What’s New – July 2021
There’s always new things being worked on in the background, and sometimes we forget to shout about them, so here’s a brief roundup of some of the updates over the last couple of months.
WordPress 5.8
A new version of WordPress was released last night – that was what prompted this post – and this is being applied to all hosted accounts. There are some new features with the block builder, though most sites we are aware of on out platform are using other builders and won’t notice the changes.
Support
Thanks to everyone who has remembered the new support address – service@cloudhost.one for those rare occasions when help is needed. Tracking everything here has made things much easier on this side, which in turn means quicker responses and resolution. You may occasionally see emails come from help@managedsupport.online which is the default mail address for the support ticket system, and the one used for some of the white-label support provided in partnership with other providers.
We’re also adding some help articles on the platform at managedsupport.online – this isn’t to replace personal support at all, but you may sometimes be directed to a specific article here to answer some issues (for example, changing DNS records so that we can supply an SSL certificate, or connecting social media feeds).
LiveChat is now available in the admin area of almost all hosted WordPress sites, on the front-end of all our sites, and in the Hosting Control Panel at my.cloudhost.one. We are also trialling a co-browse function that will enable us to request that you share your current browser page when messaging us via chat.
Booking Manager Plugin
We’ve been using a Booking Manager plugin within WordPress to enable customers to book online meetings with us for a while. This has recently been updated and we’ve also updated our licencing agreement so that we can provide this service on client websites as well as our own.
The plugin can be used to let your customers book one-off appointments or to to book onto an event where multiple attendees are allowed. If this may benefit you or your business please get in contact.
Other Plugins
There have also been major updates to some of the other plugins that we use and install on some sites:
- Social Media feeds – pull a feed from Facebook, Instagram or Twitter straight to your site, this could simply show all recent posts or could be filtered to show just pictures in certain albums or posts with certain hashtags. YouTube feeds and gallery is also now available.
- Gravity Forms and extensions – our preferred form plugin can now be styled to match the site design more easily, and some of the extensions that we now have access to bring enhanced functionality to the forms and your site. Fields can be pre-populated, show only if certain other values have been selected, and more.
- Anti Spam protection – this is now available on all hosted sites, preventing spam submission on contact forms and comments without any trick questions being asked (you know, click all the buses etc).
- Popups and Overlays – most of us have a love/hate relationship with popups, but they can be really useful sometimes. We’re making some changes to how this are used on Divi-based websites now, making for a much better (and faster) user experience.
Email Marketing
We don’t promote our email marketing platform much, but if you are looking to keep in contact with people with an email newsletter/updates, cloudhost.email may be of benefit to you. It’s not as feature-rich as something like MailChimp, but it’s also a fraction of the cost.
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