, you will be asked for a title, description, location, image, event type, start and finish date/time, venue, address, and call to action link and text.

And best of all, the Events tool is integrated into the ‘Follow’ functionality for customers who have access to these features, allowing you to automatically send a notification of the new event to your followers.

The new Hotspot tool adds a new way to add highly engaging interactive content to your engagements. The tool allows you to add feature hotspots to a background image and add explanatory, text, images and videos. Your users interact with each hotspot by on clicking or touching them, which then opens a popup allowing them to view the content. Where images and videos are added, these can be expanded into a full screen for a more immersive experience.

Hotspots can be customised with a range of colours, sizes and thousands of different icons, and even animated to make clicking on them irresistible.

This tool will open up a whole world of options, from creating interactive plans annotating illustrations, artists impressions or photographs.

Sometimes, you want to communicate some striking facts or statements to your audience. The new Facts tool allows you to highlight key facts and display them as fact cards, either by themselves or in a ‘wall’. Key words or phrases can be coloured to make them stand out and a source section allows you to provide references for your facts.

You can define how many facts appear per row, and how many rows of facts appear before they load progressively (allowing visitors to expand lists or walls of facts for more).

Gather improvements

We’ve improved the Gather tool by adding some new filter and sorting options so that users can find contributions based on their featured category as well as selecting the type of media (e.g. text, image, video).

File permission improvements

We have improved file permissions so they better reflect project permissions, project visibility (public/private) and better protect files uploaded by citizens from unauthorised access. This includes updating the file access mechanism so that all files accessed via the direct download URL (e.g. https://example.com/download_file/123) are restricted to site users who have been given access via the project settings.