Release notes tracking page

Since James is (to my knowledge still) running CS as a one-man shop, that allows for iterations and changes to be made without having to get a supervisor’s approval. Maybe he runs them by his :cat2: first though? Anyway this means new features/changes can be pushed live at anytime. For those of us that have an infatuation with checking CS after every run, we probably notice these more than the average user. Having a release notes page tracking changes could make it easier to see when new changes are implemented and what they change. If this page allowed users to subscribe (email notifications) even better. In addition, those users who help other users in the support forum could point to release notes page if a question comes up about an item that was recently changed.

James is quite good at keeping us up to date via the Announcements page.

You can even click on “Latest” to catch you up.

But totally get what you are saying here:

Agreed on the Announcement forum; I’m subscribed there. I’m thinking of the even smaller UI/UX changes. Ex: Addition of 'Last updated from OSM"

This was pushed live but don’t think it warrants an announcement level post on it’s own. It’s nice to know when it goes live though.

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Oh, there is also “Welcome to the Community” @ the top of https://community.citystrides.com/

James has updates there too!

Yep! :wave: just me over here

Neither cat is particularly helpful, I’m afraid.

I used to use CityStrides release notes but I’ve since switched to posting in Announcements because it’s a bit easier for me to keep everything in this forum.

I think the problem is less that there’s no place for me to put these updates, and more that I’m not doing the work of putting the updates out there.

Over the last few days, after reading this post, I automated my release process in a way that keeps track of exactly what gets released when. I think what I’ll do is create a new post at the start of each month e.g. Updates in October 2020 and copy over details into that.

As far as subscribing to updates - I know that this forum has a whole notification system where you can ‘watch’ posts. I don’t know if it alerts on updates to existing posts - so for my current implementation where I will update the first post with new details over the month, I’m unsure if that will send new notifications to any subscribers (watchers?) when I make those updates.
If it doesn’t, I can switch out my approach so that I make a new post in the thread for each announcement. Maybe some of you can help out and enable notifications in that post & let me know how it goes. :smiley_cat:

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Going off the descriptions for the different levels of ‘watching’, if you edit a post with new change logs, I doubt it will alert anyone regardless of what watch level they are. Seems to be tied around when new topics or replies are made only.

If you create announcement topic and then reply to it throughout the month, my reading of the watch levels is that only those “Watching” will get email notification. “Tracking” users would see reply count if they come directly to community forum site.

Personally I’ve selected “watching” on Announcement form so that would suffice for my desires. Can confirm when next announcement is made

Thanks @Marty I’m going to make a minor edit now as a quick test.
If it doesn’t alert you, I’ll add updates as new replies and maintain the full list in the first post.

I see the edit in UI but no email notification after ~5 mins. :frowning:

I think creating a new topic for each month and then replying to the topic with change log should suffice. Having the changes in replies may be more useful as we can link to them in case we need to point other users to that info.

Ooh, yeah, I like that.

Having updates in separate posts also provide visibility on when, exactly, things were released.
I’ll do that, going forward. Thanks!

Any chance this could be made in a more RSS-friendly format? The October post itself appears in the feed, but any replies would not.

There are RSS feeds for this forum? :laughing: I had no idea. That’s awesome.

It looks like the individual post has an RSS feed: Updates in October 2020
But that’s annoying! You’d have to re-subscribe every month. :sweat_smile:

Another option is for me to create a whole new post for every update. It’s possible to email subscribe to the entire category, so people who prefer emails would still have that option.

:thinking:

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How’s the “new post for each release” going so far?
It seems pretty good from my perspective…

I’m digging it. Most of the past couple months’ updates seem to be background/non-GUI items but still good to know what’s new.

I see today’s “:paintbrush: some design changes” = Laker’s purple takeover and gradients.

Also like the new icons for completed & progressed when on an activity page or on a user page. Small UI gripe for the latter though, there seems to be a lot of dead space now on each activity tile. The completed and progressed seem to be having an argument and trying to get as far away from each other as possible. Though there is so much room for activities now!

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Oh, I see - on smaller screens it looks a bit more sane

Screen Shot 2021-01-05 at 10.56.26 AM

I think the issue is that I haven’t set a max-width on those, so as the available screen space grows each activity ‘card’ grows with it. Thanks for letting me know!

The updated purple comes from the recent color changes in the TailwindCSS color palette.

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Doesn’t bother me in the least, either way. Do like the cleaner (IMHO) design.

+=0.02; //My two cents

Not sure if you made a couple recent changes elsewhere to address max-width but just noticed there is a lot of extra space to the right of striders’ cards when on a city page or a city page via a users account. Maybe fix is I just get smaller screen? :thinking:

How big is your screen?!?!
:laughing:

:thinking: I can apply a centering rule there, to keep those user cards in the middle…

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The gap wasn’t previously there; just now sure which recent update they came in on. So you are saying I shouldn’t upgrade to an ultra wide monitor?

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FWP … :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

I’m going to close this tomorrow, assuming that the release notes being tracked in Announcements - CityStrides Community has been working well. Please do comment if something isn’t working well. :smiley:

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