Our June release is anything but gloomy! We’ve got some sunny new upgrades to our visual theme editor that make branding your Centercode as cool and easy as a summer breeze. And, as always, we've swatted several pesky bugs throughout the month, which are listed below.
improvements
Nothing sets the stage for Official User Testing Business™ like a beautiful, well-branded site. Giving your community and projects a polished and professional look makes testers feel like they're part of your team, which revs their excitement and actually increases participation. That's why, for our June update, we've reorganized and streamlined the Visual Theme tool to make creating and modifying visual themes easier than ever!
This update makes choosing your colors (and knowing where and how they'll appear on your site) a much more intuitive experience. We’ve reduced the number of selections you’ll have to make when creating a theme. Before, many options required manual color selection. Now, certain elements, like menu text, drop-down/fly-out menu backgrounds, and table headers, are determined automagically based on your menu bar color selection, so you can build a cohesive and readable theme in seconds!
Additionally, we’ve added the ability to adjust and review your page background images and text color selections in real time, just make your changes and they’ll appear instantly on the visual theme page! (No more applying the theme to your live site to see the results 🎉) This also extends to the backgrounds for your site and landing pages. Simply select a background tint or image, and it will immediately apply to the preview window, making selecting appropriate text and link colors a breeze. Finally, you'll notice we've added several pre-loaded (and Centercode recommended!) background images. Definitely try them out—these backgrounds (handpicked by Luke 😀) will make your visual theme pop!
NOTE: While we have automated certain color selections that used to be available, you can still adjust these colors manually via custom CSS.
We’ve made a few small but impactful changes to our content and release management menus that make adding new resources as easy as pressing a (much easier to find!) button. The new “Add content” and “Add release” buttons located at the top of their respective management screens take you straight to the resource creation screens, where you can jump straight into creating your new masterpiece! And in case you preferred the previous method, hovering over a content or release type will still show you the “New content/release” button that you know and love.
fixes
It’s May, and that means it is time for another May-jorly exciting Centercode release (and a WHOLE lot of May puns, so buckle in)! We’ve got a couple big, new integrations features that May just blow your socks clean off, as well as some improvements to Ted’s admin-facing communications. And, as always, check out the list of bug fixes we've deployed throughout the month!
new features
First up, we’re proud to introduce the Centercode Integration Center, a brand new tool to help you May-nage all of your various Centercode integrations! Our first class and API-based integrations are powerful tools that help push your testing to the next level, and we want to make accessing, managing, and learning about those tools as easy as possible.
This new menu (located in your Community configuration sub-menu) contains tiles that link to a variety of Centercode’s first-class integrations (like Jira and Slack), as well as step-by-step guides to some of our more popular API-based integrations (Figma, YouTube, etc). While this menu already contains an impressive list of options, there are more to come! We want to hear from you about what you’d like to see, so don’t hesitate to use the “Suggest an integration!” link to let us know what YOU would like to see added to this list.
May-ke way for a brand new first-class Centercode integration: Slack! What better way to celebrate the introduction of the Centercode Integration Center than with a useful new tool to access through it? This handy new integration allows you to easily stay on top of incoming feedback by having Centercode send a Slack message whenever a new piece of feedback is created. You'll get a brief description of the new feedback submission, as well as a direct link for one-click access.
Setting up is simple—once you connect your existing Slack implementation to the site, you can configure which feedback types to send, and to which Slack channel you’d like to receive these updates. Maybe you want feedback submission across all your projects to feed into a single channel. Or maybe you'd rather split your feedback types into their own designated channels. Either way, you have a new tool in your toolbox that lets you choose what works best for your team and makes tracking feedback submissions in real time easier than ever.
improvements
We’ve been doing a little May-aintenance (last one, I promise) on everyone’s favorite testing assistant, Ted! While Ted’s daily scrum emails are already packed with useful data, we added one very basic but important bit of info: how many pieces of feedback were submitted during the period the email pertains to (daily, phase, or project closure). Additionally, Ted’s emails to testers will now always include the project name in the subject line, to avoid confusion for testers who may be in multiple projects!
fixes