eniston Changelog

It has been somewhat quiet in the past couple of months, but that does not mean we're not working on new features and bug fixes. Not everything is worth publishing, although it would make our changelog look more active. :)

In the past weeks, we regularly shipped maintenance updates and bug fixes, both within the backend and also for our themes.

What we're currently working on

We're currently working on a new editor. As you may know, we use TinyMCE as our current solution and we receive more and more complaints about things not working. But we're unable to fix or improve anything and that's also frustrating for us. So a new, better editor is something we really want to offer our customers and it's a work-in-progress.

We are also facing a few setbacks for the planned multi-language feature. It takes longer to build, because we need to rewrite a lot of our code base to make this work and we want to get it right.

That being said, we're still here, eniston is actively being developed and maintained and we're really looking forward to finally ship those things. I'm careful here, so I cannot give an ETA on when the mentioned features are done. Keep an eye on the changelog. ♥️

Nothing big, just two bugs fixed...

First, when accepting an invitation as a new user (= no existing eniston account), a "trial is about to end" reminder was sent 5 days before the 30-day trial period ends. Obviously, this is confusing and not right and has been fixed.

Second, when using the article redirect from within the backend, a HTTP cache message would show up for about 2 seconds before redirecting to the actual article. This has also been fixed and the redirect now happens without that useless info.

A while ago, we added a way to only allow certain IP addresses to access public workspaces. Today, we added a way to block certain IP addresses from accessing public workspaces. A comma-separated list of IPv4 addresses can be added in the workspace settings.

We also removed the 255 character limit for those fields so if your IP whitelist or blacklist is a bit longer, you won't see any error anymore.

We have some exciting news for our "Enhanced Editor" users: the newly released GPT-4o is now available for you to use. GPT-4o is 2x faster than GPT-4 Turbo (which was previously available) and has a knowledge cut-off date of October 2023.

We also fixed a couple of smaller bugs and UI glitches.

Today we released an update that fixes 8 small bugs. Those were mostly behind the scenes, like slow queries and errors during background jobs.

It is now also possible to rename subcategories. Finally, right? We know that this has been long overdue, sorry it took so long.

Ever since we launched eniston in 2020, it was possible to use a custom subdomain like help.domain.com.

Over the years, more and more customers asked to use their root domain (e.g. domain.com) as their custom domain for eniston.

As root domains technically cannot have a CNAME record (which is basically just an alias of a domain), it is needed to use an A record that points to a certain IP address. We always avoided going this route because if we ever want to move our platform elsewhere, our IP address would change and customers would need to update their A records or their workspaces would not work anymore.

That being said, we recently moved eniston to a different provider and we don't plan to move again any time soon.

Because of that, we added the possibility to use root domains as custom domain. We updated our setup instructions accordingly.

This is one of those updates that you don't see, but hopefully still notice.

We migrated our infrastructure to another service provider and took the chance to also upgrade the underlying servers and software to their latest versions. It was initially planned to also move from eniston.io to eniston.com for the main domain, but we ran into various issues a couple of hours after the switch that we decided to roll back on that.

You should hopefully feel that everything runs faster and snappier, as the overall performance improved significantly after the upgrade. We also refactored a few slow queries and will continue to refactor more parts of the code to improve speed and security.

Our main datacenter remains in Germany, but we recognize that our customers are spread all over the globe. Because of that, latency may be the reason eniston is somewhat slower to you, depending on where you are. We are currently preparing our first datacenter outside of Germany.

Because the majority of our customers are located in the US and Canada, our first additional datacenter will be located in the western region of the USA. We plan to introduce this datacenter sometime in April, with more following later this year.

Today we fixed a handful of bugs and added minor additions.

You can now see which team member has two-factor authentication activated and who hasn't. In a future update, we will also add an option for admins to force 2FA for all team members.

We also added an option to reset article views. While building and testing your workspace, you automatically generate views for articles when viewing them in the frontend. This data is used for the "Popular articles" view as well as the "Most viewed articles" in the dashboard. You may reset this data from within the workspace settings if needed to get a clean start.

Today, we shipped a small improvement that will probably reduce our weekly support tickets by ~10%. Ever since we launched our "Team" feature, the process was this:

• Admin invites member
• Member receives invite via email
• Member creates account
• A default workspace is created along with a 30-day trial
• Member is confused about the trial notice
• Member has to actively accept the invite
• Member has to actively use the workspace switch to access the team he / she was invited to

And yeah, that caused a lot of confusion and admins asking us why members have to pay for eniston. We simply didn't communicate it well enough and had built a process, that was simply confusing. But we learn, we change, and we improve. And no, team members never had to pay anything for as long as they are part of a team.

The new process looks like this:

• Admin invites member
• Member receives invite via email
• Member creates account and automatically joins team

No more manual accepting, no need to manually switch the workspace and hopefully, a lot less confusion on all sides. It's a small change, but we're sure a very needed one.

Today's update mainly focuses on our "Docs" theme. We added new options, tweaked a few things and improved the performance.

Custom copyright notice

As of today, it is possible to provide a custom copyright notice. The default looks something like this:

© 2024 Workspace One

So essentially the copyright sign, current year and the name of the workspace. You are now free to put whatever you like there. So something like © 2020-2024 Miller Co. is now possible. You can use the placeholder ###YEAR### to insert the current year. The copyright notice can be changed in the "General" workspace settings. This change applies to both themes.

Disable table of contents

We also added an option to disable the table of contents for the "Docs" theme. Many like it, many don't. If you decide to disable the TOC, think about the people viewing your workspace. Maybe they prefer to have it. Anyway, it's now up to you, the admin, to disable or enable it. It's enabled by default.

Navigation

We also improved (hopefully) the navigation of the "Docs" theme. It is now possible to click on a category title to get to the detail view. This was kind of hidden before, as it was only accessible by using the breadcrumb navigation.

We also added an option to collapse all categories by default and only allow one category to be open at a time. This may be handy if you have a very large navigation. You can change this behavior in the "Appearance" settings of your workspaces.

As a part of "going with what's popular", we decided to integrate an AI assistant into our editor. The AI assistant is powered by OpenAI ChatGPT 4 and lives right where you need it when creating and editing content.

The AI assistant can help with various tasks such as creating completely new content (if you have a writer's block), improve writing, expand text and a couple of more pre-defined prompts.

Consider this an "early access" phase as we're still fine-tuning a few things over then new weeks.

The AI assistant is part of our "Enhanced Editor" add-on, which currently costs €7.49 per month. Other features are custom text color and text background color, as well as footnotes. We plan to launch additional editor features which will be included in the subscription.

Please note that AI responses can be inaccurate, so be sure to fact check certain things. We cannot be held responsible for false claims and inaccurate information provided by ChatGPT.

Yesterday we upgraded our systems to the latest versions and missed to upgrade some underlying dependencies. That was causing errors when uploading images via our editor. This is now fixed.