The holiday season is in full swing and Newspack’s first release to kick off the advent calendar includes a number of small improvements and bug fixes.
Action (possibly) required: If your site uses both Mailchimp and RAS, we’ve fixed some bugs in our reader data syncing strategy which were preventing some intended reader data from being synced, and another which may have caused duplicate merge fields to be created in your connected Mailchimp audience. Please review the merge fields in your Mailchimp audience for duplicate fields and delete any duplicates as needed. Any missing data on recurring transactions and donor statuses will be backfilled automatically as readers log into their accounts.
Improvements
Item name on checkout success (#1589)
Adds “Item: ” line to modal checkout success state, so the donor can double-check what they’ve paid for.
Width control to checkout button (#1583)
Now you have more control over the look of the Checkout Button Block by selecting the button width.
Add single post option to display custom excerpt in lieu of subtitle (#2194)
The new release adds an option to the Customizer to display custom excerpts at the top of single posts, in lieu of the article subtitle.
You can do so by visiting the Customizer > Template Settings > Post Settings, and toggling on the “Display the custom excerpt at the top of single posts instead of the article subtitle”. This will place the custom excerpt below the post title on single posts on the front-end.
Add Whatsapp as one of the available icons for the Social Links (#2196)
Now links to a WhatsApp channel in the Social Links menu will display a WhatsApp icon
Performance
- Improved load speed of Homepage Posts Block styles (#1548)
- Improve Newsletters Subscription Speed (#1344)
Analytics
Update Donation events data (#2756)
Added a is_recurring parameter to the donation_new event sent to Google Analytics. This will allow publishers to differentiate new donations from recurring payments, that are computed as Subscriptions renewals. See https://help.newspack.com/analytics/ for the full documentation.
Bug fixes
Fix authentication modal with very long list descriptions (#2732)
If you had a subscription list with a very long description, the Registration modal layout would break. This is fixed now.
Fix layout styles (#1353)
Due to a regression introduced in version 2.2.0 of the Newsletters plugin, the custom styles saved in a layout were not being applied when you loaded that layout to compose a new message. This has been fixed.
(Hotfix) Fix RAS reader data sync to Mailchimp (#1355)
Hotfixed released on Nov. 16.
We fixed two issues with our our RAS Mailchimp integration, one of which prevents most metadata related to reader donations from being synced to Mailchimp, and the other which could result in duplicate merge fields being created in the connected Mailchimp account. (Note: If any publishers’ Mailchimp accounts have encountered the issue with duplicate merge fields, there’s no programmatic solution to this. They’ll need to delete the duplicates manually in Mailchimp’s audience settings.)
