While you all were asleep a few nights ago, the magical electron gnomes danced through our servers and upgraded Discourse and Ghost.
Ghost went from version 1.x to 2.x, while Discourse is still iterating over the betas of the 2.2.0 release.
A few of the major updates to note:
Discourse
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A bug was found in the 2.2.0.beta1/2.1.0 stable release which could cause images to break. This release resolves that bug, and recovers images that were broken. It is strongly recommended to upgrade to ensure broken images are not permanently lost.
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Trust Level 4 Improvement: Stronger flags. We don’t use this trust level yet, but of we do, users in this level will be able to have posts immediately unlisted until a moderator reviews it.
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New Desktop Category Page Style: Boxes. Our current layout is fine, but if the activity and number of sub-categories increase heavily we’ll be able to handle it.
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Improved Account Security: Show recently used devices. Added a new recently used devices list to account preferences. Users can now see all their recently used devices, as well as older, but still active, sessions. Users can log out of all sessions, or disconnect individual devices. Should an unrecognized device appear, Discourse provides some helpful guidance to the user to further secure their account
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For mods — Tagging: Support MiXeD case. Tags can now support mixed case, allowing you to capitalize proper nouns, create all caps tags, or even add a capital in the middle of a tag. Tags are stored case-insensitive, however, so you cannot create multiple tags with the same spelling but different capitalization.
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Improved Account Security: Suspicious login emails and report. Admins that sign in from a new country will receive an email detailing the login, including IP, estimated location, browser, and device. We’re continuing to refine this feature, and plan to alert based on the geographic distance between the locations, not simply the country. Admins can also view the new suspicious logins report for a summary of new location logins. (Comment: Hopefully this rolls out to everyone else eventually.)
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CSS Updates: Search. Discourse’s quick search interface hasn’t changed much since it was first added. For beta4 we’ve updated the design to better show each type of result: topics/posts, categories/tags, and users.
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New Badge: Wiki Editor. For the first time you edit a Wiki post.
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Filter Improvement: Category and Tag. When searching for categories or tags, Discourse now provides all results, not only those visible in the dropdown.
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THE BIG ONE. Composer Improvement: Full Screen Mode. Need even more room to write your latest post? Want to eliminate on screen distractions? Use the fullscreen composer toggle to solely see the composer.
Ghost
For everyone who writes for the blog, Ghost 2 introduces a number of significant changes.
The big one is that the editor has changed. Instead of Markdown, Ghost now uses an editor called Koenig.
It’s more of a WYSIWYG editor which surfaces more of the basic functions you’ll need like embedding YouTube videos and Tweets, as well as basic formatting functions like bold, italics, sub-headings, blockquotes, and links.
All the usual shortcuts you may have learned still work… the functions are just more discoverable now. You no longer have to go and learn a new markup language (Markdown, geddit?).
You’ll see a giant plus button on the left when your cursor is on an empty paragraph. All the embeds and stuff (“cards” they call them) are there. You can use this to create blocks of raw Markdown or HTML if you need to. If you don’t want to fiddle with the mouse, you can just type a forward slash (’/’) to pop up the cards menu.
When you select text, a small pop-up will appear with styling options.
I have also enabled two experimental “labs” features:
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E-mail subscribers. People can subscribe to our mailing list. What mailing list, you ask? The one I’ll create as soon as there are subscribers and I can ensure content ticks over regularly.
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Dark theme. The Ghost back-end is now easy on the eyes.
