eniston Changelog

Today's update brings 2 small features and a welcome improvement while creating and editing articles.

Email notifications for ratings and feedback

It's now possible to subscribe to a daily digest of new ratings and feedback. Within the workspace settings, you can add an email address to receive these emails. Currently, only one email address is supported. After adding an email address, you'll receive daily notifications in the form of a summary.

Default theme background image

Over the past years, we've seen many customers fiddle with CSS to add a background image to their default theme's header. That's now something you can do directly within the "Appearance" settings.

Currently, the uploaded image only appears on the homepage of your workspace. However, we plan to add support for adding an image option for each category and article, with the option to fall back to the default image if none is provided.

Toggle articles sidebar/settings on desktop

One feature that was requested quite a bit since we launched our new editor was the option to toggle the article settings – that is now possible.

The latest state (whether visible or hidden) is saved across an account. So if you hide the settings and create a new article, the settings will initially be hidden.

Action after updating an article

Because we receive quite a few tickets every month asking for this, you can also change the redirect behavior after saving an article. By default, you are redirected back to the category of the article. Within the account settings, you can change this to "Keep editing."

This function has existed for quite some time now. We just wanted to remind everyone again and encourage new customers to explore the platform a little more.

Icon search

We have added a search bar to the category icons overlay. Thanks for complaining! :)

Today's update includes additional improvements and fixes for the editor.

First off, we added support for the "Badge" formatting again. It turns out that some of our customers were relying on this for their content structure. It's not used too often, which is why we initially removed it. Also back is the possibility to add ALT text to images. This was more of an oversight on our part while building the new editor.

We improved the dropdown selections for callouts and code blocks. They are no longer regular HTML select elements. This change gave us the flexibility to style these elements better.

We also improved the performance of storing articles, especially drafts. Previously, it often took 3-5 seconds for the server to respond. After a few minor query improvements, the response time is now in milliseconds.

Fixes

• Fixed an issue where missing external images were throwing an error 500
• Fixed an issue where subcategories not be saved when storing an article
• Fixed an issue where article slugs were not automatically generated

And last but not least, we finally added support for category icons in the "Documentation" theme, here is an example: https://help.deftform.com

We're finally back with an actual update. 🎈

It's been quite some time since we last shipped an update that was worth mentioning in the changelog. As many of our customers are probably aware, we got stuck in the process of upgrading our editor. I'm not eager to repeat everything here, but reading this entry might shed some light on it.

Today, we finally decided to push the update live. After carefully backing everything up, a maintenance period of about two hours began. We didn't plan for it to take this long, but some things just took a bit longer than anticipated. Customers' knowledge bases were not affected by this and were available during the maintenance.

Bye bye TinyMCE, hello TipTap

Ever since eniston launched in September 2020, we used TinyMCE as our editor. It worked just fine and did what we initially needed.

Over the years, more and more oddities have popped up. Things weren't working correctly, so we had to reverse updates. Many customers often saw an error message when loading the editor stating that the domain wasn't set up. We weren't really able to fix anything. Extending it was also a tedious task, which often led to frustration on our part. It was never really integrated into eniston and always felt too much like an extension we didn't have much control over. The list goes on...

A new editor was badly needed – TinyMCE had done its deed. After an unnecessarily long trial-and-error period with other fully-fledged third-party editors, we embraced TipTap and built a slim prototype. After weeks of building and integrating it into the eniston ecosystem, we finally felt relieved to have an integrated editor like that.

The current version might still have a few rough edges, but we're ironing them out, so it should be considered version 0.9. Until now, we were the only ones using it, and I'm pretty sure that now it's publicly available, bug reports will pour in. 😰

Anyway, I think we'll reach version 1.0 very quickly.

Fully hosted in Germany

We're also happy to announce that eniston is now fully hosted in Germany. Our servers have always been located in Germany, but our S3 storage was not. Now, everything is tightly connected and under the same roof.

Maintenance and bug fixes

We also updated the underlying software to its latest versions to ensure security and performance. Additionally, we shipped several bug fixes that were reported by our customers and flagged by our error tracking tool over the past weeks and months.

We know, we know... the last changelog update has been quite some time ago. In our last update, we said the new editor was almost ready and we were preparing the next update (finally...). Oh well... 🫠

As some of you know, we currently rely on TinyMCE for our editor and it has been buggy for some of our customers. On top of that, we barely have any way to really integrate it into eniston. That's why we started building our own editor. Along the way, we got reminded that it's quite a task... 😮‍💨

So we started looking for better third-party alternatives and we believed we found one. After doing some modifications and custom stylings, we stumbled upon many minor bugs and issues we haven't noticed earlier. That's when we posted our last changelog update – that were the "95% finished" came from. And after going back and forth (for about 2 months) with the developer of the editor, we decided to ditch this one as well. It just didn't fit.

Back to square one, with the help of TipTap

We started from scratch again, sort of. With the help of TipTap, we're currently building a fully integrated and fully custom-styled editor, just the way we need it. It will take a few more weeks to have a fully working editor just the way we want. Most of the formatting options are already working, but there are a few things that still take time to build. Mostly image handling, embedded content and AI features.

But we're getting there, finally. I'm not able to give a more detailed ETA for the release, but it will likely be sometime in November (yes, this year).

Many things to come

We wanted to ship the new editor before starting to work on new features. But as things have taking so long, we weren't able to ship much this year, apart from a couple of maintenance updates that are not always worth noting in a changelog.

We do have lots of stuff planned and are eager to finish the new editor as soon as possible, so we can continue making eniston better with continuous improvements and new features.

Thanks for sticking around.

In preparation for the upcoming release of our new editor (it's ~95% finished), we released a small update which only affects the public side of a workspace. So essentially the frontend when viewing a workspace. This is mainly a maintenance update, bringing the underlying software to its latest versions, but we also added a few improvements.

Better code highlighting

We improved the way code is highlighted. So if your knowledge base features code snippets, the formatting is now much better than before. We also improved the "Copy to clipboard" button.

The new code highlighting is powered by Torchlight.

Improved images and auto-enlarge

We also released some optimizations for images. Rendered images are now much smaller by default and you can click on an image to see a bigger version of it, if available. This is enabled by default, nothing for admins to activate.

A new caching mechanism is also in place, so pages will load even faster now with a much more reduced network load time.

Bug fixes

Apart from that, we also fixed a few edge-case bugs that popped up in our error logs and were reported in the past weeks.

Yes, finally! 🎉

In addition to custom category slugs – which we introduced quite a while ago – it is now also possible to set a custom article slug when editing an article. While we were at it, we also fixed that annoying thing that slugs automatically updated when article titles were modified. That's now up to you.

The slug can be changed in the article settings when editing an existing article.

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.