Modern Slideout & Legacy Widget deprecation

We try not to move people's cheese too much, but sometimes, it's necessary.

When we released Contextual Help Widget 2.0 in November 2019, our plan was to sunset the Modern Slideout and Legacy widgets. We have been less aggressive in sunsetting them than we originally anticipated, since we wanted to be very sure that Widget 2.0 was fully stable and that it was the right strategic choice for KnowledgeOwl and our customers.

But during that time, we've:

  • seen increasing usage of Widget 2.0
  • seen decreasing usage of the older widgets, particularly among authors who are setting up the contextual help widget for the first time
  • been able to add a much wider range of functionality into Widget 2.0 at a faster rate

So we've decided it is now time to officially sunset and deprecate the Modern Slideout and Legacy widgets.

Continuing to add functionality to Modern Slideout or Legacy widget--or to fix every bug that gets reported for them--is no longer a sustainable choice for our team.

We'll no longer be adding new features to these widgets and will largely not fix their new reported bugs.

If you're using one of these two widgets: we're not going to turn them off.

They'll keep working as they have been. They just won't be updated moving forward, since we're focusing on improving Widget 2.0.

You can read more details about this decision and how it might affect you at Deprecation of Modern & Legacy widget.

We--like much of the world--are trying to keep the resources we have focused on the areas where they can do the most good. We appreciate all the feedback we've gotten on Widget 2.0, as well as your understanding of this change.

Please feel free to contact us with feedback about these changes, thoughts on cheese-moving and deprecation, or any other questions you might have--we're happy to help any way we can!