Every project has its own idea of what participants should see first. Some lead with feedback, some with activities, some want a briefing before anything else happens. Until now the platform picked one order and everyone lived with it. Starting today, a project admin drags the sections of Project Home into whatever order fits the program, clicks Save, and every participant sees it that way.
Drag Your Project Home Into the Order That Fits
The Project Home has always rendered its sections in a fixed sequence we chose. That worked fine until it didn't. A hardware program that ships units wants Activities up top to drive completion. A research team wants Feedback first, because collecting it is the whole point. A project that briefs participants before anything else wants Content leading. One order was never going to serve all three.
The new Project Home Order page lives under Management > Project Configuration. It lists the sections of the Project Home as a vertical drag-and-drop list, each row labeled with its name and a short description. Drag them into the order you want and click Save. There's no save-on-drop here, deliberately, because the change reaches every participant in the project. If you want to start over, Restore default order snaps the list back to the platform default.
Six sections are reorderable: Content, Feedback, Drafts, Surveys, Activities, and Assigned Test Platforms. Release announcements aren't a separate section, so they move wherever Content moves. The Content stream travels as one block, which means individual content items stay in their existing sequence within it.
One saved order applies to everyone in the project, and the same order drives desktop and mobile. Each participant still sees only the sections they're entitled to, arranged the way you set them. Sections with nothing in them keep hiding themselves exactly as they do today, and they hold their configured position for whenever they do have content. You'll never end up with an empty placeholder just because you moved something.
The order is part of project configuration, so it travels on clone. Set it once on a template and every project cloned from that template starts with your layout already in place. That's the fix worth knowing about if your answer to "we don't like the default order" needs to apply to more than one project.
Important note: nothing rearranges on its own. Every existing project keeps rendering exactly as it does today until an admin opens the page and saves a new order. The config page shows your current order as its starting point, so opening it to look around changes nothing. For the full walkthrough, see our Guide to setting your Project Home order.
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Product Verification Moves to the Top
Product Verification isn't one of the reorderable sections. It's pinned, and as of this release it's pinned to the top of Project Home rather than sitting below Feedback. If your project uses Product Verification, this is the one thing that looks different on release day without anyone touching a setting. If your project doesn't use it, nothing moves.
The reasoning is straightforward. Product Verification asks participants to confirm they've received the test unit, and it gates their access to activities and feedback until they answer. A question that blocks everything else belongs above everything else.
On the Project Home Order page it appears as a locked row in its fixed position, with a short explanation of why it can't be dragged. We show it rather than hiding it so you can see where your reordered sections land relative to it.
It's worth being clear about one thing: the gate is logical, not positional. Activities stays hidden until a participant answers the product-receipt question, no matter where you put Activities in the order. Reordering changes the visual sequence and nothing else. You can't move a section above or below Product Verification to get around it, and you don't need to worry that dragging Activities somewhere new will open access before a participant has confirmed receipt.
Each connection stores an instance name, a base URL, an authentication scheme (basic with a username and API token, or bearer with a personal access token), and the credentials themselves, encrypted at rest. You can set up as many instances as you need, so an engineering Jira and a support Jira can happily coexist.
Every connection card has a Test button. Select it and we call Jira, then show you the list of Jira projects those credentials can actually reach, 30 at a time. It's a quick confirmation rather than a project browser, and it catches the situation that generates the most support tickets today: a token that authenticates perfectly well but lacks the access the sync needs downstream. A successful test shows a green Connected badge. A failure shows a red Connection unsuccessful with the reason in plain language, like Token expired or Could not reach Jira at this URL. Save credentials without testing them and the card sits at Untested until you do.
In a project, the authentication fields on the Jira external destination are replaced by a Connection source drop-down. It lists your community's connections alphabetically, with Project-specific connection at the bottom. Choose a community connection and the instance details display read-only, so you go straight to the JSON mapping without hunting down a token. For a one-off integration, like a contractor's Jira account, choose Project-specific connection and enter the base URL, authentication scheme, and credentials the way you do today.
Switching between the two is safe in both directions. When you move a project from its own credentials to a community connection, the original credentials stay put behind the scenes, obfuscated. If that community connection later disappears, flip back to Project-specific connection and everything you entered is still there waiting.
The old inline drop-down for inserting dynamic tags into the JSON editor is retired. The dynamic tag button now opens the same search modal you already use elsewhere in the platform. Park your cursor in the JSON, open the modal, add the tags you need, close it, then move them where they belong.
Required on Duplicate closes that gap. You can now flag specific form elements as required on duplicate, so that when a participant claims an existing issue, they're prompted to fill in just those fields before the duplicate is recorded. A focused popup appears with only the fields you've marked, nothing else, so it stays quick for the participant while capturing what your team actually needs to triage.
That captured context travels with the duplicate. Each "me too" now creates a real duplicate submission, linked to the original, with the participant's data attached. From there it flows into your comparison view, reporting, and exports, the same as any other feedback. You're triaging from what people actually reported, not from a count and a guess.
A completed phase can now be reopened with one action. The new reopen control on closed phases flips the phase's status back to active and reactivates its surveys and activities, so participants can submit data again. Every submission, response, and attachment from the prior window stays intact. The reopened phase resumes its identity rather than starting over. If you've ever spun up new artifacts to run a follow-up round (and lost the historical thread doing it), this one's for you.
Date edits on past phases let you fix what was wrong without rewriting history. Deactivated phases now show the same date-edit controls as active and pending ones. Correcting a typo, retroactively labeling a phase to match what really happened, or aligning a phase to an external timeline is now a self-service edit. Changing a deactivated phase's dates doesn't reactivate it. The phase stays deactivated unless you also choose to reopen it.
Single-day phases finally just work. Set the start date to match the end date, and the platform accepts it cleanly. The timeline view renders the phase visibly rather than as a zero-width sliver, so single-day events stay recognizable next to multi-day ones. Useful for one-day kickoffs, focused field tests, or pinpoint survey distributions that didn't quite belong in a longer window.
Becomes:
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