eniston Changelog

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.

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.