Dev Update 6

The migration continues, and at a greater pace than anticipated.

We were a little behind with migrations in the beginning but this was due to migrating and updating/tweaking the Admin environment at the same time. But now the early updates are complete we have been able to really progress - bearing in mind we are still learning how powerful what we have built, actually is.

There is a real sense of pride here, at what is achievable with the VB Media Version 3 build and to quote one of our Dev Team; "I have fallen back in love with VB Media", and I echo that statement. We are at a really exciting time, and the potential for VB Media and it's users is almost nerve-tingling.

It was important for me to handle the migrations in the first few weeks, so that I could fix / tweak / debug, any issues that I came across, immediately.

Now, however, I have let go of the reins, as it were, and handed over migrations to others in the team. This now frees up my time to develop any functionality that they require to make their lives easier or to produce better, more creative results.

This has made it even more exciting for us as it shows just how flexible the system is and how easily (and quickly) it is to improve upon.

The development time is still being concentrated on the Page Editor as we feel this is the most impactful, both in terms of the appearance of your business to your customers as well as separating sites from the 'standard VB Media version 2' look.

We will be looking to redevelop all the back-end functionality, going forward and some of the plans/concepts are looking amazing.

Print Home is our primary example site. It shows what can be done with a VB Media website.

Gavin has been spending time really testing the Page Editor to see what is now possible. The result is a stunning improvement of the previous version as well as some really nice touches such as 'custom landing pages'. These pages (such as this Business Cards page) are great for having maximum control over a major product category as well as having great SEO-ability with additional relevant content.

These custom landing pages are a great example of what you can apply to your own sites... once you are on Version 3

We have added additional functionality to the Header - you can now select to show a 'Pre-Header' bar.

This bar has various uses, from announcing closed dates over the Christmas period to telling everyone that this is a demonstration site (as we aim to do with the example site on VB Media).

The controls for this are intentionally simple as the bar itself is very basic. It is meant for information purposes only, so does not need to be to elaborate.

The 'loading overlay' is what appears in front of your website whenever a link is clicked.

This is in place to prevent double-clicking as well as providing feedback to the user that something has been clicked and the website is working on their request.

Well, we have now made this editable.

You can choose your background colour, use a different logo and even choose the loading animation that plays.

The additional benefit is, that whichever animation you choose for your website, it will also be the loader for any in-page content, for example, when the product selects are loading on a Trade Print product.

We have also cautiously added the ability to add some text. Whilst not meant to be super-informative, it dose allow you to write something like "loading..." or "we're working on it", just in case you thought your users were unsure as to what was happening :)

We have now implemented a 'sticky nav'.

This means that once a user has scrolled down the page and the header is out of view, the section that contains the navigation is 'stuck' to the top of the page with the rest of the content  scrolling beneath it.

This is a simple solution to ensure that your users have quick access to the navigation of your website without the need to keep scrolling to the top of the page.

This was also present in the previous version of the VB Media websites, but has only just been recreated in Version 3.

• Front End - call to action links that jump to id's to not show loading overlay
• Front End - call to action links that that are empty or are just '#' to as a div instead of an empty a-tag, as this impedes lighthouse score
• Front End - call to action group now shifts layout on reduced screen sizes to prevent layout 'borking'
• Front End - call to action group not providing images with source-sets
• Front End - last item in the call to action group to have no bottom margin so that it can align center vertically
• Front End - fix to 404 error not displaying for pages that do not exist
• Front End - faqs section not adjusting layout on smaller screen sizes
• Front End - testimonials section not adjusting layout on smaller screen sizes
• Front End - fix to prevent ALL links that start with a '#' from showing the loading overlay
• Front End - fixed an issue which prevent access to the 'my account' section if there were no previous orders
• Front End - fix to prevent non-live products from showing in category pages
• Admin Area - incorrect file paths for javascript and css files on live admin area  
• Admin Area - superfluous padding slider for text sections
• Admin Area - independent vertical scrolling for sub-navigation when content exceeds screen height
• Admin Area - paste-board check on hover of a section so that it is easier to paste across browser tabs without the need to refresh
• Admin Area - change to the 'full width' setting on the slider section, the slides will no longer increase in size to fill the browser's width
• Admin Area - fix to prevent jumping to the top of the page whenever clicking the change screen size buttons in the page editor
• Admin Area - ability to change the path for custom pages
• Admin Area - 'scripts and codes' functionality
• Admin Area - 'custom css' functionality preparation
• SSO - logo and styling updates
• API - ability to change the path for custom pages
• API - end points for 'scripts and codes'
• API - end point preparation for 'custom css'
• CDN - 'scripts and codes' functionality
• CDN - preparation for 'custom css'